OpenAI’s Sam Altman is funding a green-energy moonshot as AI’s power demands grow to ‘insatiable’ levels

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are two of the investors who have put $20 million into Exowatt, a green-energy startup targeting data centers, the Wall Street Journal first reported. 

They’re part of a growing list of investors, from Big Tech to private equity, who are collectively pouring tens of billions into energy and data infrastructure to support future AI development. But alongside bets on massive data centers and computing hardware, Altman and other CEOs are putting money toward unproven, moonshot energy startups that promise to deliver unlimited power for next to nothing.

Exowatt is a tiny, little-known startup that promises to supply AI companies with modular solar systems providing nearly-free energy. Renewable energy is an attractive investment for many AI companies because it presents a cheaper long-term alternative to existing energy sources, and because some renewable projects can connect to data centers directly without needing to go through the regulatory red tape required to interface with the electric grid.

“The goal of one cent per kilowatt-hour is very achievable,” Exowatt cofounder and CEO Hannan Parvizian told Fortune. (The Energy Information Administration reported that industrial energy cost just above 8 cents per kilowatt-hour in January.) “As we build more and more modules, the cost goes down. Eventually, we project that it’s going to be down to the cost of raw materials.”

Miami-based Exowatt, founded last year by Parvizian and Jack Abraham, employs a small team that includes PhDs and engineers with prior experience at companies such as Tesla and SunPower, Parvizian said. Exowatt’s P3 energy platform is a modular unit about the size of a shipping container that works by using solar power to heat a chunk of material called a thermal battery. The thermal battery can store heat and then convert it back to energy through an engine. 

Parvizian didn’t specify what material the thermal battery was made of, but said it was “similar to some of the other raw materials that have been used for heat batteries in the past by other companies.” The science isn’t new—other companies have for a number of years used materials such as liquid tin or carbon blocks for thermal energy storage in the U.S., but the…