Why two SpaceX alumni are betting on solar and batteries to power the AI craze
Two SpaceX alumni have a pitch to hyperscalers, and it has nothing to do with outer space: They’re building power plants here on Earth that cost less — and get built faster — than a natural gas power plant Ambrosia Energy, which has been operating in stealth until now, hasn’t invented a new technology. Instead, it’s pairing solar panels with lithium-ion batteries to keep electrons flowing around the clock for $100 per megawatt-hour. “A power plant should be able to be built at any scale in 12 months from contract signing to power on,” Sara Spangelo, co-founder and president of Ambrosia Energy, exclusively told TechCrunch.
- ▪Two SpaceX alumni have a pitch to hyperscalers, and it has nothing to do with outer space: They’re building power plants here on Earth that cost less — and get built faster — than a natural gas power plant Ambrosia Energy, which has been op
- ▪Instead, it’s pairing solar panels with lithium-ion batteries to keep electrons flowing around the clock for $100 per megawatt-hour.
- ▪“A power plant should be able to be built at any scale in 12 months from contract signing to power on,” Sara Spangelo, co-founder and president of Ambrosia Energy, exclusively told TechCrunch.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/10/why-two-spacex-alumni-are-betting-on-solar-and-batteries-to-power-the-ai-craze/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-10T13:07:28.277Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-10T13:07:28.277Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7WeUSjXveyfV |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Two SpaceX alumni have a pitch to hyperscalers, and it has nothing to do with outer space: They’re building power plants here on Earth that cost less — and get built faster — than a natural gas power plant Ambrosia Energy, which has been operating in stealth until now, hasn’t invented a new technology. Instead, it’s pairing solar panels with lithium-ion batteries to keep electrons flowing around the clock for $100 per megawatt-hour. “A power plant should be able to be built at any scale in 12 months from contract signing to power on,” Sara Spangelo, co-founder and president of Ambrosia Energy, exclusively told TechCrunch. “Our ambition is to go to gigawatt scale.” To bring costs down, the startup has been able to simplify the battery pack.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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