T

TAR

Off-grid power plants for AI data centers

Government Relations Lead - Federal

Full-Time
No salary listed
Senior
Washington, DC, USA+2 moreMore locations: San Francisco, CA, USA | Austin, TX, USA
HybridBased in Washington, DC, Austin, or San Francisco, with frequent travel to Washington, DC.
Growth & MarketingPR & Communications

About the job

Requirements
  • Meaningful experience on Capitol Hill, in an Administration, on campaigns, or in a federal affairs role, with relationships among members, chiefs of staff, committee staff, and legislative staff.
  • Experience working on energy, tax, technology, or infrastructure issues, including the ability to discuss Investment Tax Credit mechanics with tax staff or identify the appropriate subject-matter support.
  • Experience getting provisions into or keeping provisions out of a bill, markup, or rule, with the ability to explain the process and outcome.
  • Experience running lobbyists and trade associations to amplify advocacy efforts.
  • Ability to stage a site visit, prepare a founder for testimony, and write talking points that withstand hostile questions.
  • Ability to operate autonomously as a one-person Washington operation for a fast-moving company and remain accountable for outcomes.
Responsibilities
  • Set and run TAR's federal strategy by defining advocacy priorities, building the legislative agenda, and deciding where to engage across Congress and the Administration.
  • Build and maintain relationships with members of Congress and their staff, especially the Texas delegation, energy and tax committee staff, and offices leading on AI policy.
  • Monitor and shape legislation affecting the business, including energy tax credits, AI infrastructure and permitting bills, trade and tariff measures, and data center policy, and brief leadership on developments and needed advocacy.
  • Select and manage contract lobbyists, own trade association memberships and working groups, and decide where TAR leads versus where coalitions carry the advocacy.
  • Run political-visibility activities including site visits, congressional testimony, delegation briefings, fly-ins, and press-adjacent engagements.
  • Represent TAR in White House, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Department of Energy, and Department of Commerce conversations shaping AI infrastructure and energy policy.
  • Ensure lobbying compliance, including Lobbying Disclosure Act registration and reporting and political activity policies, in coordination with legal.
  • Partner with state and local government affairs, development, and communications teams so the Washington narrative aligns with conditions in West Texas.
Desired Qualifications
  • Texas delegation relationships.
  • Connections in the AI policy community.
  • Experience building a federal affairs function from zero at a high-growth company.
  • Campaign experience.

About the company

T

TAR

View
Website

TAR builds and operates behind-the-meter power plants for AI data centers that cannot wait out a utility interconnection queue. The company designs islanded microgrids pairing solar, battery storage, and gas peakers, then manufactures, installs, and runs them, handling power electronics, microgrid controls, dispatch software, and site construction in-house. Compared with grid interconnection, which can take years to clear, an off-grid plant can be sited and energized on the developer's own schedule, and TAR says it is working with a large compute provider and targets 5 GW by 2028. Its goal is to remove power as the constraint on AI buildout by owning generation end to end.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Series A

Total Funding

$147M

Headquarters

Texas

Founded

2025

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Spark Capital led TAR's $120 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation.
  • Latitude Media says TAR already has one West Texas neocloud project underway.
  • TAR has 40 employees and plans to hire 100 more across operations.

What critics are saying

  • TAR has commissioned no plant, so its six-month promise remains unproven.
  • A single unnamed neocloud customer exposes TAR to concentration risk and schedule slippage.
  • West Texas permitting, land, and equipment delays can kill TAR before revenue.

What makes TAR unique

  • TAR vertically integrates siting, engineering, construction, commissioning, and operations for data-center power.
  • Its modular solar-battery blocks target under-six-month deployments, not yearslong grid interconnections.
  • West Texas manufacturing lets TAR integrate and test equipment before field shipment.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

  • Meal Benefits
  • Unlimited Paid Time Off
  • Health Insurance
  • Dental Insurance
  • Vision Insurance
  • Relocation Assistance

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-30%

1 year growth

-30%

2 year growth

-30%
The ConTech Guy
Sep 25th, 2026
The week capital bet on factories, not dashboards.

