Is Base Power coming for Tesla?

Base Power, a home battery startup, just raised another round of funding, pushing its valuation to at least $13 billion. Unlike most battery makers, Base owns and runs the batteries itself rather than selling them to homeowners outright. Customers, which the company calls "members," pay an upfront fee of $100 to $700 depending on location, instead of buying the battery. Its newest model, Base Core, stores 40 kilowatt-hours of power, well above the roughly 13.5 kWh you get from a Tesla Powerwall, which typically costs around $7,000 before installation and incentives.

Base started in Texas, where it also acts as an electricity retailer, and has begun expanding into other markets by selling battery capacity to utilities instead. With this new funding, the company plans to grow its manufacturing from about 40 megawatts of batteries a month to 100 megawatts by year's end, and to move into other energy products beyond batteries.

A big part of that growth is aimed at data centers, not homes. Base wants to supply battery capacity to power-hungry data centers through deals known as "bring your own capacity," where a data center helps pay for local energy resources like batteries in exchange for guaranteed power. This is a broader trend in the industry, with companies like Google striking similar deals elsewhere. For homeowners, the takeaway is that a lower-cost, utility-scale alternative to traditional home batteries is scaling up fast, though availability still depends on where you live and whether Base or a similar model has reached your local grid.