Dan Opila of Spiritus winning the Most Promising Startup award at the 2026 Data Center World Innovation Challenge powered by ABB.

As hyperscale data center developers race to go live with new capacity, many are turning to behind-the-meter natural gas generation to meet aggressive deployment schedules. Such power generation can work against sustainability targets given the carbon emissions from natural gas.

To address this, Spiritus is developing integrated power facilities that combine natural gas generation, air capture technology, and underground carbon storage. Its model is designed to generate firm power while removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than the facility emits, creating what the company describes as carbon-negative power infrastructure.

That approach helped Spiritus win the Most Promising Startup award at the 2026 Data Center World Innovation Challenge powered by ABB. The Innovation Challenge brought together 24 startups to pitch their data center innovations Shark Tank-style to a panel of judges, with winners selected across multiple categories for their potential impact on next-generation infrastructure.

“We’ve been handed a false trade-off,” says Charles Cadieu, co-founder and CEO of Spiritus. “Operators are told they need to pick between fast, firm power and meeting their carbon commitments. We believe they should be able to do both.”

Why Natural Gas Is Becoming the Default Choice

AI workloads are driving unprecedented demand for power, while timelines connecting to the electric grid and accessing firm clean generation often are much longer than the targets of hyperscale operators.

“The challenge is really about the calendar,” Cadieu says. “Hyperscale loads are arriving on three- to five-year horizons, while many of the long-term solutions people point to operate on much longer timelines.”

On-site power generation using natural gas turbines often emerges as the fastest and thus preferred option.

“In the United States, natural gas is abundant, affordable and increasingly becoming the default choice for behind-the-meter power,” he says. “The question is how you manage the carbon profile of those assets over time.”

Spiritus’s approach is to provide carbon management directly in the power facility rather than treating it as a separate sustainability initiative.

Bringing Power and Carbon Strategy Together

Cadieu often sees carbon reduction programs and power procurement that involve different teams, budgets, and decision-making processes. As a result, carbon strategies can become disconnected from infrastructure deployment. Spiritus seeks to bring those decisions together.

“Carbon management becomes part of the asset itself,” Cadieu says. “It’s built on the same timeline as the power generation rather than being something added later.”

Since more data centers are generating their own power with behind-the-meter projects, data centers can help shape the direction of sustainable energy, if they take this approach of merging power production and carbon reduction. “The conversation used to be about how the energy system serves data centers,” Cadieu says. “What’s becoming more interesting is what role data centers play in shaping the future energy system.”

How the Spiritus Approach Is Different

What makes Spiritus different is that it doesn’t treat carbon capture as an add-on to power generation. Instead, the company has designed an integrated system that pairs high-efficiency natural gas generation with its proprietary ‘Carbon Orchard’ direct air capture technology. Waste heat from the power plant is used to regenerate the carbon capture system, improving overall efficiency while enabling the facility to remove both the emissions it produces and additional CO₂ already in the atmosphere.

At the heart of the approach is a modular direct air capture system that uses a solid sorbent to passively absorb carbon dioxide from ambient air, avoiding the energy-intensive fans used by many competing DAC technologies. The result is a lower-energy carbon removal process that can be deployed alongside reliable, dispatchable power. For AI data centers, that creates a compelling proposition: fast-to-deploy power capacity with lifecycle net-zero emissions.

Building on Existing Infrastructure Technologies

For startups like Spiritus supporting critical infrastructure, innovation alone is rarely enough. Power systems are among the most risk-sensitive sectors in the economy, and data center operators and utilities need confidence that new technologies can perform reliably at scale.

Cadieu thinks Spiritus benefits from building around generation and carbon-capture technologies that already have a track record in industrial environments.

“The core power generation assets are familiar technologies,” he says. “Whether it’s turbines, reciprocating engines or fuel cells, these are trusted systems. Carbon capture is also already deployed across industrial infrastructure around the world.”

Spiritus focuses on integrating these existing technologies into a different operating model.

The Long-Term Infrastructure Question

BlackRock projects that the United States could add 150 GW of new data center capacity by 2030, with a significant portion expected to be supported by natural gas generation. If those forecasts materialize, the decisions made over the next few years could determine the carbon emissions profile of data centers for decades.

For the Spiritus team, that reality reinforces the importance of acting now to help data centers get the speed-to-market power they need while lowering emissions.

“We want to remove the trade-off,” he says. “The long-term goal is that firm power and a credible carbon profile become one decision made at the point of construction.”

Designing for the Next Generation of AI Infrastructure

The next generation of data centers, he believes, will increasingly be designed around that principle.

Cadieu is making the case that the next generation of data centers can be built with power, carbon management, and resource planning more tightly integrated.

“Power still has to be firm. Cooling still has to work,” Cadieu says. “The difference is that the carbon question becomes part of the infrastructure itself rather than something sitting outside of it.”

In today’s race to build AI infrastructure, securing power is often the most urgent priority. For Spiritus, the bigger opportunity is ensuring that the power systems built today remain sustainable for the decades ahead.