The week capital bet on factories, not dashboards. TheConTechGuy Weekly Briefing Friday, September 25, 2026 Five construction technology financings closed within nine days this month, worth roughly $207 million combined, and the shape of them says more than any single round. Investors are backing companies that build the physical thing themselves, start to finish, and companies that make the software already on site finally talk to each other. Nobody raised money this week for a new dashboard. This week in construction technology. TAR raises $120 million at a $1 billion valuation to build power plants for AI data centers. The Austin startup, founded this year by Pat Becker and Leonhard Soenke, handles site selection, engineering, construction and operations in-house to deliver off-grid, gigawatt-scale power without waiting in a utility interconnection queue. Spark Capital led the Series A, announced September 10. Planted raises $31.8 million to turn solar construction into a manufacturing line. The company's next-generation robot, Sage, is built to more than double field crew productivity as Planted works toward 100 megawatts deployed in 2026, up from just over 10 last year. Announced September 15, with Google and Piva Capital among the backers. Adaptive raises $30 million Series B to put AI agents in the construction back office. The agentic accounting platform now serves more than 750 construction companies, pulling data from schedules and field logs to automate job costing, billing and compliance across QuickBooks, Sage Intacct and other systems. Tidemark led the round, announced September 17. Scaffold raises $15 million so homebuilders stop entering the same data three times. Connected to 29 of the top 30 U.S. homebuilders and live on more than 200,000 homes, Scaffold's early users reported roughly 50 percent fewer unproductive site trips and an 83 percent cut in purchase-order processing time in their first 60 days, figures the company reports and that are not yet independently audited. Announced September 15. CURA Climate raises $10 million to electrify cement instead of burning it. The Calgary company's electrochemical process replaces fossil-fired limestone processing with renewable electricity, targeting up to an 85 percent emissions cut, and is commissioning a 100-tonne pilot plant in Alberta ahead of a planned 30,000-tonne facility. The real data center bottleneck is no longer power. It's the neighbors. Texas Governor Greg Abbott paused new data center grid interconnections in August after roughly 90 percent of the state's 474 gigawatts of proposed new load turned out to be data centers, and developers are now hiring community relations leads earlier than construction managers. Editor's take. Read the five rounds side by side and a shape emerges. TAR and Planted are not selling software that helps someone else build faster. They are becoming the general contractor, the manufacturer and the operator at once, on the theory that owning the entire delivery chain is the only way to hit gigawatt and megawatt targets on a timeline the market will actually pay for. Planted said it plainly: they are turning the construction of a power plant into a manufacturing problem. Adaptive and Scaffold went the opposite direction, and it is just as telling. Neither company built a new destination app that construction teams have to adopt. Both connect to systems already in use, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, homebuilder portals, and make them tell the truth faster. Vertical integration at one end, integration glue at the other. Nobody raised money this month to build a better dashboard. The money is landing where the cost of being slow or wrong is largest. A data center that takes a year longer to power costs a hyperscaler real revenue. A project accountant chasing down job costs a week late costs a contractor real cash flow. A trade partner re-keying the same purchase order three times costs real margin on a business that already runs thin. None of these are exciting problems to describe at a dinner party. All of them were worth nine figures this month. Then there is the reminder sitting in the Construction Dive piece on data centers and public support. None of this capital touches the oldest constraint in the business. Texas, a state that has said yes to nearly everything, paused new data center grid interconnections in August because roughly nine in ten proposed gigawatts in the queue turned out to be data centers. You can vertically integrate a power plant. You cannot vertically integrate a zoning board or a skeptical neighbor. If you are chasing capital or clients into this sector, budget for the community relations hire before the second data scientist. Monday morning, ask whoever owns your firm's next large-load or contested-site project whether community engagement has its own line item and its own timeline, separate from permitting. If the honest answer is that it is someone's part-time job, that is the gap this week's news says is about to get expensive. Seen this pattern on your own projects? If you have watched a vendor try to own the whole delivery chain instead of selling a point tool, or fought a community engagement battle on a large-load or contested site, reply and tell me what actually happened. Reader accounts shape future issues, and the best ones get featured. TheConTechGuy Weekly Briefing covers construction technology with an operator's eye. Published every Friday at thecontechguy.io.

