A 2026 Gallup survey found that 71% of Americans oppose constructing local data centers for artificial intelligence due to concerns over regional power, water, and grid capacity. As hyperscalers explore alternative infrastructure locations, clean energy startup Exowatt argues that the near-term solution sits on underutilized acreage across the desert frontier.
The Miami-headquartered company has launched its ExoRise powered land initiative. The program pairs land acquisition with the company’s modular P3 energy platform, establishing islanded, renewable-first environments for high-density compute clusters in West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada.
Rather than deploying conventional photovoltaic panels paired with chemical battery storage, the P3 system utilizes containerized concentrated solar thermal technology. Each factory-built, fully bolted steel 40-foot modular unit utilizes proprietary Fresnel lenses to concentrate sunlight, heating a thermal storage bed composed of domestically sourced sand, dirt, and slag to temperatures reaching 1,000 C. The banked thermal energy is subsequently converted back to electricity via an integrated heat engine and linear generator.
The company said each individual module provides 150 kWh of thermal storage capacity, enabling up to 24 hours of dispatchable output to decouple generation from real-time solar availability.
Siting configurations target a 50% to 70% capacity factor depending on regional solar profiles, requiring a physical land footprint of roughly one acre per megawatt-hour of dispatchable capacity. To maintain a continuous supply during multi-day cloud cover, project configurations are oversized relative to the local solar profile and the customer’s firmness requirement.
“The bottleneck in AI infrastructure has shifted,” Hannan Happi, chief executive officer and co-founder of Exowatt told pv magazine USA. “For most of the last decade, the constraints were compute and network connectivity. Today the binding constraint is power. Specifically, the multi-year queues to interconnect new load to a strained grid in established hubs.”
By operating behind the meter, the configurations comply with IEEE 1547-2018 and UL1741-SB interconnection standards for optional utility ties but do not depend on active grid connections to function. A load that brings its own supply does not lean on the shared stack or bid scarcity into transmission markets like PJM.
The closed-loop thermal cycle requires no process water for generation cooling because it does not run a steam cycle, restricting water consumption mainly to automated lens cleaning a few times per year.
For data center developers concerned about utility gaps in remote regions, the developer advocates for closed-loop IT cooling systems to eliminate operational water consumption. For data connectivity, the developer asserts that large language model training sites do not require dense fiber trunks, citing satellite constellations, wavelength multiplexing, and low-cost boring as sufficient alternatives for frontier deployments.
The structural frame is engineered to AISC 360, AISI S100, and ASME BPVC standards, rated for local seismic and wind loads. Routine field maintenance is limited to lens cleaning, while the linear generator and tracking mechanisms require service about once every five years over an engineered 30-year operational lifespan.
The manufacturing architecture relies on domestic supply chains and American contract manufacturers, eliminating the rare-earth minerals, cobalt, and lithium components that typically bind hardware production to overseas markets.
Exowatt, which operates a facility in Miami alongside a manufacturing footprint in Austin, Texas, is leveraging this localized assembly model with a “north star target” of a levelized cost of energy of 1 cent per kilowatt-hour.
The company currently reports a 90 GWh project backlog spanning U.S. data center operators and utility-scale energy developers, consisting of both binding contracts and early-stage agreements.
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