Inside the Factory Using Rocks & Sunlight to Fix AI's Power Problem | Exowatt

**Molly O'Shea** (0:00)
So what is Exowatt?

**Hannan Happi** (0:03)
Exowatt is developing the solar backbone for the AI infrastructure. So think of this as like a solar panel, but that has a built-in battery. One of the elements of our product is actually a Fresnel lens. This essentially focuses the light coming in from the sun onto the battery material. It gets very hot and then stores that energy. So what Exowatt is really doing, our mission is to build a solar backbone. It's really important because you think about the AI race is so intense. It's now time to power, right? I need power, I don't care how you make it. If you talk about a gigawatt data center, that's almost a million US households of energy.
The grid is just really not built for that. The most important thing is at the end of the day, the raw materials that we use, sand and dirt and steel, right? So you don't have to go import something from China. Really the vision and idea is to scale this to the millions and billions of units, and build it better, faster, cheaper and don't take no for an answer.
Welcome to Exowatt, Miami.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:18)
Thank you. Thanks for having us here. So what is Exowatt?

**Hannan Happi** (1:23)
So Exowatt is developing the solar backbone for the AI infrastructure. So we're powering data centers that require enormous amounts of power with solar energy that's available around the clock, which is not something that people usually think of when they think sun, because the sun goes down at the end of the day, but we've developed a technology that we'll show you today that allows us to capture that energy and make it available and dispatch it around the clock to power baseload applications like data centers.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:53)
Amazing. So we're going to do a little tour around the office. I did see the little model in there. Could we go check that out? It looks like you have merch too.

**Hannan Happi** (2:02)
Yes, we do. You want to start there.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:05)
I definitely do.

**Hannan Happi** (2:06)
Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, please come in.
So our flagship product is called the Exowatt P3. And so this is a desktop model, as you said. And essentially, as you can say, it's a modular system. Each module the size of a standard shipping container. And it's made of three elements. That's why it's called the P3. So the three elements are the optical table, so these lenses, and then you have the heat battery and the PC, or the power conversion unit, all in this kind of container. And the idea is that we capture energy from the sun throughout the day. These lenses are tracking the sun, and then they're focusing that light onto a series of rocks, right? That's the heat battery. And then that energy is then transferred via an air loop to the engine, which produces electricity. So think of this as like a solar panel, but that has a built-in battery, and that essentially you can scale linearly to any project size. So if a datacenter customer needs 100 megawatts or a gigawatt or however many gigawatts, you just stack these next to each other. And kind of the hypothesis behind Exowatt is that none of the elements of what we're doing here are net new. People have been using lenses, you know, centuries long ago. The engine technology that we use is very established and old as well, and essentially what we're using to store the energy is ancient as time. So it's essentially rocks.
And so none of that is new. What's new to read about our approach and our hypothesis is making this in a modular fashion, making this in a factory, and then scaling the production to millions and ultimately billions of these, which ultimately allows us to go down the cost curve and generate electricity at our ultimate goal of one cent per kilowatt hour. And so that's why we started the company. That's kind of been the goal North Star from the beginning. Now we're on a track and a path to get there.

**Molly O'Shea** (4:01)
How did you actually found the company and who was involved? Yeah, and why Miami?

**Hannan Happi** (4:07)
Yeah, interesting story.
So we started here because I moved here from San Francisco after I sold my last company to work with Jack and Chester at the Atomic team. So Atomic is a venture studio. They start a bunch of companies internally. And so I moved in as a founder of Residence back in 2022 and started working with Jack, I dating around what could become Exowatt. Really the hypothesis was the modularity. So we knew solar technologies, especially solar PV and solar thermal are established technologies. Solar PV has actually been really successful in coming down the cost curve. If you look at the trajectory over the last 50 years, the cost of making a solar panel has gone down by 99.6 percent.