AI Power News 5/11/26

May 11, 2026

Nvidia and PulteGroup Are Mounting AI Data Centers on the Sides of Homes

Nvidia, homebuilder PulteGroup, and energy startup Span announced a pilot program last week to mount small liquid-cooled AI computing units on the exterior walls of newly built homes, turning residential neighborhoods into distributed data center networks. Each unit, called an XFRA node, holds an Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU and draws power from the home’s electrical panel. Span claims it can replicate the capacity of a 100-megawatt data center by deploying nodes across 8,000 homes in roughly six months at $3 million per megawatt, well below what traditional data center construction costs. PulteGroup has deployed the system in a single home so far in early testing, with plans to integrate XFRA units into new subdivisions.

Homeowners pay roughly $150 per month for electricity and internet service; installation is free. Span sells that compute to AI cloud providers and keeps the revenue. The homeowner hosts the hardware, takes the electricity bill reduction, and otherwise does nothing.

This is a genuinely new model, and the economics could work at scale. The friction is regulatory: utilities have no framework for millions of residential nodes acting as compute sellers, and zoning, insurance, and grid interconnection rules were all designed for a different world. Whether this scales before those frictions stop it is the real question.

Watch for hyperscaler response. If a major cloud provider signs a formal agreement to buy compute from residential XFRA networks, this goes from pilot to industry story fast. (CNBC)

Meta Bets on Space-Based Solar and 100-Hour Energy Storage

Meta reserved 1 gigawatt of space-based solar energy from Overview Energy, a startup building satellites in geosynchronous orbit that collect sunlight around the clock and beam it to Earth as near-infrared light. An orbital demonstration is planned for 2028; commercial delivery to the US grid could begin as early as 2030. Simultaneously, Meta reserved 1 gigawatt of ultra-long-duration storage from Noon Energy, using reversible solid oxide fuel cells that hold power for more than 100 hours. Meta now has staked positions in space solar, long-duration storage, nuclear, and geothermal simultaneously. That is not a single bet. That is a hedge against every possible failure in the grid buildout. (Meta)

California Batteries Cover 40% of Statewide Demand at Peak

California’s grid-scale battery fleet discharged a record 12,000 megawatts during peak evening hours in late March, briefly covering more than 40% of statewide electricity demand at the moment the grid was most strained. California now has over 17,000 megawatts of installed battery storage, up nearly 2,000% since 2019. The milestone proves what utility planners have argued for years: battery storage can function as genuine dispatchable capacity, not just a short-duration buffer. A dispatchable resource is one the grid operator can call on demand, which was previously only possible with gas peakers or hydro. (Inside Climate News)

NextEra Gets Federal Approval for 10 GW of New Natural Gas

NextEra Energy received federal approval to develop up to 10 gigawatts of new natural gas generation in Texas and Pennsylvania, including a 5.2 GW plant in Texas and a 4.3 GW facility in southwestern Pennsylvania, both designed to serve AI data center hubs. NextEra’s Florida utility separately has 21 gigawatts of data center load requests in its interconnection queue, with more than half in advanced discussions. The company’s upside forecast for new generation to serve data center customers now reaches 30 gigawatts by 2035, making NextEra one of the clearest direct beneficiaries of the AI power buildout. (Data Center Dynamics)

Fermi America Implodes: CEO and CFO Out, Stock Down 81%

Fermi America, the startup backed by former US Energy Secretary Rick Perry with plans to build 11 gigawatts of nuclear, solar, and natural gas for a Trump-branded AI campus near Amarillo, Texas, lost its CEO and CFO within two days of each other in late April. The stock debuted at $21 per share in October 2025 and now trades near $5, an 81% decline from its IPO price. No confirmed hyperscaler tenant ever signed a contract. Fermi is the first significant public failure of a company built entirely on the AI power buildout story, a reminder that proximity to a real trend does not guarantee a real business. (TechCrunch)

MARA Holdings Acquires 505 MW Ohio Gas Plant for $1.5B

Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings signed a deal to acquire Long Ridge Energy, a 505-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas power plant in Hannibal, Ohio, plus 1,600 acres of adjacent land, for approximately $1.5 billion including assumed debt. MARA plans to build a 200-megawatt AI data center at the site starting in 2027. The acquisition marks a clear inflection point: bitcoin miners and AI data center operators are now competing directly for the same power assets, and the miners who already own generation facilities have a structural cost advantage that most data center developers cannot quickly replicate. (Data Center Dynamics)

Massachusetts Signs 2,400 MW of Offshore Wind, Saving $1.4B

Massachusetts signed contracts for 2,400 megawatts of offshore wind power, saving an estimated $1.4 billion compared to prior procurement rounds for equivalent capacity. The deals demonstrate that offshore wind costs continue to fall even as federal lease activity has slowed under the current administration. Massachusetts is targeting 3,200 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, and cheaper procurement costs improve the odds that the state hits that number. (Electrek)

Have fun this week,

Will

AI Power Weekly

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