American Supercritical and Powering the Data Center Boom

Simon Shuham, co-founder and CEO of American Supercritical, joins Andrew Couillard to explain why the exhaust heat pouring out of gas turbines may be the most overlooked power source for the data center boom. Based in Denver, American Supercritical builds supercritical CO2 power blocks that bolt onto a turbine's exhaust and turn waste heat into electricity, giving simple cycle turbines up to 50 percent more power from the same fuel in a tenth of the footprint of a steam system. The first product is a 10 megawatt skid aimed at the sub 50 megawatt, behind the meter generation that data centers are building to get around grid interconnection queues. Simon traces his path from rocket engines at ULA and Blue Origin, through Ursa Major, Harvard Business School, and Exowatt, and explains why a technology that lived in labs for decades finally has the right market, the right timing, and the right co-founder in CTO Matt Carlson, a veteran of Sandia National Labs and Kairos Power. The conversation widens into why steam has dominated power generation for two hundred years and why Simon believes supercritical CO2 is its next generation. Because the system is heat source agnostic, the same architecture from roughly 5 to 50 megawatts can pair with small modular reactors, thermal batteries, concentrated solar, and waste heat from steel and cement plants. Simon covers who actually buys the product (the developer owner operators deploying gas turbines), why incumbents like GE face a classic innovator's dilemma, what nine months and roughly fifty co-founder conversations taught him about patience, and how the team grew from two to seven in about a month by hiring deeply experienced engineers and building a flexible, family friendly culture. He closes with advice for future founders: be obsessed with an idea you have real expertise in, and never start a company just for the sake of starting one.