Nate Franklin grew up near Bakersfield’s Panorama Bluffs, looking down on the Kern River oil field. His father and grandfather worked there. After dark, the workings became a landscape of lights. “At night it looks like a city,” he recalled. Long before electricity became the limiting factor in an AI business plan, energy was something he could see from home.
The Pacifico Energy founder’s career has since taken him through American solar development, a move to Tokyo with his wife and three young children, and renewable projects across Asia. In 2019, he returned to the United States. Today, his company is developing a private power campus in Pecos County, Texas, intended to supply data centers. The geography changes; land, money and a customer for the power keep reappearing.
That route invites a tidy explanation about spotting the future. The more interesting explanation is less tidy. Franklin has repeatedly entered businesses when a change in policy or demand made a project possible. Each opportunity then required the rather unglamorous work of finding a site, securing permissions and arranging financing. The future, in this line of work, arrives carrying a folder of contracts.
A recruiting pitch changes the route
At UCLA Anderson, Franklin initially considered investment banking as a way to accumulate the money he would need to become an entrepreneur. He had already worked at Citigroup. A recruiting event introduced another possibility: Edison Mission Energy was creating a renewable energy group and planned to commit billions to new projects. He joined the company and learned the solar business.
His education paired economics at the University of California, Berkeley, with an MBA completed at Anderson in 2008. Subsequent roles included alternative energy at Jaco Oil and solar development at BP. The combination matters to the story: the projects he would pursue needed commercial arrangements as surely as they needed equipment. A promising resource becomes a business only when someone can pay to build it and someone agrees to buy its output.
Franklin later supported Marion Anderson Hall through a gift that created the Franklin Classroom. He credited professors Bill Cockrum and Stuart Gabriel, along with his wider business-school experience, for helping him understand different parts of a company. There is a pleasing circularity here. A campus recruiting pitch helped redirect his career; his contribution would put another classroom at the disposal of students considering their own routes.
Japan puts the idea on a hillside
Pacifico began in 2012, as Japan introduced a fixed-price purchase system for renewable electricity. Franklin moved to Tokyo and started with a two-person office. For a developer, a long-term arrangement for selling power provides something concrete to take to a lender. Pacifico’s early Japanese projects put that logic into practice, combining a site, a utility buyer, construction expertise and project financing.
Kumenan, in Okayama Prefecture, offers a useful close-up. The solar plant began commercial operation in March 2016. Its roughly 32-megawatt installation was built on mountainous terrain, with Toyo Engineering handling engineering, procurement and construction. Chugoku Electric agreed to purchase the output under a 20-year contract. MUFG and Chugoku Bank provided project finance. A hillside had acquired a financial structure as well as rows of panels.
The terrain was more than scenery. In a 2016 discussion of solar development in Japan, Franklin described a 96-megawatt project on Kyushu involving more than five million cubic meters of earthwork. Irregular ground made the orderly arrangement of solar equipment harder. The image is a useful corrective to the effortless appearance of a finished solar farm: before the neat rows came the problem of making the land work.
The second business inside the first
Pacifico also built investment vehicles around operating solar plants. Its first fund raised ¥15.5 billion from Japanese institutional investors and assembled five plants totaling more than 100 megawatts of direct-current capacity. A February 2018 announcement described completed acquisitions in Chiba and Miyagi, with two further acquisitions in progress. The company would provide asset management as well as assemble the portfolio.
In November 2019, Pacifico announced a second fund, raising ¥29 billion. Nomura Securities and Goldman Sachs Japan served as co-placement agents; Baker McKenzie was legal counsel. The intended portfolio comprised five Japanese solar plants totaling more than 216 megawatts. Its initial acquisition was a roughly 35-megawatt project in Tochigi Prefecture, with the remaining acquisitions planned for the following year.
This was a different task from putting the first panel on a new site. Operating plants could be brought together for investors, while the developer’s experience informed their management. Franklin’s career therefore sits at the meeting point of physical development and investment management. The money has a destination you can visit. In a business full of financial terminology, that is a welcome accommodation for anyone who prefers their assets to cast a shadow.
A passport is not a local team
In a 2019 interview, Franklin described an approach built around local knowledge. He argued that a team successful in one country could not simply be transferred to another and expected to reproduce its results. Development depended on people who understood the local rules and relationships. He also emphasized giving capable employees freedom over how they achieved a result.
His chosen comparison came from basketball: an accomplished shooter should be allowed to shoot. It is an economical account of delegation. Hire for the ability, then leave room for it. Franklin described the business as opportunistic, favoring depth in a small number of markets over a rigid five-year plan. That was his stated management philosophy, rather than a guarantee that every investment would succeed.
