Ambrosia Energy breaks ground on 10 GWh battery factory in Texas

Ambrosia Energy has begun work on a 10 gigawatt-hour battery factory near Austin, Texas, co-founder and CEO Ben Longmier announced on stage Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. The scale, he said, would let the company build roughly a 300-megawatt power plant per year at its field sites. The factory will occupy 150,000 square feet, and Longmier said Ambrosia plans to reach full production in two to three years.

The startup emerged from stealth in June to build power plants for data centers at a cost of $100 per megawatt-hour. Longmier and co-founder Sara Spangelo settled on solar plus batteries as the cheapest, fastest-to-deploy option: solar panels power the load during the day and charge batteries that discharge at night and on cloudy days to keep a data center running around the clock. The pair previously founded satellite-constellation startup Swarm, which they sold to SpaceX.

Ambrosia is also starting work on its first commercial power plant, in West Texas, later this year. The facility will pair 300 megawatts of solar panels with 660 megawatt-hours of batteries to deliver 30 megawatts of continuous power, targeting 99.3% uptime. Even with the “overbuilding” of solar and batteries that continuous uptime requires, Longmier said the company can still be profitable at $100 per megawatt-hour — competitive with the natural-gas turbines many hyperscalers are planning to use to power their data centers. Sections of Ambrosia’s first pilot-scale power plant have been operating continuously for more than 100 days, Longmier said, and the pilot can generate 200 kilowatts of electricity around the clock.

To hit its cost targets, Ambrosia has simplified components such as solar mounts and battery packs, reducing part counts and manufacturing many of them itself rather than buying from outside suppliers. “We buy existing cells and we make our own pack in-house, and it has the fewest parts by a factor of about 100 compared to any other competitor we’ve seen,” Longmier said. “We’ve been able to get to about 1.3x the cost of the bare cell compared to about a 5- or 7x for most stationary storage systems.”

Why it matters

As hyperscalers race to power AI data centers and increasingly consider on-site generation to skip grid bottlenecks, Ambrosia’s bet is that in-house-manufactured solar-plus-storage can undercut natural gas on cost — turning battery manufacturing scale, not just siting, into the lever for who builds off-grid compute capacity fastest.