Petra Power Pitches Fuel Cells to Data Centers on $9M DoD Deals

Petra Power, a nine-year-old startup with a 15-person team, has pulled in nearly $9 million in Department of Defense contracts for solid oxide fuel cells it wants to sell into both military ground vehicles and the data-center power crunch, TechCrunch reported.

The ceramic cells skip combustion entirely. "What fuel cells do is they take the electrons directly off of the fuel, so they strip the fuel of its electrons, which creates electricity," founder Aaron Goodman told the outlet. "It's one step, no loss, and subsequently, in theory, at least, they're much, much more efficient." He contrasts that with turbine economics, where "Combustion takes fuel and creates explosions. Those explosions create heat. That heat creates motion," through so many steps "that you end up with a really inefficient system."

The commercial path is slower than the pitch. Petra is targeting a first infrastructure-provider deployment in 2028 and full-scale production in 2029, and for now is talking to neoclouds and smaller infrastructure buyers rather than the hyperscalers whose spend drives the AI-power narrative. "Hyperscalers are an ICP [ideal customer profile] for us, and we talk a lot to them, but we don't have anything firm with them yet," Goodman said. On the defense side, the cells will serve as auxiliary power for land-vehicle equipment; testing is under way, with no live deployment yet.

Petra was selected for TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2026. The company arrives inside what has become a thick beat of AI-infrastructure coverage on our tracker — 454 stories in the last 90 days — but a 2028 first deployment lands two planning cycles after the current build-out, with no named customer yet on either side of the business.