Latitude Media: Planted is Pitching Solar for the Data Center Era

A small Bay Area startup has been quietly deploying utility-scale solar at data centers around the country for the last year, having sold hyperscalers on a reimagined version of the technology that leverages robots and software to turn project sites into factories in the field.

Founded in 2020, Planted Solar now has a 20-plus-gigawatt pipeline, largely composed of projects that will either be built onsite at a data center, or will directly supply one. The company has yet to publicly announce those data center customers, but the list includes some of the biggest and best-capitalized developers in the tech industry, both newcomers and legacy players.

Because those projects will be pre-designed in software and installed in large part by robots, each will go up in months, rather than the several years that solar projects typically take to move from development to power.

Speed to power, the current mantra for data center developers, is central to Planted’s value proposition. The company has installed 42 megawatts in the last six months. That includes a 28-MW behind-the-meter project for a data center in the Southeast for which development, from first contact with the data center operator to a fully completed array, took just 10 months. In 2027, Planted plans to install as much as a gigawatt of capacity, founder and CEO Eric Brown told Latitude Media.

Today, Brown explained, the constraint on solar deployment isn’t cost, but deployment capacity.

The next breakthrough in solar, he said, will be about the ability to build fast enough, in the right places, and at the scale demanded by the AI boom and electrification. Accordingly, the Planted thesis is that the only way for solar to be a meaningful part of the near-term data center buildout is to build more flexibly and more efficiently than the industry ever has before.

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