“Sam Altman Invests in Energy Startup Focused on AI Data Centers: Investment by OpenAI CEO Highlights Artificial Intelligence’s Electricity Appetite”, 2024-04-22 ():
Sam Altman and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are among the investors putting $20 million into Exowatt, a company launched to tackle the clean-energy needs of big data centers.
…“You don’t have to go back to fossil fuels to solve the data-center energy problem…That’s counterproductive”, Hannan Parvizian, Exowatt’s chief executive, said in an interview. Instead of solar panels arrayed across a field, Exowatt has developed modules roughly the size of shipping containers that contain solar lenses. The lenses convert energy from the sun into heat. That heat can then be used to warm up cheap, basic materials much like electricity heats up a toaster, allowing the modules to store energy for up to 24 hours a day. The goal is to take advantage of the cost reductions from storing energy as heat. To produce electricity, the module passes the heat through an engine. Many other companies are working on different approaches to solar and low-cost heat batteries, but Exowatt says it is unique because it combines them in one unit. Exowatt declined to provide more details about what materials it is using and how the heat engine works. Other companies are using carbon blocks, bricks, sand or salt to store heat…Miami-based Exowatt can succeed because its module is much cheaper to deploy due to its simplicity, Parvizian said.
…Exowatt is prioritizing using components made in the US to limit its dependence on China and to qualify for rich subsidies in the 2022 climate law. It could potentially stack tax credits for solar generation and energy storage, making the product ultra-cheap for customers. It is aiming to deploy its first units for data-center customers later this year. The company hopes to eventually offer electricity as cheap as 1¢ per kilowatt-hour without subsidies, well below the cheapest power available today in energy-rich states like Texas. It has analyzed data showing that a large chunk of data centers in the US are in areas with attractive solar profiles.
Parvizian is an engineer who worked at Tesla, General Electric and Siemens. He previously founded a vertical takeoff and landing drone startup that was acquired in 2022. He started working on Exowatt last year with Jack Abraham, the CEO of Atomic, a venture-capital firm that also helps executives build startups. They tested about 50 designs of their modules. Abraham is a friend of Sam Altman’s, leading to the AI executive’s investment.