Powering the next century of growth
Nine years after founding, Antora's carbon-block 'giant toaster' is delivering 5 GWh of industrial heat at a South Dakota ethanol plant and a $550M Series C to build a second factory. Why long-duration storage now speaks in steam, not electrons.
$14.6m. Four firms put money behind Sora Fuel this April, and the startup's pilot is now due within 24 months. The bet: a single cell that captures CO2 and converts it to syngas, bypassing the most expensive step in direct air capture.
Big tech has committed more than 9.8 GW to small modular reactors for AI data centers. NuScale holds the only NRC certification, X-energy pulled a billion-dollar IPO, and Antares closed $470 million. Here is how to weigh the developers, fuel suppliers and rate-base players this cycle.
Nvidia's 33-page BESS self-qualification spec turns grid-interactive battery storage into a documented, testable layer of the AI factory power stack, backed by a Siemens reference design.
Reliance lifted its battery gigafactory target to 120 GWh and anchored the hydrogen side with a $3 billion Samsung C&T ammonia offtake. The bet lives or dies on one gate: 40 GWh going live in the second half of 2026.
AI helped Zanskar find more overlooked geothermal sites in a year than the industry found in a decade, incl. a first confirmed blind prospect in 30 yrs. $115M Series C and $40M show private credit treating geothermal as infrastructure. Fervo's 400MW buildout shows demand. Wellbore economics is open.
Hyperscalers are signing fusion power contracts a decade before delivery. Helion's $465M Series G at a $15.5B valuation shows the money is now following the contracts — and the bottleneck has shifted from plasma physics to magnet factories.
A GE Vernova spinout trains AI on the physics simulators utilities already trust, running a month-long power-flow study in under three minutes. The $28M Series A is the marker: AI-native grid planning has moved from lab to utility procurement.