An Asian renewables roundtable in 2018 supplied a less breezy companion to that philosophy. Franklin discussed the financing and policy difficulties of entering less mature markets. He described Vietnam as a learning experience after Japan’s more established banking environment. His enthusiasm for growing demand coexisted with attention to land, permissions and the reliability of power buyers. Local teams were part of understanding those risks before capital was committed.
“You don’t hire Steph Curry and tell him how to shoot a jump shot.”
Nate Franklin on giving capable people room to work
Hanoi, then the next stretch of sea
In March 2025, Franklin met Vietnam’s Party General Secretary Tô Lâm in Hanoi. The discussion concerned further investment, renewable energy and the progress of existing projects. Franklin expressed interest in expanding offshore wind development. The meeting placed him in the formal world that surrounds large infrastructure: government priorities, national energy plans and investment relationships that extend well beyond the boundary of an individual site.
By September 2026, Pacifico’s Vietnam platform had secured approval for sea surveys for Nam Trung Bo 3, an offshore wind project in Lam Dong Province with a proposed capacity of up to 1.3 gigawatts. The project appears in Vietnam’s adjusted power development plan, with commercial operation expected between 2031 and 2035. The approval permits studies of the offshore area; it is an early development milestone.
South Korea remained on the company’s map too. On September 3, 2026, Pacifico submitted a non-binding investment declaration worth more than $1 billion covering the 990-megawatt Manho and 1.8-gigawatt Jindo Baram offshore wind projects. The intended customers include advanced industries requiring clean electricity. These are commitments and development plans. Their significance lies in the work they set in motion, with surveys, approvals and commercial arrangements still separating ambition from operating turbines.
The Texas campus gets a customer
Franklin’s American focus now includes electricity for AI computing. At Yotta 2025, he appeared with energy analyst Mark P. Mills in a session about building the country’s AI infrastructure. “We’re going all-in on behind-the-meter power for data centers,” he said. His argument centered on the time required to get power to customers and the appeal of developing generation alongside the computing facilities that would use it.
Pacifico’s GW Ranch project gives that argument a location in West Texas. In January 2026, the company announced a Texas air permit for up to 7.65 gigawatts of gas-fired generation. The broader campus plan includes solar and battery storage. Those figures describe permitted or planned capacity. They should be read as the dimensions of a development undertaking, with construction and commissioning needed before electricity can be delivered.
Franklin has since stressed the term private grid when describing the project. The distinction helps explain his ambition: an energy system built to serve large computing loads, with responsibility for supply and reliability organized around the campus. A dedicated power system still needs fuel, equipment, financing and operations. It changes how the customer obtains electricity, while giving the developer a substantial list of things to get right.
The customer question became more concrete in August 2026. Amazon confirmed that it had acquired the GW Ranch site and planned to purchase power from Pacifico’s plant. Amazon also said it was exploring a later connection that could allow the energy infrastructure to supply other customers. The announced campus therefore has a possible evolution beyond its initial on-site generation model.
The gas component introduces a difficult environmental tradeoff for a company with a renewable-energy history. Permit documents allow annual greenhouse-gas emissions of about 33 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent under maximum operating assumptions. That is a permitted ceiling, rather than a measurement of emissions from an operating plant. It nevertheless belongs in an account of the project’s scale. The ability to supply computing demand quickly must be considered alongside what that supply requires.
GW Ranch, Texas. An air-permit limit for development, not operating output.
Back home, measured in lanes
One of Franklin’s completed projects uses a more familiar unit of measurement. On October 23, 2025, the East Side Aquatic Center opened at Highland High School in Bakersfield. Franklin, a Highland alumnus, donated $13 million for its design and construction. The Kern High School District owns and operates the facility, with community programming that includes the B-Town Brazadas Swim Club.
The pool accommodates eight 50-meter lanes or 19 short-course lanes. Three nearby schools serve roughly 4,000 students. At the opening, Franklin connected swimming with the discipline that had shaped his entrepreneurial life. He also described a promise he had made as a student to give back to the community. Here, the destination for the money was close to the place where his own story began.
The 661 Foundation, Pacifico Energy Group’s philanthropic arm, also lists projects including a public plaza in San Juan Capistrano and a Little League scoreboard. Alongside Franklin’s classroom gift, these are physical spaces and facilities people can use. They bring a different scale to a career often expressed in megawatts and billions of yen. A child arriving for swimming lessons needs a lane, an instructor and somewhere to leave a towel.
Franklin’s projects stretch from Japanese hillsides to Vietnamese waters to the Texas desert. The Bakersfield pool gives that map a hometown point. It also offers a satisfying final image: a facility built, open and available to the people it was intended to serve. For all the large numbers surrounding his work, completion remains a wonderfully practical standard. You can point to it. In Bakersfield, you can swim in it.