The Austin-based startup TAR aims to build off-grid power for data centers in less than six months — and rely primarily on renewables to do it.
That’s according to cofounders Pat Becker and Leonhard Soenke, in emails exchanged in the days after announcing the company’s $120-million Series A, led by $100 million from Spark Capital. If they pull it off, TAR — an acronym that stands for “transformative American resources,” per the company website — would be operating at an unprecedented pace for an industry beset by long lead times for power equipment, construction delays, and local opposition.
Going off-grid allows TAR to skip yearslong interconnection queues, and the founders said the company’s modular blocks of solar and battery storage, power electronics, and balance-of-plant systems allow for speedy build outs. TAR also handles the site selection as well as the design, construction, and long-term maintenance.
The startup, which launched in June, so far has one project underway with a large neocloud in West Texas; Becker and Soenke decline to disclose the name of the customer. TAR is also building a manufacturing plant in the region that integrates and tests its modular equipment before it gets shipped into the field. That first plant is expected to be finished this month.
The founders said in an email that West Texas is their initial focus because of its strong solar resources, large amounts of land far from urban centers, and experienced energy workforce.
TAR has 40 employees, and is looking to hire 100 more people over the coming months across power engineering, robotics, manufacturing, construction operations, procurement, and logistics.
The startup’s focus on clean energy differentiates it from other off-grid projects in Texas, such as Oracle and OpenAI’s Stargate campuses that rely on a fleet of gas generators. Many developers have said gas provides the kind of baseload power that data centers need to maintain constant uptime and reliability. (That said, at another Stargate site in New Mexico, Oracle has invested in a portfolio of cleaner energy to offset its gas use, in an attempt to quell local backlash.)
Becker and Soenke said TAR is overbuilding solar and storage, with some gas backup in case of emergencies, to ensure high uptimes for its data center customers. The exact split of renewables versus gas will depend on location and typical amount of sunlight a particular site gets.
Overbuilding renewables — and the amount of land that requires — is expensive. But Becker and Soenke noted that their more gas-reliant competitors face high costs as well: from the price of the gas itself and exposure to price volatility, pipeline access and technology to control greenhouse gas emissions. “Our goal is to optimize the economics of the entire campus over its operating life, not simply minimize its physical footprint,” they said via email.
Underpinning that goal is TAR’s modular power systems, which Becker and Soenke said can be placed on a wide range of terrain. That allows the startup to limit custom engineering to other parts of a project, such as designing foundations and drainage for various topographies or high-voltage power connections.
TAR also plans to use robotics to minimize construction labor. That’s the only way to scale up deployments in the timelines the company is targeting, the founders said.
They added that no company can escape the long lead times for power equipment entirely, but TAR intentionally sources most of it from the U.S. to minimize delays.
“Most of what goes into a deployment can be sourced and, where needed, assembled domestically at the scale we’re operating at today and expect to need next year,” Becker and Soenke said.
However, this could be more challenging if TAR lines up a larger number of projects. The founders didn’t answer questions about its future pipeline.