Latitude Media
Sep 14th, 2026
TAR aims to build off-grid power for data centers in just six months.

TAR aims to build off-grid power for data centers in just six months. Unlike gas-heavy rivals, the startup is deploying modular solar and storage, and just raised $120 million to do it. September 14, 2026 The Austin-based startup TAR aims to build off-grid power for data centers in less than six months - and rely primarily on renewables to do it. That's according to co-founders Pat Becker and Leonhard Soenke, in emails exchanged in the days after announcing the company's $120-million Series A, led by $100 million from Spark Capital. If they pull it off, TAR - an acronym that stands for "transformative American resources," per the company website - would be operating at an unprecedented pace for an industry beset by long lead times for power equipment, construction delays, and local opposition. Going off-grid allows TAR to skip yearslong interconnection queues, and the founders said the company's modular blocks of solar and battery storage, power electronics, and balance-of-plant systems allow for speedy build-outs. TAR also handles the site selection as well as the design, construction, and long-term maintenance. The startup, which launched in June, so far has one project underway with a large neocloud in West Texas; Becker and Soenke decline to disclose the name of the customer. TAR is also building a manufacturing plant in the region that integrates and tests its modular equipment before it gets shipped into the field. That first plant is expected to be finished this month. The founders said in an email that West Texas is their initial focus because of its strong solar resources, large amounts of land far from urban centers, and experienced energy workforce. TAR has 40 employees, and is looking to hire 100 more people over the coming months across power engineering, robotics, manufacturing, construction operations, procurement, and logistics. The startup's focus on clean energy differentiates it from other off-grid projects in Texas, such as Oracle and OpenAI's Stargate campuses that rely on a fleet of gas generators. Many developers have said gas provides the kind of baseload power that data centers need to maintain constant uptime and reliability. (That said, at another Stargate site in New Mexico, Oracle has invested in a portfolio of cleaner energy to offset its gas use, in an attempt to quell local backlash.) Becker and Soenke said TAR is overbuilding solar and storage, with some gas backup in case of emergencies, to ensure high uptimes for its data center customers. The exact split of renewables versus gas will depend on location and typical amount of sunlight a particular site gets. Overbuilding renewables - and the amount of land that requires - is expensive. But Becker and Soenke noted that their more gas-reliant competitors face high costs as well: from the price of the gas itself and exposure to price volatility, pipeline access and technology to control greenhouse gas emissions. "Our goal is to optimize the economics of the entire campus over its operating life, not simply minimize its physical footprint," they said via email. Underpinning that goal is TAR's modular power systems, which Becker and Soenke said can be placed on a wide range of terrain. That allows the startup to limit custom engineering to other parts of a project, such as designing foundations and drainage for various topographies or high-voltage power connections. TAR also plans to use robotics to minimize construction labor. That's the only way to scale up deployments in the timelines the company is targeting, the founders said. They added that no company can escape the long lead times for power equipment entirely, but TAR intentionally sources most of it from the U.S. to minimize delays. "Most of what goes into a deployment can be sourced and, where needed, assembled domestically at the scale we're operating at today and expect to need next year," Becker and Soenke said. However, this could be more challenging if TAR lines up a larger number of projects. The founders didn't answer questions about its future pipeline. * Catherine Boudreau Catherine Boudreau is a senior reporter at Latitude Media. She's spent a decade covering, energy, climate and agriculture issues at the intersection of business and policy, at publications including Business Insider and Politico. Related Reading Stay ahead of energy's next frontier. Subscribe for free:

DevCuration
Sep 11th, 2026
TAR raises $120M to power AI beyond the grid.

