Parallax is building roughly 10 megawatt natural gas turbines sized to sit next to AI data centers, giving hyperscalers a way to add firm, on-site power while utility interconnects and incumbent turbine orders stretch into the 2030s. The company is building a ~10MW gas turbine from scratch, small enough to ship in a container , and is designed around a single customer profile rather than utilities or aviation. The launch matters now because data-centre power has a factory queue too, with existing gas-turbine deliveries slipping into the 2030s , leaving operators of training and inference clusters short of megawatts regardless of how many GPUs they can procure.
The technical bet is on manufacturability. The turbine runs cooler than an incumbent machine, which gives up a little efficiency but designs out the single-crystal blades and rhenium alloy that bottleneck everyone else, and 3D printing takes a core that normally has more than 2,000 parts down to a handful. That tradeoff is meant to let Parallax ramp units on AI timelines using common alloys and additive manufacturing instead of competing for the same exotic supply chains that constrain GE, Siemens Energy, and Mitsubishi.
Parallax is led by founder and CEO Carl Schoeller, a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer whose earlier component designs shipped in Tesla's Cybertruck and Apple products , and who previously co-founded a defense hardware company . The company exited stealth with $117 million raised across a seed and Series A , led by Founders Fund, Eclipse, Lux, Diffusion, Greylock, and General Catalyst, which is a notable concentration of deep-tech and infrastructure capital for a first public raise in the behind-the-meter power category.
Comments (15)
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Nadia Hrytsenko12d ago
Pitching an energy company as 'the AI energy company' is the 2025 version of adding .ai to your domain. Just build the turbines.
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Temi Balogun12d ago
The investor lineup is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that tweet. Would've loved one actual sentence about what you're building before the cap table flex.
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Temi Balogun12d ago
Just watched the video. Still don't know what you're building but the drone shots over the substation were cinema.
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Rupert Vance12d ago
Everyone thinks AI needs infinite power. Grid demand forecasts have been wrong in both directions for 40 years and I'll die on this hill.
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Kenji Murai12d ago
Cuts in the launch video are way too fast for a company that wants me to trust it with gigawatts. Slow down, let the b-roll breathe.
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Pria Venkatachalam12d ago
The wordmark kerning on PARALLAX is almost perfect but that second A is sliding into the L like it's had a long day.
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Magda Olesinski12d ago
'THE AI ENERGY COMPANY' reads like a stock ticker description. Try 'Powering the machines that are replacing us.' Free of charge.
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Zack Pemberton12d ago
Interesting round composition but I'd want to see offtake agreements before I get excited. What does the revenue picture actually look like in year one?
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Zack Pemberton12d ago
Also, 5 tweets and the word 'customer' appears zero times. That's a choice.
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Oluchi Nnamani12d ago
Who's leading hiring here? I know a power systems engineer in Houston who left a hyperscaler last month and would eat this role for breakfast.
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ravenkoda12d ago
Mark it down: this is the last energy company that will be founded without agents in the loop designing the plants themselves.
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Bastien Quereau12d ago
Impression numbers on this thread are suspiciously flat after tweet 2. Did people drop off at the investor list or at the TAM slide?
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Haruki Sato12d ago
Every energy demo looks great until you ask about interconnect queues. I'll believe the timelines when I see a signed PPA.
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Sinead Broderick12d ago
Any plans to open source the modeling stack or is this going to be a black box forever? Asking because the community around grid tooling is starving.
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Omari Jackson12d ago
Watching this as someone 3 weeks from launching a much smaller energy thing and quietly reconsidering my entire launch video budget.
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Parallax is building roughly 10 megawatt natural gas turbines sized to sit next to AI data centers, giving hyperscalers a way to add firm, on-site power while utility interconnects and incumbent turbine orders stretch into the 2030s. The company is building a ~10MW gas turbine from scratch, small enough to ship in a container , and is designed around a single customer profile rather than utilities or aviation. The launch matters now because data-centre power has a factory queue too, with existing gas-turbine deliveries slipping into the 2030s , leaving operators of training and inference clusters short of megawatts regardless of how many GPUs they can procure. The technical bet is on manufacturability. The turbine runs cooler than an incumbent machine, which gives up a little efficiency but designs out the single-crystal blades and rhenium alloy that bottleneck everyone else, and 3D printing takes a core that normally has more than 2,000 parts down to a handful. That tradeoff is meant to let Parallax ramp units on AI timelines using common alloys and additive manufacturing instead of competing for the same exotic supply chains that constrain GE, Siemens Energy, and Mitsubishi. Parallax is led by founder and CEO Carl Schoeller, a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer whose earlier component designs shipped in Tesla's Cybertruck and Apple products , and who previously co-founded a defense hardware company . The company exited stealth with $117 million raised across a seed and Series A , led by Founders Fund, Eclipse, Lux, Diffusion, Greylock, and General Catalyst, which is a notable concentration of deep-tech and infrastructure capital for a first public raise in the behind-the-meter power category.
Comments (15)
Pitching an energy company as 'the AI energy company' is the 2025 version of adding .ai to your domain. Just build the turbines.
The investor lineup is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that tweet. Would've loved one actual sentence about what you're building before the cap table flex.
Just watched the video. Still don't know what you're building but the drone shots over the substation were cinema.
Everyone thinks AI needs infinite power. Grid demand forecasts have been wrong in both directions for 40 years and I'll die on this hill.
Cuts in the launch video are way too fast for a company that wants me to trust it with gigawatts. Slow down, let the b-roll breathe.
The wordmark kerning on PARALLAX is almost perfect but that second A is sliding into the L like it's had a long day.
'THE AI ENERGY COMPANY' reads like a stock ticker description. Try 'Powering the machines that are replacing us.' Free of charge.
Interesting round composition but I'd want to see offtake agreements before I get excited. What does the revenue picture actually look like in year one?
Also, 5 tweets and the word 'customer' appears zero times. That's a choice.
Who's leading hiring here? I know a power systems engineer in Houston who left a hyperscaler last month and would eat this role for breakfast.
Mark it down: this is the last energy company that will be founded without agents in the loop designing the plants themselves.
Impression numbers on this thread are suspiciously flat after tweet 2. Did people drop off at the investor list or at the TAM slide?
Every energy demo looks great until you ask about interconnect queues. I'll believe the timelines when I see a signed PPA.
Any plans to open source the modeling stack or is this going to be a black box forever? Asking because the community around grid tooling is starving.
Watching this as someone 3 weeks from launching a much smaller energy thing and quietly reconsidering my entire launch video budget.