AI factories from unused power — factory-produced micro data centers
HQ: London, United Kingdom | Founded: 2026 | Employees: 6 | Stage: Seed (Y Combinator S26) | Website: https://pacific.space
Pacific builds small data centres in a factory — it calls them pods — and installs them on construction sites that already have a power connection but no working computing. The problem is that new data centres wait years for electricity while delayed building projects sit on unused power and pay interest on debt, which Pacific estimates costs about $1 billion a week in the United States alone. Its pods are built indoors and installed on site within days, using diamond wafers in the cooling system so they can run almost anywhere, including desert conditions. Pacific sells computing on short and long contracts below market rates, and also sells on-site pods directly to customers whose data cannot leave their premises, such as defence contractors facing US compliance rules. Because a pod works when it leaves the factory and can be repossessed, lenders treat it like equipment rather than property, which cuts borrowing costs sharply. Pacific reports $95M in letters of intent for hosted computing and $27M more for pod sales, with its first two clusters going live in Missouri. Founded in 2026 in London by chief executive Harper Dammann Smith, with six employees.
The data centre bottleneck has moved from chips to construction: projects slip because electricians are scarce, not because GPUs are. Pacific builds small data centres in a factory and drops them onto sites that already have power connections but stalled construction, so idle capacity earns money instead of costing interest. Two things make it more than a niche: a pod can be repossessed and moved, so lenders finance it like equipment at roughly 5-6% instead of construction debt at 11-15%; and on-site pods suit defence buyers who cannot use large cloud providers. The tension is in the numbers — $122M of letters of intent is not signed business.
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