Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,
Elon Musk has acquired a power company based in Jacksonville, Fla., paying $1 billion for the mobile gas-turbine provider as a possible solution to data center energy needs.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lists Musk as the acquiring party, with New APR Energy, LLC listed as the acquired entity.
Neither party issued public statements on the deal that closed May 14. Local business news outlet Jacksonville Daily Record first reported on the news in June before it gained national media attention in recent days.
The potential cost of the deal was found in a separate filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in which Technologies Group reported selling its 5 percent non-voting stake in New APR Energy in a May 28 SEC report.
Duos said its sale generated $50.4 million in net proceeds, which implies the Musk deal was worth at least $1 billion.
Musk continues to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) development with the research company he founded, xAI, and its chatbot Grok.
His xAI company runs the Colossus data center in Tennessee, a $20 billion facility near a power plant site, where he has had to rent turbine units as he waits for grid power to the site.
New APR Energy owns and maintains a fleet of gas turbines with more than 1 gigawatt of power generation capacity, according to a statement from the company in January, when it expanded capacity.
The company has been delivering power to clients for more than 20 years, deploying its fleets “in as little as 30 to 90 days,” the statement said.
Grok is a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) chatbot developed by xAI, based on a large language model (LLM). It was developed at the initiative of Elon Musk in response to the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Riccardo Milani/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
Musk’s purchase of the Florida company represents his second investment in the energy sector. In 2006, Musk helped fund SolarCity, a company founded by his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, which grew to be the largest residential solar installer in the United States.
Tesla bought SolarCity in an all-stock deal worth about $2.6 billion in 2016 and turned it into Tesla Energy.
Tech expert and podcaster Aakash Gupta said Musk’s latest transaction exposed the AI industry’s current problems.
“What [Musk] bought tells you where the real bottleneck in AI is,” Gupta said in a July 16 post on X.
New APR Energy operates a fleet of mobile gas and diesel turbines with over 1 gigawatt of generation capacity—enough to power 750,000 homes at once.
The fleet, which was built for disaster response, arrives on trucks and can be delivered, installed, and commissioned in a month.
The fast set-up time makes sense for Musk, who has already lived through delays with xAI’s first Memphis plant, Gupta said.
“Environmental groups sued. The [Justice Department] intervened to keep the turbines running. He was renting the most important input to his most important company,” Gupta said. “So he bought the landlord. … Every AI lab can buy the same chips. Only one of them now owns a power plant fleet that ships by truck.”
New APR Energy and Tesla did not return requests for comments about the purchase by publication time.