What if AI data centers didn’t need new power plants?

In southwest Texas, a new data center has emerged that doesn't rely on the grid or the construction of new power plants. Instead, it taps into excess solar power at existing solar farms, a model that could be replicated nationwide. Rune, a startup that raised $40 million in Series A funding, offers a solution that can provide clean power for data centers faster and cheaper than traditional methods.

The company's modular technology, called RELIC (renewable energy linked intelligent compute), houses servers, cooling equipment, and power electronics. These modules plug directly into solar farms, using direct current (DC) electricity that computers already run on, eliminating the need for traditional transformers. This approach bypasses the usual challenges of building new power capacity, such as long construction times, permitting, and community opposition.

Rune's CEO, William Layden, emphasizes that their model allows for "the fastest time to compute," enabling data centers to access clean power immediately. The company's modules, which are 8-by-8 feet in size, can be installed in just an hour using a forklift. This approach not only reduces construction time but also cuts costs, with Rune claiming to be about 90% less expensive on a per-megawatt basis compared to traditional methods.

The U.S. currently has around 161 gigawatts of utility-scale solar power, with enough extra capacity to meet the demand for inference workloads—computing tasks that run trained models to generate outputs—over the next several years. Rune plans to deploy 100 megawatts of computing power at solar power plants within a year, a potential that remains largely untapped.