Ambrosia Energy has initiated construction on a 10 gigawatt-hour (GWh) battery factory near Austin, Texas. Co-founder and CEO Ben Longmier announced the development Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, detailing plans for a 150,000-square-foot facility.
The company projects the factory will reach full production capacity within two to three years. This output will enable Ambrosia to build approximately one 300-megawatt (MW) power plant annually for its field sites.
Ambrosia emerged from stealth in June with a business model focused on building power plants for data centers. The startup aims to provide electricity at a cost of $100 per megawatt-hour (MWh), positioning itself to compete with natural gas turbines currently considered by hyperscalers for data center energy needs.
Longmier and co-founder Sara Spangelo identified solar-plus-battery systems as the most cost-effective and rapidly deployable option for continuous power. Their model uses solar panels to power the data center load during the day and charge batteries, which then discharge at night or on cloudy days to ensure 24/7 operation.
Ambrosia is commencing work on its first commercial power plant in West Texas later this year. This facility will integrate 300 MW of solar panels with 660 MWh of batteries, designed to deliver 30 MW of continuous power with a target uptime of 99.3 percent.
Longmier said the company can achieve profitability at its $100 per MWh cost target by overbuilding solar and battery capacity to ensure continuous uptime. This competitive pricing directly challenges existing energy solutions for large-scale data operations.
The company has demonstrated its technology through a pilot-scale power plant, which has operated continuously for over 100 days, generating 200 kilowatts (kW) of electricity around the clock.
To meet its aggressive cost targets, Ambrosia simplifies component design and manufacturing. The company produces many components, including solar mounts and battery packs, in-house. Longmier noted that Ambrosia's in-house battery pack design reduces parts by a factor of approximately 100 compared to competitor systems. This efficiency allows the company to achieve a cost of 1.3 times the bare cell price, significantly lower than the five to seven times markup seen in most stationary storage systems.
Longmier and Spangelo previously founded Swarm, a satellite constellation startup that they sold to SpaceX.
