Formations · Accelerating
Data Center
6 companies in the last four YC batches (Fall 2025 – Summer 2026), up from 2 in the four before (Fall 2024 – Summer 2025).
Companies per batch
How many companies in each YC batch belong to this group. Batches with none are left out.
About this formation
The real split in this batch is between companies racing to build more data center capacity and companies trying to make the capacity that already exists run smarter, and the second group outnumbers the first. Pacific and Atomarine attack the physical shortage directly, one by mass-producing modular units for stalled construction sites and the other by moving compute onto nuclear-powered ships at sea to sidestep land and grid constraints entirely. But Edviro, Condor Energy, and Inviscid AI are all variations on a single bet: that the binding constraint is coordination and efficiency of energy and operations, not raw square footage, which is why they sell software and physics simulation to existing facilities rather than pouring concrete. HERA sits in between, building verification tools for the hardware vendors who supply both camps. The arXiv data center research cluster is genuinely surging alongside this formation, suggesting the operational-efficiency thesis has academic legs, not just startup interest. This clustering around power and thermal bottlenecks rather than chip supply is a direct downstream effect of the 2023 generative AI boom pushing data center electricity demand past what regional grids were planned for, turning power procurement and facility uptime into the scarce resource that compute buildout now waits on.
Model-written summary (claude-sonnet-5, 2026-10-24), grounded in the companies below. Any sentence on why this is happening now comes from the model’s general knowledge, not from this dataset.
The companies behind the signal 6
Newest batch first.
- Summer 2026Pacific
Mass-producing and financing micro data center incredibly quickly.. We mass-produce modular data centers that deploy on stalled infrastructure projects losing billions per week. Delayed infrastructure projects hemorrhage $1B a week in the US alone - Pacific mass-produces modular data centers that deploy on those sites in days and turn their unused power into revenue. Data centers are stuck for years waiting for power, while delayed construction sites across the world sit on unused interconnects, losing billions of dollars per week in interest on trillions of dollars of debt. Our pods deploy on those sites and generate revenue for them in days. They use diamond wafers in the cooling system so pods run anywhere on earth, even a desert. We'll use the same mechanisms we're building today to deploy compute across the galaxy.
- Summer 2026Atomarine
Floating nuclear powered data centers at sea.. We are building nuclear power delivery ships to power our floating compute barges at sea. Our systems are fully standalone, have better cooling, and avoid all the resource competition that leads to local community opposition. Our centralized manufacturing allows us to deploy anywhere on Earth, four times faster than on land.
- Summer 2026Edviro
AI That Operates Energy Infrastructure. Edviro builds AI that operates energy infrastructure. We connect to meters, HVAC systems, batteries, solar, and other energy equipment and continuously handle the work required to keep them efficient: detecting and diagnosing problems to forecasting demand, simulating fixes, creating work orders, coordinating maintenance, and controlling equipment where authorized. Our energy world models learn how each site behaves, choose the highest-value actions, and verify the results against real operational, meter, and billing data.
- Summer 2026HERA
Hera is the design verification layer for heavy industry.. At Hera, we build tools that help heavy engineering teams bring products to market up to 20× faster. Today, we work with manufacturers of data center ancillary equipment, renewable energy systems, robotics, heat exchangers, power plants and pressure vessels.
- Winter 2026Condor Energy
Software for enterprise energy procurement.. Condor helps large electricity consumers - C&I and data centers - cut electricity costs by helping the grid. We are former electricity traders and energy physicists. We build an AI-powered software that our clients use to optimize their energy procurement - making sure they always have access to cheap & reliable power.
- Winter 2026Inviscid AI
Real-time Physics Simulations for Industrial Facilities & Data Centers. Inviscid AI builds physics-informed AI solutions that transform how buildings and data centers operate. By combining real-time IoT sensor data with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling, we create digital twins that simulate building performance in real time and autonomously optimize operations. Our platform optimizes airflow patterns and ventilation strategies to eliminate dead zones, improve air distribution, and reduce the load on mechanical systems. On the energy side, we minimize HVAC power consumption, reduce cooling costs, and lower overall operational expenses while maintaining optimal thermal comfort and indoor air quality. Beyond immediate operational efficiency, we optimize equipment scheduling and maintenance cycles by predicting system behavior under different conditions, allowing facilities manage