What if AI data centers didn’t need new power plants?

A new data center in southwest Texas isn’t connected to the grid—but it also didn’t require building any new power plants. Instead, a startup called Rune used modular technology to plug in directly at a solar farm, running on solar power that would otherwise be wasted. The company, which just raised a $40 million Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital, says that its model can be replicated at solar plants around the country, giving data centers access to clean power faster and cheaper than building new power capacity. “We’re the fastest time to compute,” says Rune’s CEO, William Layden. “We don’t need to wait three years, four years, five years for new infrastructure to get built. We’re using what we have today to bring on compute today.” [Photo: Rune] Rune taps solar power that the grid can’t use A typical solar plant wastes as much as 20% of the energy that it generates, the company says. There’s often so much extra solar power in the middle of the day that grids can’t make use of it. The California grid, for example, wasted around 3.5 million megawatt-hours of solar in 2025, an amount that could have powered hundreds of thousands of homes. Solar power plants also waste …