Breakthrough Energy Bets on 21 Startups as Data Center Opposition Grows

Eric Toone, managing partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, told TechCrunch that data centers are a small part of a larger problem. “Data centers are a 10% bump against basically flat demand for electricity over the last 30 years. So it looks like a big bump, but data centers are absolutely the canary in the coal mine,” Toone said. “You’re chasing a coming massive increase in demand for electricity.” He said electrifying everything implies a threefold increase in demand.

Breakthrough Energy’s fellows program, now in its sixth year, is the first cohort announced since Ashley Grosh, who previously led the program, left to become a partner at WovenEarth Ventures. Senior director Benjamin Gaddy is serving as acting director while the organization determines what’s next. Toone said the program aims to “take some big bets and hope to get some big payoffs.”

Among the selected startups is Borealis Fusion, which is pursuing fusion power using proton-boron fuel. The fuel is widely available but difficult to heat to the temperatures required to ignite fusion reactions. Gaddy told TechCrunch that if Borealis can do it, “you could get to much lower cost of energy.” Another fusion startup, StarWarden, is working on heat management technology for future reactors. Bedrock Semiconductor, K1 Semiconductor and Vari Flux are working on efficiency for semiconductors and data centers. K1 is developing a more efficient method to process key semiconductor materials, including gallium nitride and silicon carbide. Gaddy said that could reduce the cost of power electronics by “maybe 50%, maybe more.”

Breakthrough Energy is also backing agriculture and critical minerals companies, including molecular sensing techniques to detect crop disease and robotics systems to harvest minerals from the ocean floor while minimizing disturbance. AmyHyTech and Ammovolt Energy are developing ways to use and transport hydrogen with ammonia. Toone described hydrogen as “the Swiss army knife of energy.” He said that if hydrogen is cheap enough, “you can do anything,” but the infrastructure to move it barely exists. “There’s pretty close to zero installed capacity in this country,” he said. “There’s no simple way to move hydrogen around, and ammonia offers a potential way to do that.” The cohort also includes startups working on adaptation to a warmer climate.

Toone said the need for adaptation reflects the difficulty of decarbonizing as quickly as hoped. “It’s going to take longer and it’s going to be harder than we thought, and that absolutely leads you directly to adaptation,” he said.

On data centers, public opinion surveys cited by Data & Society say more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, particularly in their communities. The longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing fast. Data Center Watch estimates that data center projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opponents in the second quarter of 2026. TechCrunch reported that some industry explanations, such as the idea that opposition is driven by secretive Chinese meddling, do not pass the smell test.

The report is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork by a team of researchers who interviewed 44 Pennsylvanians between 2024 and 2026. The authors are critical of the way AI has been pitched and say they are not trying to measure the empirical impact of data centers but to understand how people experience the debate over their construction. “One of the strengths of ethnography and doing research on the ground for an extended period of time is piercing the bubble of AI hype,” Livia Garofalo, a Data & Society researcher, told TechCrunch. “People are making sense of the dissonances between AI being the next inevitable industrial revolution, and fears about AI.”

In Pennsylvania, the debate has shifted quickly. Governor Josh Shapiro headlined a July 2025 summit celebrating $90 billion in data center and AI infrastructure investment. A year later, Shapiro signed an order imposing new requirements on data center projects and removing them from a regulatory fast-track initiative. The report says the industry message that AI is inevitable has landed poorly with residents, partly because of the state’s experience with coal mining, the early oil industry, steel manufacturing and fracking. “People in Pennsylvania especially have incredible experience with industrial change, have deep lineages of industrial trauma, enough to sniff when things don’t feel right to them,” said Maia Woluchem, a program director at Data & Society who co-authored the report.

Trade unions are perhaps the greatest source of support for data center projects because of the potential jobs, even though the data centers will not be major employers once built, according to the report. The Data Center Coalition, a trade group, has set up websites such as “Pennsylvania Connects” to boost projects and spent at least $19,000 lobbying the state government last year. The researchers describe opposition as post-partisan rather than bipartisan, drawing in people who oppose development, people who dislike AI and the corporate interests behind it, environmental groups concerned about water usage and energy-related emissions, and people with concerns about public health. Material interests are often top of mind: electricity bills, property values and tactics such as asking local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements. “There is a significant group of people who are just really clued into their town hall meetings and might notice that wow, a representative from Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, showed up here, or a data center developer showed up at my community meeting … that’s a little odd,” Woluchem said.

Editor's Summary Breakthrough Energy’s sixth fellows cohort backs 21 startups working on fusion, semiconductors, hydrogen and other energy technologies as electricity demand is projected to triple. A Data & Society report says data center opposition in Pennsylvania is broad and driven by cost, process and industrial history, even as unions and industry groups support projects.