Two SpaceX alumni are making waves in the tech world by proposing an alternative to natural gas for powering artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Ambrosia Energy is building scalable power plants using solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, all with ambitions of gigawatt scale.

The company’s innovative approach involves trickle charging its batteries throughout the day and slowly discharging them at night, reducing system strain. This, combined with other engineering refinements, has brought costs down to 1.5 times what they pay for battery cells, making their systems more affordable than traditional natural gas power plants.

“We’re also way more reliable than gas,” says co-founder Sara Spangelo. The startup recently secured investment from DFJ Growth and is currently building a power plant in West Texas, with plans to test its scalability on a much larger site that provides access to up to one million acres of land. Ambrosia Energy aims to deliver gigawatts by the end of the decade.

“A lot of these challenges are very similar across regulatory, technical and go-to-market,” Spangelo says, drawing parallels between SpaceX and her current project. “Building power plant modules has been kind of like deploying a satellite constellation.”