data-center-power
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The Company Under the Cloud
AI may live in the cloud, but the cloud lives on switchgear, drives and control systems. ABB is the century-old engineering company turning the digital economy's appetite for power into an industrial growth story.
Ameresco Found a Way to Make Old Buildings Pay for Their Own Future
The Framingham company sells a practical bargain: modernize the systems everyone depends on, then use the avoided utility bill to help pay for the work. Now data centers are turning that old energy-services idea into a new power-infrastructure business.
Generac
How a generator built in a Wisconsin barn became the machine millions of Americans buy the week after the power goes out - and why Generac now wants a say in the grid itself.
Apollo Atomics
Apollo Atomics is a Cambridge, Massachusetts nuclear startup building the most power-dense pressurized water reactor. By redesigning the steam generator - the bulkiest part of a conventional plant - into a proprietary Compact Steam Generator, the company shrinks a proven reactor design by roughly an order of magnitude, turning a decade-long construction project into a factory-built machine that fits on a truck and deploys in under 24 months. Founded by MIT nuclear PhD Assil Halimi and operator Drew Walker, Apollo is in Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch and is testing its design in collaboration with MIT.
Vela Energy
Vela Energy builds AI execution agents for large-load energy projects, automating the procurement, permitting, and engineering-study work that stalls data center and utility interconnections. Founded by Tarun Batchu and Tony Li and backed by a16z Speedrun and Z Fellows, the company aims to be the intelligence layer that helps developers, utilities, and data centers move projects through the interconnection queue faster while keeping licensed engineers in control of every decision.
Scalvy
Scalvy is an Austin-based power electronics company building a modular, software-defined platform called the Power Neuron that distributes power conversion and control to the edge of each battery pack instead of routing it through a single centralized block. The approach targets three power-hungry markets - AI data centers, grid-scale energy storage, and electric mobility - promising higher usable energy, ultra-high efficiency, and faster development cycles. Founded in 2022 by Mohamed Badawy, the company raised a $13.9M Series A in March 2026, bringing total funding to roughly $17M.
Enteligent
Enteligent is a Morgan Hill, California startup building DC-to-DC power electronics that skip the wasteful AC conversion steps between solar panels, batteries, and the things that consume electricity. Its flagship products are the world's first solar-powered DC-to-DC bidirectional EV charger and the NMax module-level power optimizer for rooftop solar, and it is extending the same direct-current approach to AI data center racks. The pitch is simple arithmetic: keep electricity in DC form from generation to load and you lose less of it, which means faster charging, cheaper installs, and higher solar yields.
AGent Energy
AGent Energy (branded AiGent) is a Houston-based energy-tech company that uses AI software and secure hardware to aggregate, orchestrate, and monetize idle backup generators at commercial, industrial, and mission-critical sites. By connecting these behind-the-meter assets to wholesale power markets during peak demand and grid emergencies, AGent turns standby liabilities into dispatchable, revenue-generating distributed power plants - improving grid reliability without building new infrastructure. The company is targeting a roughly 185 GW fleet of existing backup generation across the U.S.
XL Batteries
XL Batteries is a Marlborough, Massachusetts startup building an Organic Flow Battery for grid-scale, long-duration energy storage. Spun out of Columbia University chemistry research, the company uses proprietary organic molecules dissolved in pH-neutral water instead of vanadium in acid - producing a non-flammable, non-toxic, non-corrosive battery assembled from commodity pumps, tanks and tubes. The pitch: safe, scalable storage that can run for 10, 20, even 50 hours by simply enlarging the tanks, at costs targeted below lithium-ion for long durations.
