DFJ Growth is thrilled to announce our investment in Ambrosia Energy, a vertically integrated solar + battery company building modular, off-grid power plants for the next generation of AI workloads. Founded by Ben Longmier, CEO, and Sara Spangelo, President/COO, both former SpaceX Starlink leaders, Ambrosia aims to deploy the fastest and lowest-cost continuous renewable energy in the United States.
Solar is the logical solution for a generational problem
As the AI era advances at a breathtaking pace, competition over models, chips, and data has encountered a new bottleneck: energy capacity. The four biggest AI labs have all sounded the alarm. Elon Musk warned as early as 2024 that the next “constraint is just electricity supply.” Anthropic has estimated that AI usage will require 50 GW of additional power by 2028, while OpenAI has urged the government to plan for 100 GW of additional power generation build-out per year.
The energy industry is reeling to catch up. Lead times for large gas turbines – currently the fastest way to power data centers – have reached four to seven years. Microsoft, Google, and other hyperscalers have committed to 20-year contracts for nuclear power, even proposing to restart decommissioned plants like Three Mile Island. Even with these efforts, S&P Global Energy estimates that the US will only be able to provide half of the new power needed to supply global data centers by 2028.
As the dominant source of AI compute demand transitions from model training to inference, solar energy is positioned to meet the corresponding energy demands. For AI model training, energy sources need to provide stable baseload power, where sources such as cycle gas or nuclear work well. AI inference, however, doesn’t require the strict, continuous synchronization of localized training clusters. Energy sources for inference compute can be distributed and placed practically anywhere, making solar + battery more effective and affordable, where efficient battery solutions can provide 24/7 reliability.
The right team to meet this challenge
Prior to Ambrosia, Ben and Sara co-founded Swarm, where they engineered and launched hundreds of the lowest-cost communications satellites in the world. After becoming the first real acquisition at SpaceX, they led the design, manufacturing, regulatory, business strategy, and operations for the Starlink Mobile satellite constellation, which is used by many of the largest and most demanding telecom carriers globally. They are veterans of scaling hardware at constellation volumes, closing large deals with carriers globally, and relentlessly optimizing complexity and cost out of the system.
“Ben and Sara were two of the best leaders we had at SpaceX. What they accomplished with Swarm and Starlink Mobile constellation required extreme engineering rigor, maniacal focus on speed and cost, and honestly, a bit of magic to make it all work. Now they’re taking the same approach to power generation. Watching them rip out requirements and delete unnecessary complexity is a masterclass.” - Max Sirenko, Venture Partner, DFJ Growth
Building for speed through a vertically integrated approach
Ambrosia brings this same level of engineering rigor, cost-cutting, and maniacal speed to the power industry. The company develops, manufactures, and operates solar + battery power plants, selling energy directly to customers with a flexible commercial model. Ambrosia has designed every part of its process for speed and cost, and is vertically integrated across land acquisition, permitting, engineering, procurement, battery manufacturing, construction, operations, maintenance, and power sales. In addition, it has designed its own battery system that makes 24-hour storage economically viable. Put together, this enables off-grid, 24/7 operations at 99.9% availability, built in less than 12 months.
By employing “the algorithm” of questioning every requirement and deleting all unnecessary components and process steps, the Ambrosia team is reimagining how to build a solar-centric power plant and data center. One of the team’s key insights is that solar panels and batteries have become so inexpensive that they now account for only 10-20% of total system cost. By reengineering the rest of the system to aggressively remove costs that are not truly contributing to the core power generation goals, Ambrosia is flipping the economic ratio so that non-core costs to develop its power plants will be only 10% of total system costs. In other words, 90% of costs will be productive—power and revenue generating by definition.
In addition to delivering cost and process engineering advantages, Ambrosia has demonstrated the ability to compress timelines from years into weeks. Its first pilot plant in Texas was completed within a few months after the company was founded and has demonstrated 100% reliability over several months of continuous operation. The company is now planning projects with a handful of customers and are on a path to scale to hundreds of MW in short order and ultimately achieve gigawatt scale.
Ambrosia is addressing the most urgent infrastructure need of the AI era. We believe it will play a critical role in meeting the immense energy demands of AI over the coming decade and beyond. We are honored to partner with Ben, Sara, and the rest of the Ambrosia team on their journey.
Ambrosia Energy's off-grid pilot plant in West Texas.
