A new company led by former members of the Trump administration is hoping to make artificial intelligence big by going small. The AI sect...
A new company led by former members of the Trump administration is hoping to make artificial intelligence big by going small.
The AI sector is currently at a stalemate over data centers. AI companies need the processing power to be faster and faster in the highly competitive market. Residents of towns in which data centers are planned fight them tooth and nail over potential environmental and quality-of-life issues, as well as the drain on the local power grid.
Three former Energy Department staffers believe a different approach could work, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The concept behind a company they founded called Mavria is to make modular data centers, which are individually smaller units than the massive centers currently on the drawing boards.
The company has reached a $1 billion valuation as it approaches the first tests of its products next year.
Adam Blake, Nick Poradek and Seth Cohen met while working on nuclear energy issues at the Energy Department.
“Our power infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and supply chains are nowhere near ready to meet the demand from AI,” Blake said, calling that a “strategic vulnerability”
The response is Terrain, a modular 5-megawatt data-center system that has everything — power distribution, direct liquid cooling, controls, and server racks.
“Everything is modular. It is almost entirely built in factory, and then you basically plug it in on site,” Poradek said,
The Journal outlined the concept: “Because of their small size, the Terrain units could be used to soak up excess capacity on local distribution power lines, skirting the yearslong waits faced by data centers to connect to the power grid. Units also could be added like Lego blocks to a larger location.”
Alana Palmedo, managing partner at Paradigm, which is an investor in Mavria, said it offers a more nimble alternative to massive projects.
“Local residents are predominantly responding to these large mega projects that they don’t want in their backyard,” he said, calling Terrain “not intrusive.”
“The AI story is an infrastructure story,” Anjney Midha, a founder of AMP and an early investor in Anthropic, said.
He said the smaller approach has promise.
“We have a pretty daunting challenge ahead to stay competitive with China,” Midha said.
Opposition to data centers is such that in the first three months of 2026, at least 75 proposed data center projects were blocked or delayed, the U.K.’s Guardian noted.
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