Verne
Verne is a San Francisco climate-tech company building high-density cryo-compressed hydrogen (CcH2) storage and power systems. Founded in 2020 by Stanford and UC-Berkeley alumni, Verne developed a method to store hydrogen at up to 73 g/L - roughly 33% denser than liquid hydrogen and 87% denser than 700-bar compressed gas - without the cost of full liquefaction. After proving the technology on the world's first CcH2-powered Class 8 truck in 2024, Verne has expanded into turnkey zero-emission on-site power, targeting data centers, ports, construction sites and EV charging with modular hydrogen-to-power systems.
Critical Loop
Critical Loop is an industrial power company founded in 2023 by former SpaceX, Tesla and Palantir engineers. It deploys modular, relocatable battery-storage microgrids - paired with its software-defined controller, Cygnus - to give factories, data centers, airports and other grid-constrained sites reliable power in weeks instead of waiting years for utility upgrades. The company raised a $26M Series A in April 2026, bringing total committed funding to $49M, and operates a fleet of control nodes across California.
ElectronX
ElectronX is a U.S.-regulated electricity derivatives exchange building the financial infrastructure for the energy transition. Founded in 2024 and based in Chicago with a New York office, it offers direct-access, centrally cleared hourly power futures and binary options that let utilities, traders, renewable operators, energy-storage firms and data-center operators hedge the extreme short-term price swings that come with a grid increasingly powered by intermittent wind and solar. ElectronX holds CFTC approvals as both a Designated Contract Market and a Designated Clearing Organization, and has raised more than $55 million from investors including DCVC, Innovation Endeavors, and the venture arms of Shell and Equinor.
Fervo Energy
Fervo Energy is a Houston-based next-generation geothermal company that borrows horizontal drilling and fiber-optic sensing from the oil and gas playbook to make enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) commercially viable. By drilling into hot dry rock almost anywhere - not just rare natural hotspots - Fervo produces around-the-clock, carbon-free firm power. Its flagship Cape Station project in Utah is on track to be the world's largest next-generation geothermal development, and the company has become a go-to supplier of clean baseload electricity for AI data centers and utilities.
Hover Energy
Hover Energy is a Dallas-based clean-energy company that builds patented Wind-Powered Microgrids - rooftop arrays of compact 36 kW turbines that turn a building's own edge into a sail, combined with solar, storage, and an AI-driven control stack. The system is designed to offset most or all of a building's power use on site, delivering resilient, behind-the-meter electricity to commercial, industrial, and data-center customers. Paired with IBM's watsonx and Maximo software and scaled through joint ventures like EverOn Energy, Hover pitches an Energy-as-a-Service path to what it calls 'real zero.'
Last Energy
Last Energy is a US-based developer of factory-built micro modular nuclear power plants. Its flagship PWR-20 is a 20-megawatt pressurized water reactor assembled from truck-shippable modules and delivered as a turnkey, build-own-operate service. Rather than selling reactors, Last Energy sells electricity and heat under long-term power purchase agreements, targeting data centers and energy-intensive industries that need reliable, carbon-free baseload power without financing or operating a plant themselves.
The Nuclear Company
The Nuclear Company is a U.S. nuclear infrastructure platform building a standardized fleet of large reactors using proven, already-licensed designs. Rather than inventing new reactor technology, it applies a 'design-once, build-many' methodology layered with AI and digital-twin software to cut the cost and timeline of building gigawatt-scale nuclear power. Founded in 2023 by Jonathan Webb, Kiran Bhatraju, and Patrick Maloney, it has raised about $70M to evaluate sites for an initial 6-gigawatt fleet targeted for the early 2030s.
VEIR
VEIR is a Woburn, Massachusetts company commercializing high-temperature superconducting power lines that move 5 to 10 times more electricity than conventional cables at the same voltage and footprint. Its key breakthrough is a passive, evaporative liquid-nitrogen cooling system that keeps superconductors cold without heavy machinery. Founded in 2019 out of Breakthrough Energy Ventures research, VEIR targets utilities, renewable developers, and increasingly the power-hungry AI data center market. It closed a $75M Series B in January 2025 led by Munich Re Ventures, with backing from Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund.