Every AI infrastructure story this year eventually runs into the same wall: there isn't enough electricity to go around. A Miami company thinks it has a shortcut.
Exowatt, headquartered in Miami and founded in 2023, has raised $140 million to build modular solar thermal units that let data centers generate their own power on-site rather than wait years in a utility interconnection queue. The company's backers include Sam Altman, Leonardo DiCaprio, a16z, HSBC Innovation Banking and Felicis.
Storing Sunlight Instead of Waiting for the Grid
Exowatt's product, the P3, looks nothing like a conventional solar farm. Each unit is a factory-built, 40-foot steel module that uses Fresnel lenses to concentrate sunlight, storing the heat in a thermal battery and converting it to electricity on demand through a heat engine, day or night.
The pitch is straightforward. Grid interconnection for new power capacity now routinely takes years, and AI data centers can't wait that long. Exowatt says a P3 deployment can be installed directly next to a facility, sidestepping the queue entirely, with an engineered 30-year lifespan and minimal maintenance beyond periodic lens cleaning.
The approach is also a deliberate bet against battery chemistry. The system uses no rare earth minerals, cobalt or lithium, relying instead on domestic manufacturing and materials that don't depend on the same supply chains straining under EV and grid-storage demand.
From Product to Land Developer
In January, Exowatt launched ExoRise, a new business arm that pairs land acquisition with P3 deployment to create fully off-grid, powered sites for hyperscale AI compute. The program targets high-solar, low-density regions across West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada.
By July, the company was pushing the concept further with what it calls Frontier Land: remote desert acreage where AI training clusters could run without dense fiber infrastructure, relying instead on satellite links and low-cost boring for connectivity.
To run that side of the business, Exowatt brought in Nic Bustamante, a data center veteran with more than 25 years of hyperscale development experience at Apple, Google, Microsoft and Rackspace, as its Chief Data Center Officer.
"Hyperscalers should not have to piece together land, power, and infrastructure on their own," Exowatt CEO Hannan Happi said.
A CFO Signals the Next Phase
Exowatt named its first chief financial officer, Suchet Singh, in June, a milestone that typically marks a company preparing for larger deals, more complex financing structures, or a path toward an eventual public offering.
The hire comes as Exowatt says it's sitting on a demand backlog exceeding 90 gigawatt-hours from data centers, energy developers and hyperscalers nationally. A 2026 Gallup survey found 71% of Americans oppose new data centers being built near their communities over power and water concerns, a pressure point Exowatt's off-grid model is explicitly designed to sidestep.
That local-opposition problem has become one of the defining constraints on the entire AI buildout, not just a side issue. It's the same dynamic that pushed Metrobloks toward a pre-zoned industrial site near Sweetwater rather than fighting a rezoning battle, and it's part of why remote, off-grid land is starting to look more attractive to developers than sites closer to existing population centers and infrastructure.
What This Means for Miami
Exowatt is a reminder that Miami's role in the AI buildout isn't limited to the data centers themselves. The company that may end up solving one of the industry's most persistent bottlenecks, getting enough power on-site fast enough, is headquartered here, not in Silicon Valley or Texas, even though its actual deployments are happening a thousand miles away.
That distinction matters for how Miami's investors and economic development officials think about the local AI economy. The city doesn't need to host every gigawatt of AI infrastructure to benefit from the buildout. A Miami-based company solving the power problem nationally, hiring locally as it scales, and pulling in a roster of high-profile investors is its own kind of economic win, one that doesn't show up in a data center's megawatt count.