TAR raises $120M to power AI beyond the grid. A data center can secure chips, land, and a customer contract before it secures the power needed to run them. TAR is financing a different sequence: build self-contained generation beside the compute, own deployment from site selection through operation, and stop treating the interconnection queue as the default project schedule. The Austin company announced a $120M Series A led by Spark Capital on September 10, 2026. Returning investors Buckley Ventures and Align Fund participated, and TAR reported a $1B post-money valuation. The capital will expand its Austin headquarters, San Francisco engineering office, West Texas manufacturing and logistics operation, hiring, and deployments already underway. The round matters because the most visible AI infrastructure race has moved beyond models and chips. Electricity, construction capacity, equipment supply, and the time required to turn a planned site into live megawatts increasingly determine when compute can earn revenue. TAR is betting that ownership of those physical handoffs can become a product. What TAR raised and who backed it. Spark Capital led TAR's $120M Series A, with prior investors Buckley Ventures and Align Fund participating. Bloomberg reported the same amount, lead investor, and approximate valuation. Will Reed, General Partner, Growth at Spark Capital, framed power as the primary constraint on scaling compute in TAR's official announcement. The financing arrived 87 days after TAR announced a $27M seed. Together, the 2 disclosed rounds represent $147M in announced capital, although TAR has not presented that arithmetic total as a separately audited funding figure. The Series A doubles the company's reported post-money valuation from the $500M figure associated with the June seed to $1B. TAR was founded in 2026 by Pat Becker and Leonhard Soenke. Both previously built creator-economy company Throne, a software business with a very different operating cadence. Their new company has to coordinate land, heavy equipment, power electronics, batteries, construction, controls, and ongoing plant operation before the customer's workload can use a single electron. How TAR tries to compress the power timeline. TAR describes its systems as modular and self-contained, using renewable generation and battery storage without a grid connection. Becker has said the design combines solar, batteries, wind, and simple-cycle natural gas turbines reserved for backup or prolonged unfavorable weather. The company positions speed, rather than a lower price than grid electricity, as the core customer benefit. That speed thesis depends on vertical integration. TAR says it controls site selection, engineering, design, procurement, logistics, civil works, construction, commissioning, and ongoing operation. The company also says its purpose-built deployment automation and robotics move more work into repeatable manufacturing while reducing labor at the project site. The model replaces a long queue of external handoffs with one accountable operator. It also concentrates execution risk. Equipment delays, permitting, construction quality, renewable variability, storage sizing, backup generation, and commissioning remain physical obligations even when software makes the deployment sequence easier to coordinate. TAR says it is executing a utility-scale deployment with one of the largest neoclouds, developing a dedicated project campus, and completing TAR Terminal One, its West Texas manufacturing and logistics center. The customer has not been named. TAR also has not publicly disclosed commissioned capacity, revenue, uptime, signed backlog, or project-level economics, so those deployment claims remain company-reported. Why AI's power timeline matters. The market pressure behind TAR's pitch is measurable. The International Energy Agency's Electricity 2026 outlook projects U.S. electricity use will add more than 420 TWh through 2030, with data-center expansion accounting for about half of that growth. The IEA separately projects global data-center electricity consumption rising from 485 TWh in 2025 to about 950 TWh in 2030. More demand alone does not guarantee that every proposed data center will be built. AI projects need generation, transmission, substations, transformers, batteries, gas turbines, local permits, financing, and customers willing to commit before the infrastructure is fully proven. The IEA notes that constraints across grid connections and energy-equipment supply are already limiting near-term scenarios even as project pipelines grow. Different startups are attacking different parts of that constraint. Emerald AI is working on flexible data-center demand, while Catalyst Power is financing distributed onsite generation. TAR is taking a more integrated position: own the generation system and the delivery chain required to make it operational for the compute customer. The operating burden inside a $1B valuation. The $1B post-money valuation reflects investor conviction before TAR has disclosed the operating evidence normally used to judge infrastructure at scale. Commissioned capacity, schedule performance, reliability, customer concentration, and project economics therefore carry unusual weight in the company's next chapter. Off-grid power also carries tradeoffs. The IEA's current energy-and-AI analysis says reliable onsite gas generation may require 30% to 70% more installed capacity than demand and notes that turbine supply is constrained. TAR's renewable-and-storage-heavy design may reduce gas use, but the company still has to prove the full system can deliver reliable power through weather, equipment, construction, and operating conditions. The company's hiring plan shows where that burden lands. TAR is recruiting across more than 40 roles in engineering, robotics, power systems, operations, supply chain, and project management. Its named operating leaders include Jeff Silvan, Head of Projects; Christian Sanchez, Head of Power Systems; and Raphael Levy, Head of Supply Chain. What the $120M changes. The Series A gives TAR more control over the resources that determine deployment speed: engineering capacity, manufactured components, field execution, logistics, and the ability to work on multiple sites. It also gives Spark Capital and the returning investors exposure to a layer of AI infrastructure where the product is measured in commissioned megawatts rather than software adoption. TAR's opportunity is to make time-to-power a controllable operating system for data-center developers. Its obligation is to show that vertical ownership creates repeatability rather than simply moving every dependency onto one balance sheet. Customers will experience the answer through live capacity, reliability, and schedule performance, which is where this unusually fast capital curve now has to become physical.

