The grid queue for a 10MW data center is 5 years. At this pace, AI can't wait 5 years for power. Casey Spencer and his co-founders Max Pfeiffer and Evan Schmidt decided the best grid connection is no grid connection. Voxel Energy (YC W26) is building off-grid AI data centers in 200 days — powered entirely by second-life Tesla batteries nobody else thought to use.

In this episode: Casey's path from mind-controlling a drone to win a hackathon, to shipping thousands of Model 3s at Tesla, to founding Voxel Energy — how they source and qualify second-life Tesla packs, why a full DC microgrid gives them a 26% efficiency edge over traditional AI infrastructure, how Voxel is solving the AI energy crisis one grid-independent data center at a time, how they got 600 acres under contract for $10K, and yes — his favourite cartoon.

Learn more about Elias:

https://deeptech-decoded.com/guests/casey-spencer

Timestamps:

0:00 Meet Casey Spencer - Tesla, world records, and pizza-fueled capitalism

3:27 The lemonade stand and young entrepreneurship

6:16 Hackathons: the community that changed everything

11:54 Mind-controlling a drone at CalHacks 2014

16:59 The unconventional path: Make School → Tesla → Voxel Energy

19:38 Voxel Energy - off-grid data centers with repurposed Tesla batteries

26:59 Why second-life batteries actually work for mission-critical compute

31:16 The DC microgrid advantage - 26% more efficient than AC

34:00 The gigawatt delusion and what you can actually build now

37:46 1,500 acres, 60 megawatts, $10,000 to start

42:21 Sales in deep tech - warm intros only

46:41 Audience Q&A - iron-air, hydrogen, grid balancing

51:16 Crossing the chasm: customers before prototypes

55:44 Geography, permits, and why Google paid $4B for California approvals

59:22 Deep tech is having its moment

1:03:49 Modular data centers and the liquid cooling demolition wave

1:08:39 Data centers in space - the thermal management question

1:15:09 The founder mindset - failure, flexibility, and core thesis

1:20:44 The future in 10 years - Jevons' paradox and the human condition

1:35:36 Touch grass