Soaring energy demand for artificial intelligence (AI) has spurred billions of dollars in clean energy investments, such as in next-generation geothermal and advanced nuclear reactors. Now, hyperscalers are boosting yet another clean technology: long-lasting batteries.
Developers are starting to add these batteries, known as long-duration energy storage, to data centres. As they do that, there’s a real chance to scale them and unlock more renewable energy, experts say.
"Long-duration storage is an important addition to a growing toolkit that can help us build AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale,” said Cully Cavness, cofounder and president at Crusoe, which builds and operates AI data centres for tech giants.
Long-duration energy storage is an umbrella term for technologies capable of storing and releasing electricity for many hours or even days. Conventional lithium-ion batteries, in contrast, only hold power for a few hours.
The idea of creating super batteries has been around for years, but they have been slow to take off because they are expensive and remain unproven at scale. That is poised to change with a rapidly expanding pipeline.
Since the beginning of 2025, at least 150 gigawatt-hours’ worth of new long-duration storage projects have either been announced, permitted or secured financing in the US, according to an estimate by BloombergNEF. That represents more than a fivefold increase from the country’s total planned installations as of late 2024, BNEF data shows, with the majority of the new demand coming from AI data centres.
The influx of capital from AI data centre operators is not just expanding the scale of deployment; it is also opening the door for a wide range of technologies. In Arizona, Alphabet Inc’s Google is working with Energy Dome, an Italian company, to store power for 10 hours in batteries made of carbon dioxide. And Crusoe has teamed up with startup Form Energy to deploy so-called iron-air batteries, which leverage the reaction between iron, water and oxygen from the air to hold and discharge electricity for several days.
Meta Platforms Inc, meanwhile, inked an agreement with Noon Energy, another California-based maker of long-lasting batteries, to install systems that can store renewable energy for 100 hours by splitting CO2 into carbon compounds and oxygen and then reversing the process to generate power.
"Ultra-long duration energy storage really helps enable clean, reliable power,” said Amanda Yang, head of clean and renewable energy at Meta. "Four hours can only get you that far.”
Historically, facilities have relied on a mix of diesel generators, natural gas turbines and conventional batteries to keep operations running during grid failures or when renewable power lulls. But adding new fossil-fuel capacity threatens tech companies’ pledges to cut carbon emissions at a time when AI’s climate toll is growing. The installation of gas turbines is also bogged down by persistent supply chain bottlenecks, leaving developers with multiyear wait times for new orders.
It’s possible to cobble 100 hours’ worth of backup power by stacking banks of lithium-ion batteries, but that can get expensive. While long-duration storage currently costs more, once deployed at scale, it presents a "very strong cost competitive profile,” according to Yang, though she declined to share specific price comparisons.
Emerging long-duration batteries have other advantages. For example, unlike conventional batteries, many of them don’t use critical minerals such as graphite, which have been caught up in the geopolitical crossfire, according to Lucia Tian, director of advanced energy technologies at Google. And as long-duration storage startups build factories on US soil, domestic production not only helps tech giants strengthen their supply chains but also earns them political goodwill with an administration trying to restore manufacturing jobs.
Aric Saunders, executive vice president of Noon Energy, has experienced the new enthusiasm firsthand. AI data centres now account for roughly half of its planned deployment, up from almost none two years ago, he said.
While other customers such as electric utilities and off-grid communities are also helping drive the adoption of long-duration storage, few possess the speed and financial firepower of AI data centres, Saunders said. "They are the accelerant for the industry.”
Indeed, one such startup, Massachusetts-based XL Batteries, credits its sales to Prometheus Hyperscale, a data centre developer, for acting as a stamp of validation. Startups making innovative hardware often require significant working capital to scale capacity, but lenders can be cautious about financing products that have yet to demonstrate strong market demand, said Tom Sisto, the company’s cofounder and chief executive officer.
"The path to bankability is the challenge all emerging technology providers are going to face,” he said. "That’s where some of the AI data centres can help.”
As AI data centres step in as early adopters, the technologies will get tested, and costs will fall, benefiting other industries, said Yiyi Zhou, an energy storage analyst at BNEF.
Long-duration batteries could also provide a rare opportunity for Western companies to play catch-up with China in the clean tech arena. While Chinese suppliers dominate lithium-ion batteries, industry watchers say that global leadership for longer-lasting energy storage is up for grabs.
Still, it’s early days, and it remains to be seen whether long-duration storage startups can deliver on their promised performance and cost savings as commercial deployment rolls out.
For now, the urgency of finding new energy storage solutions appears to be outweighing that uncertainty.
"To scale new technologies, you need to be able to take some of that risk,” said Tian of Google. "We will never get there if we don’t start.” – Bloomberg