Offshore Source
Sep 10th, 2026
TAR raises $120 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation led by Spark Capital to build off-grid power for AI.

TAR raises $120 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation led by Spark Capital to build off-grid power for AI. AUSTIN, Texas-(BUSINESS WIRE)-TAR, which builds off-grid power systems for AI data centers, today announced a $120 million Series A led by Spark Capital at a $1 billion post-money valuation. The funding will grow its Austin HQ and San Francisco engineering office, expand its West Texas logistics and manufacturing operation, and speed up deployments already underway. Power is an increasingly obvious bottleneck for AI. Interconnection queues run years long, and data center projects keep stalling on grid capacity and local opposition. TAR doesn't ask the grid for anything. It builds self-contained, modular systems of renewable energy generation and batteries in West Texas. Nothing it builds competes with a community for power. TAR is approaching energy deployment differently by verticalizing the entire chain. TAR handles the full process from site selection to detailed engineering and design plans, procurement, logistics, civil works and construction, and full commissioning and ongoing operation. Doing so allows TAR to operate at an unprecedented pace by avoiding coordination across a wide range of slow-moving third parties. Using their purpose-built deployment automation stack, TAR puts up generation capacity faster, at larger scale, and with far less field labor than conventional construction. The team pairs energy veterans from Hut 8, AES and Vistra with robotics engineers from Zipline, GrayMatter Robotics and Lucid Motors. "To lead the frontier of AI after a lack of investment in the electrical grid for decades requires a complete rethinking of energy deployments. Gigawatt-scale deployments in tight time windows necessitate owning the full stack end-to-end," said Pat Becker, co-founder of TAR. "We are excited by the demand from our customers. Our focus now is scaling supply to make a real impact on the power shortage stopping the scaling of compute," said Lenny Soenke, co-founder of TAR. TAR is currently executing a utility-scale deployment in tandem with one of the largest neoclouds, developing a dedicated project campus, and finishing TAR Terminal One, its manufacturing and logistics center in West Texas. "Power is becoming the main bottleneck to scaling compute. We will need innovation, unprecedented speed and exceptional companies unblocking it at every level," said Will Reed, General Partner at Spark Capital. TAR is hiring in Austin and San Francisco across engineering, robotics, power systems, operations, supply chain and project management. Leadership includes Jeff Silvan, Head of Projects (previously Hut 8, ON Energy); Christian Sanchez, Head of Power Systems (Zelestra, AES); and Raphael Levy, Head of Supply Chain (NineDot, Vistra). Open roles at tar.com/careers. TAR builds off-grid power systems for AI data centers at gigawatt scale. Founded by Pat Becker and Leonhard Soenke in 2026, the company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with engineering in San Francisco and manufacturing in West Texas. Backed by Spark Capital, Buckley Ventures, Align Fund and more. Learn more at tar.com. Press Contact: Diana Vicinanza VSC, on behalf of TAR [email protected] Read the Article on Business Wire: Read More Posted By OffshoreSource

Bloomberg
Sep 10th, 2026
Anthropic Investor Leads Funding for Off-Grid AI Power Startup

A startup that builds off-grid power systems for data centers said it raised $120 million in a Series A funding round led by Spark Capital, an investor in artificial-intelligence developer Anthropic PBC.