Three former Trump administration Energy Department officials have launched Mavria, a Texas-based company developing modular data centers designed to address infrastructure and power constraints slowing the artificial intelligence boom, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Founded over the summer by Adam Blake, Nick Poradek and Seth Cohen, the company recently reached a $1 billion valuation after raising $130 million in total funding. Its primary product, Terrain, is a standardized 5-megawatt data center system that integrates power distribution, direct liquid cooling, controls and server racks.
The units are largely manufactured in factories and transported by truck for installation, allowing companies to deploy computing capacity more quickly than traditional large-scale facilities.
Mavria will sell the equipment but can also develop sites with electric power and operate them. Its smaller systems could use excess capacity on local power distribution lines, potentially avoiding yearslong waits for grid connections, and can be combined to expand larger facilities.
The founders met while working at the Energy Department, where they focused on nuclear power reforms, including efforts to streamline regulations and advance small modular reactors. Their experience highlighted what they see as a strategic vulnerability. America’s power infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and supply chains are not prepared to meet growing AI demand.
Investors believe Mavria’s smaller footprint and faster deployment could offer an advantage as communities increasingly push back against massive data center projects. The company has 35 employees, and its first unit is under construction at a Houston factory.
It plans to begin testing in early 2027 and scale up production by midyear as demand grows for the electricity and computing infrastructure needed to compete with China in artificial intelligence.
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