Building the electrified edge

Terawatt was founded on a simple idea: to accelerate decarbonization by making clean energy the obvious choice for the most power-intensive sectors. We started out with infrastructure for heavy-duty EV trucks, then quickly added autonomous vehicles, and built a network of sites that deliver reliable charging in strategic locations. 

Since then, major new sources of energy demand have emerged. As the economy electrifies and new business models start to take off, people are increasingly focused on getting power where it’s needed. For a new generation of companies, having permitted and connected sites close to where you do business is not nice-to-have but mission critical. Yet these sites are in short supply. 

That means the hottest thing right now is the thing we have spent 5 years strategically acquiring and developing: powered land at the edge. There is a clear opportunity to build the edge network for a new generation of businesses that need data and power. This is the next major infrastructure play and it is already reshaping the economy. 

A major shift

Take AI. When people talk about AI infrastructure they usually mean data centers for training models – massive facilities that require vast amounts of power and water and are built wherever energy is cheapest. All the headlines are about these huge scale installations and the complex financing required to bring them online. 

But right now there is a race to build smaller edge sites for AI inference. These are much less resource intensive – think a warehouse full of robotics which uses as much electricity and water as a grocery store, not a city – but much more location dependent: to minimize latency they need to be close to where users are. 

In other words: the infrastructure challenge for AI is moving from the cloud to the edge. That dynamic is happening for transport too, and commercial storage, and other types of industries that require land and power. As the core technology matures and starts to roll out, the focus shifts to the middle mile that allows centralized providers to connect to consumers. 

Living at the edge 

I’ve seen this movie before. I led energy strategy at Google during a global data center buildout, where I saw the massive capital cost and operational complexity of moving from higher latency compute to the metro based edge. Everything gets harder: finding sites, permitting, power, all of it. And companies are starting to realize the true scarcity of suitable locations. 

Terawatt lives at the edge. We spent years acquiring a portfolio of sites near major population centers and transport corridors across the country: securing the capital to develop them, building expertise in distribution grids and power contracts, and creating a network of land, power and fiber that can support the next generation of businesses. 

We're here to build edge infrastructure for the electrified economy. And just as we make it possible for companies like Waymo to bring their technology to consumers – by providing powered land and data ops at the edge and clean electricity to supply it – we can do the same for other new types of demand. 

People sometimes ask me what will happen to our sites if fleet charging doesn’t take off. It’s an understandable question but I think it misses the shift that’s happening right now. As the electron economy grows new types of demand are coming online that we could not have imagined before. Autonomous electric vehicles are just one example; battery storage facilities are another, local compute for AI inference yet another. 

What they all have in common is the thing we were built to provide: powered land at the edge. Urban land with a grid connection was already scarce and it’s only getting scarcer. As a growing share of economic activity is powered by electrons, the pressure to find sites that can power the future is getting more intense every day. We’re here to meet that challenge.