Zach Dell Thinks He Can Solve America’s Energy Crisis
With $1 billion in new funding, Zach Dell, son of billionaire Michael Dell, envisions his startup turning millions of homes into one giant battery.
To get inside why Zach Dell believes he will shake up the half-trillion-dollar U.S. power industry and then go global, it helps to take account of who’s inspiring the moves.
That would be his father, Michael Dell, who sold computer parts out of his college dorm at 19, took Dell Computer public four years later and by age 26 had entirely disrupted the personal computer business and become one of the richest people in the world.
At 29, the younger Dell is still working out the kinks at Base Power, the Austin, Texas, battery startup he co-founded two years ago. That, he concedes, puts him just slightly behind the pace his father set four decades ago. “I got off to a late start,” Dell jokes. Still, investors have been throwing money at him, most recently a $1 billion round in October, which valued Base at $4 billion, almost five times its valuation six months earlier. Base plans to spend some of the money on building two battery-making factories in Austin.
Dell’s idea resembles his father’s effort to bring personal computers to the masses. He is leasing no-frills home backup batteries—large gray boxes that sit outside—for a cut-rate $19 a month plus a few hundred dollars in installation fees. That’s a huge discount to the approximately $15,000 it costs to install a Tesla Powerwall.
The batteries provide homeowners with a source of cheap power for keeping their lights on if a blackout or a natural disaster hits. They’re Wi-Fi enabled and grid connected, so Base recharges them from the grid when its software calculates energy costs are low. In other moments, Base routes energy stored in the batteries to the grid to meet elevated demand—selling that energy at a higher price. The deal doesn’t include solar.
Roughly 18 months ago, it took Dell’s service crew a couple of days to install the first Base home battery. “But then we were just like, ‘OK, how do we make the next step? How do we go from 10, to 20, to 30, to 40 a day?’ Just go, go, go,” Dell said. The crews are now up to 50 installations on good days and have the batteries in more than 7,000 Texas homes. At a scale of millions of homes, Base batteries would be capable of operating like a gigantic power plant.
Base arrives at a time when America is deeply worried about energy. AI data centers threaten to put enormous strain on the country’s existing infrastructure, which was already struggling before their mass proliferation.
Dell notes that utilities are scrambling to get capacity on the grid to meet this booming demand, and he thinks Base will disrupt incumbent energy incumbents like NRG Energy by adding capacity faster than they can: His batteries are, after all, far easier to get running than setting up a nuclear power plant. “We are a technology-led company in an industry without technology-led companies” he said. After conquering the U.S., he plans to expand to Australia, Germany, Spain, the U.K. and other countries.
Dell, with his talk of world expansion and market dominance, fits a certain mold: He’s one of the scions of 1980s and 1990s billionaires who have suddenly surfaced with big plans to shake up industries like biotech, renewable energy and media. There’s David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose Skydance Media has acquired Paramount Global and is making a run at Warner Bros. Discovery. Meanwhile, Reed Jobs, Steve Jobs’ eldest son and the head of venture firm Yosemite, is seeking to eradicate cancer.
Of course, Dell’s plans come with some big risks: It’s no sure thing that homeowners everywhere will be as eager as power-starved Texans to pay for a battery—or that AI companies will actually build all the data centers in their most ambitious forecasts.
Base will retain ownership of its batteries, meaning it is also assuming enormous expense—which may explain why others have avoided following in Dell’s footsteps. He will have to keep going back to investors and either giving up more equity or taking debt on the company’s balance sheet, until some unknown future date when Base’s cash flow can cover its growth.
“How do you sustain this?” said industry veteran Vikash Venkataramana, the San Francisco–based chief product officer for India’s Amara Raja Power Systems. “You have to keep raising large sums of capital if you want to grow.”
Dell, as it happens, might be just the person in the unique position to do so. “Zach has the ability to raise huge sums of money because of who he is,” Venkataramana said. “I don’t think any entrepreneur trying to do this would be able to bring in this much capital.”
