Zach Dell bets a battery fleet can solve America’s AI power crunch

A scion of PC billionaire Michael Dell is trying to build a power plant one home at a time, installing thousands of batteries in households to supply the electricity grid as the US confronts an AI-driven energy crunch.

Zach Dell’s Base Power, which just closed a $1bn funding round to value the company at $13bn, installs battery systems in homes and operates as a retail electricity provider in deregulated markets such as Texas.

The fleet of batteries installed at homes represents a new form of power generation that, in addition to meeting home energy needs, can add capacity to the grid as it comes under intense pressure from an explosion of data centres. The batteries are cheaper thanks to rapid technological advances, making mass installations possible.

The model has revolutionised how such batteries work. In addition to serving as energy storage for backup, they are now an active grid asset enabled by software that can tell them when to start delivering to the grid during peak demand.

The company installs its 39.2kWh batteries for up to $650 and charges a monthly fee like a traditional retail electricity provider. It retains control of the battery to profit through arbitrage, buying electricity to charge batteries when prices are low and discharging the batteries to sell when prices are high.

Base Power has grown its battery fleet to about 25,000 units and has partnered with utilities in Texas and Illinois.

At Base headquarters, a hive of activity filled with workers who appeared to be in their twenties, Dell said his goal was to become “one of the largest and fastest-growing power developers on the planet”.

“I think the biggest company in the world in a decade could very likely be a power company,” said Dell, aged 30. “And we think that we are pretty well positioned to become that company.”

Father and son are benefiting from the explosion in data centre construction. Dell Technologies has projected its AI server sales to hit $60bn in the fiscal year ending in January 2027, while Base is rapidly expanding as customers and utilities search for ways to offset electricity costs and grid congestion.

“There was not some grand plan of like, all right, so you’re going to build the servers and then we’re going to need all this power and I’m going to handle that,” said Dell about the confluence of their businesses. “I wish I could tell you that we were that smart.”

In deregulated markets, the company acts as a retail electricity provider. In regulated markets, it serves as a vendor to utilities, adding batteries to help stabilise the grid. In June, the company announced it was launching in Chicago, another deregulated market, with utility company ComEd.

Dell, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt during a recent interview, said he had been thinking about a venture in energy for years before founding Base in 2023.

In college at the University of Southern California, he tried to put together a deal on a solar farm. Years later, while working on the private equity team at Blackstone, he saw there were “fundamental constraints” with utility-scale battery storage.

“Across the country, you’re seeing an increase in prices and we’re showing up as supply,” he said. “That’s why we’re building multiple factories and raising billions of dollars and hiring hundreds of people, because we have to go meet that moment.”

The company secured its latest round of funding from investors including venture capital groups Ribbit and Valor Equity Partners. Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, where Dell once worked, and Lightspeed Venture Partners reinvested in the latest round, which closed earlier this summer.

Dell founded Base alongside Justin Lopas, a mechanical engineer who held top manufacturing positions working with Elon Musk at SpaceX and autonomous defence-tech company Anduril Industries.

Lopas, aged 32, said the company was focused on expansion as it built out the fleet and did not have a target date for profitability.

On the factory floor, the former site of the Austin American-Statesman printing press, workers were pumping out 300 battery systems during each shift at an annualised rate of 3 gigawatt hours per year, Lopas said.

The company’s production capacity will expand when it opens a new factory on the outskirts of Austin later this year, joining Tesla and Amazon, which are expanding manufacturing operations in the southern tech hub.

“What we’re starting with is batteries on homes in Texas. But to be very clear with you, that’s not the last thing we’re going to do,” said Lopas. “We want to be a modern energy platform.”

Base’s expansion is taking place as adoption of home battery units becomes commonplace. Texas had also enabled the business through a distributed energy pilot project, which allows a fleet of batteries to bid into the wholesale market as one resource, said Geoffrey Hebertson, a renewables analyst at Rystad Energy.

“Base Power is renting out thousands of these batteries and engaging in the wholesale market like a utility would,” said Hebertson. “Getting a homeowner to purchase a battery is very tough. Now they’ve unlocked an option for homeowners to install a battery that is more palatable upfront.”