How we got here.

Not long ago, in the most energy-rich basin on the planet, gas prices went negative. Producers were paying people to take their energy away. Meanwhile, a thousand miles in every direction, the biggest technology buildout in modern history was stalled, waiting years for power that didn't exist. I looked at that and saw the same problem wearing two costumes. This is the story of what we're doing about it.

But let me back up.

I was seventeen when technology paid me my first paycheck, and it taught me something no classroom ever did: the world isn't finished. Every tool, every system, every industry you see, somebody built it, which means somebody can build it better. Technology is how we do that. It's how a kid from nowhere gets a say in what comes next. I've been chasing that ever since.

Chased it through the Marine Corps. Chased it out of the service and straight into the oil patch, building software for the men and women who pull energy out of the ground. I learned the business from the inside out, and somewhere in there I stopped being a visitor. This was my industry now.

So I did what you do. I started my own operating company in Oklahoma. Loved it. Loved the work, loved the people, loved the dirt under my fingernails. But love isn't the same thing as an edge, and I knew I didn't have one. I wasn't discovering a new Permian. I wasn't inventing the next horizontal well. I was running the same play as everybody else, just with a smaller stack. And a man can spend his whole life doing that. I decided I wouldn't.

So I went looking. Not for a company. For a question.

The question became a podcast, and the podcast became Digital Wildcatters. Seven years, every single week, sitting across from the sharpest builders in energy. Operators, engineers, CEOs. And every one of those conversations was me turning over the same rock: what does the energy company of the future look like?

Then one day the future sat down in my studio.

A guest told me he was taking stranded natural gas, gas with nowhere to go, and turning it into computing power. Off the grid. Out in the field. After that episode aired, my phone lit up. A handful of oil and gas engineers had seen the same problem and quietly gone out and solved it. Trailblazers, working in the middle of nowhere, and I'd just stumbled onto their frequency. So in 2022 we launched the Empower conference to give that frontier a room, put energy and computing face to face, and see what sparked. We figured a few hundred people might show up. Over a thousand walked through the doors that first year. There was something here. We ran it three years, and every year the conversation on that stage drifted further from Bitcoin and closer to AI, until only one truth was left standing: the AI revolution was going to be won or lost on power. And the grid was losing.

And out in West Texas? Those negative prices I told you about. The Permian was producing more gas than the pipelines could carry away, and the molecules had nowhere to go. The biggest energy prize on earth, stranded in the desert.

That's when it clicked.

Go behind the meter. Build where the energy already lives. Cheap molecules in, premium electrons out. That's the arbitrage. Oil and gas companies becoming oil and power companies. Right place, right time, and for the first time in my career, a real edge. The answer to my question had been sitting in the desert the whole time.

Now, an idea is worth about as much as the people you build it with. I needed an engineer, a great one, and a mutual friend introduced me to Tim. Tim had already built an E&P startup and sold it to a much bigger company. Not just an engineer. A builder, with the scars and the exit to prove it. One conversation in, I knew two things: he was thinking about the same future I was, and he was an outlier, the kind of creative that finds doors where other people see walls.

But before I raised a dollar, I wanted somebody to try to kill the idea. That's why I took it to Mark. Mark's an engineer turned energy finance guy. His career started before I was born. His knowledge of energy runs wider and deeper than any man I know, and he's one of the most intellectually curious minds I've ever been around. If anybody on this earth could pick the thesis apart, it was Mark. I gave him the pitch and braced for impact.

He didn't kill it. He couldn't. He'd been circling the same idea himself. And when I finished the pitch, the man I'd brought in to tear it apart asked me the only question that mattered: "What are we waiting for?"

And just like that, we were three. Three guys and one conviction: the largest infrastructure buildout in modern history was about to be decided by a single variable, and it wasn't chips, capital, or talent. It was who could deliver power fastest. The grid needed years. The builders needed it yesterday.

Speed to power. That's the mission. That's the whole company.

Today that mission has a name and an address: Power Foundry, a thousand acres in Upton County, Texas. Land secured. Gas supply signed. Engineers hired. Permits pulled. Hundreds of megawatts with a path to gigawatt scale. And we're just getting started.

Here's what I believe. AI is the technology I've been chasing since I was seventeen, the one that finally makes good on the promise. New medicines. New materials. Whole industries nobody's named yet. But intelligence runs on energy, and energy doesn't show up on its own. Somebody has to go get it. That's what wildcatters do.

Jake CorleyCofounder and CEO