Dell concedes that he has basically been tutored since boyhood on exactly this sort of capture-an-industry play. “I got to see front row how this is done,” he said. “And I feel very blessed to have had that perspective.”
Watching his father do that in computers, Dell obsessed over building his own “great company,” and not just any great company. “I’d been looking for paradigm shifts,” he said of his early 20s. “I was looking for a wave to surf.”
The main vibe you get from Dell is a sense of imperviousness. At 17, for instance, he raised $585,000 from investors including his father’s pal Marc Benioff to bankroll a dating app called Thread. It failed to take off, but Dell shrugged off the experience as no big deal. Growing up as he had, “I was kind of unafraid,” he told me.
In 2020, soon after graduating from the University of Southern California with a social sciences degree, Dell went to work as a private equity analyst at Blackstone. That gave him more confidence, he said, especially about taking “big swings” at deals involving “big numbers on a spreadsheet.”
“You’re the analyst on these big, billion-dollar transactions, and the partners are relying on your math and your analysis,” he said.
In 2021, Dell went to work for Thrive Capital, the venture firm founded by Josh Kushner. He was part of an eight-member team that invested in SpaceX and Anduril Industries, both formative experiences. Dell looked up to the billionaire founders of those two companies—Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey—as role models. They went after big traditional industries—Musk with space, Luckey with weapons—and won.
Now, when Dell looked at big power companies in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, he thought he saw the same sort of target. Based on cost trends, he thought stationary storage batteries and solar would come to supplant coal as the cheapest way to power the grid—and that could be really big. Yet the leaders of battery and solar companies were moving slowly, if at all.
“These are not engineers, and they’re not engineering-led companies: They are finance-led companies,” he said. “They don’t look like SpaceX; they don’t look like Anduril; they don’t look like Tesla. And energy is a deeply technical part of the economy where technology is really needed.”
Dell made a decision: “I wanted to do to energy what SpaceX did to aerospace and Anduril did to defense.”
While Thrive was conducting its due diligence on Anduril, Dell met Justin Lopas, Anduril’s head of manufacturing and a former SpaceX engineer. In 2023, the two, along with a slew of Tesla, SpaceX and Anduril veterans, co-founded Base. In regular tweets, Michael Dell, who did not respond to a request for comment, has cheered from the sidelines.
“There’s a guy named Dell building a great company in Austin,” he wrote on X last month.
Dell’s push into batteries aligns with the U.S. data center boom. According to BloombergNEF, a renewable energy research firm, hyperscalers will need 362 gigawatts of additional power worldwide by 2035 to sustain the growing data center fleet. Almost half of those will be required in the U.S., according to the Brattle Group. One gigawatt is equivalent to the power usage of up to 750,000 homes. So if the announced projects materialize, the data centers would use the power equivalent of about 270 million homes, or twice the number of U.S. households.
No one knows where the AI industry will get all that power, which makes electricity the biggest bottleneck in expanding data center capacity. Dell thinks his batteries would be a relatively fast—and generally overlooked—way to add gigawatts of capacity to the grid: If a fraction of U.S. households installed a 25 kilowatt-hour battery, the minimum size Base installs, they would provide for much of hyperscalers’ peak needs.
That’s a very simplistic picture, though. The reality is more complicated. Battery-equipped houses would have to be located where hyperscalers need them. And Dell has to make sure that in trading away the power in homeowners’ batteries, he doesn’t leave them high and dry during a blackout, triggering a massive and company-killing customer revolt.
Base will need to keep raising cash—billions of dollars—to buy all those battery cells and the power devices and other parts needed to assemble them into packs for the global buildout Dell outlines. Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, the $1 billion he raised last month will perhaps cover a couple hundred thousand home batteries and the initial capacity of the factory he is planning near the Austin airport. There is no guarantee that investors will keep their wallets open, even for someone named Dell.
But Dell seems unworried as usual. He talks like the rest will be there when it needs it. His cash in hand is “a good amount,” he said. “We’ll go, you know, execute and reevaluate.”
