Ambrosia Energy has started work on a 10 gigawatt-hour battery factory near Austin, CEO Ben Longmier said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. The plant will cover about 150,000 square feet, and the company expects full production in two to three years. Longmier said that capacity is enough to support roughly 300 megawatts of power plants a year at its field sites.
The startup left stealth in June pitching solar-plus-battery plants that sell continuous power to data centers for about $100 per megawatt-hour. Solar charges the packs by day; the batteries cover nights and cloudy stretches. Longmier and co-founder Sara Spangelo previously built Swarm Technologies and sold it to SpaceX. Ambrosia is also starting its first commercial plant in West Texas later this year: 300 MW of solar paired with 660 MWh of batteries for 30 MW of continuous power, aiming for 99.3% uptime. A pilot at 200 kW has already run continuous sections for more than 100 days.
Cost is the whole pitch. Ambrosia buys cells and builds its own packs in-house, claiming about 1.3x the cost of a bare cell versus 5x to 7x for typical stationary storage, and far fewer parts than rivals. Hyperscalers are lining up gas turbines for AI campuses; Ambrosia is betting factory-made packs and a simpler plant design can undercut that without waiting on the grid.
— via TechCrunch