Form Energy raises $750M to build more 100-hour batteries for the grid
- ID
- 13541
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 13 Aug 2026, 12:18 AM
- Fetched
- 13 Aug 2026, 12:44 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/form-energy-raises-750m-to-build-more-100-hour-batteries-for-the-grid/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 13 Aug 2026, 12:47 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_founders
What happened
Form Energy raised $750M to scale manufacturing of its iron-air batteries in West Virginia, which can discharge for up to 100 hours versus the few hours typical of most grid storage. Google is buying a 30GWh Form battery for ~$1B to power a Minnesota data center, and Crusoe ordered 12GWh, driven by AI data centers expected to quadruple U.S. electricity use by 2035. The batteries use iron instead of lithium/cobalt/nickel, with 80% of materials sourced from the U.S. to reduce China dependence.
Why it matters
If you're building AI infrastructure or SaaS with heavy compute needs, energy availability and cost are becoming the binding constraint, not GPU supply. Malaysia's own data center boom (especially Johor) faces the same grid-capacity pressure this article describes for the U.S. — founders scaling compute-heavy products should factor multi-day power storage and renewable intermittency into long-term cloud cost projections, since hyperscalers will pass these energy costs through.
Discussion angle
How the AI data center energy crunch in the U.S. maps to Malaysia's Johor data center corridor — are local grid constraints the next bottleneck for Malaysian AI builders, and does long-duration storage change the economics?