Why off-grid renewable data centers matter in the AI era: Felix Huettenbach's Prieska bet
Felix Huettenbach, a founder, investor, adventurer and YouTuber based in Dubai who is best known for scaling Sameday Health's COVID testing network in the United States, is one of the people trying to answer a question that the spread of artificial intelligence has made urgent: where will the electricity for all this computing come from? His company Terranum is planning a 100 MW data center campus in South Africa that would run fully off-grid on renewable energy, and the project offers a useful lens on a wider industry debate.
The case study in numbers
Terranum, legally Terranum Capital FZCO in Dubai's IFZA Business Park, develops data center campuses powered by renewable energy. Its planned campus in Prieska, in South Africa's Northern Cape, is sized at 100 MW, designed to operate entirely off-grid with 100% renewable energy, and intended to serve hyperscale demand by 2029. Its backers position it as the largest data center campus currently planned in Africa. Huettenbach is a co-founder and partner.
Computing has become an energy question
Training and running AI models requires large clusters of specialised hardware that operate continuously. Each new generation of models tends to bring demand for more computing capacity, and that capacity sits in data centers. As a result, conversations about digital infrastructure increasingly start with power rather than with buildings or servers.
This shift changes how sites are chosen. Where developers once looked primarily for proximity to customers and network hubs, energy availability has become a leading criterion. A site with abundant renewable resources and space to build generation can be more attractive than one in a crowded metropolitan grid.
What off-grid design solves
An off-grid campus does not depend on the public electricity network. That has three practical implications.
- Supply independence: the facility is not competing with households and industry for capacity on a shared grid.
- Predictability: power planning can be aligned with the campus's own needs rather than external constraints.
- Emissions profile: if the power is fully renewable, as in the Prieska plan, the computing that runs on site starts from a renewable base.
Off-grid design also brings its own challenges, above all the need to keep supply stable when renewable output varies.
Why a town in the Northern Cape
Prieska is not an obvious name in global technology. Yet that is part of the logic. Large renewable campuses need land and energy resources more than they need a city address. In March 2026, Huettenbach and Terranum's Victor Decalf visited the town with the Prieska Power Reserve team and met the mayor and senior officials to discuss preliminary approval. The meeting signals that the project depends on local support as much as on technology.
The operator's argument: lessons from Sameday Health and COVID-19
Huettenbach brings an unusual background to this field. In the COVID-19 pandemic, Huettenbach, as co-founder and CEO, built Sameday Health in Los Angeles, opening its first walk-in testing site in Venice in September 2020 and growing the network to 55 US locations and more than 1,000 employees by April 2022. Much of that growth was a question of physical capacity. Under his leadership, a drive-thru site outside Tysons Corner Center in Virginia opened in February 2021 as the company's 11th location in the Washington, D.C. area; according to local reports, its 20,000-square-foot lot had 550 spaces and capacity for more than 1,000 people per day. In March 2021, with Huettenbach as CEO, a drive-through vaccination site at Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles followed, with capacity for roughly 1,000 to 2,000 people per day, according to the company. The data layer mattered as much as the sites: a booking and results platform that, according to the company, four MIT software engineers custom-built was linked to local laboratories. Huettenbach, an engineer by training who also studied at MIT, ran the company on top of that system rather than building it himself. By his own account, he is passionate about making healthcare more affordable, transparent and approachable, and online booking with digital results was how walk-in COVID testing put that into practice. In 2023 he stepped back after he and the management team agreed that a physician should lead Sameday Health and broaden its medical services. He argues that the work at Sameday Health, which meant running physical infrastructure across many sites, obtaining official approval and keeping downtime near zero, prepared him for data centers.
That fits a principle he states plainly about investing and building: "Execution beats narrative." In an industry where announcements about AI capacity are frequent, the distinction between a plan and an operating facility is precisely where execution matters.
What to watch
For anyone following the Prieska project, the useful markers are straightforward: the outcome of the approval process that began with the March 2026 talks, the details of how renewable supply will be secured for a fully off-grid campus, and progress toward the 2029 hyperscale target. These will show whether the case for off-grid renewable data centers holds up in practice.
A broader lesson
Whatever the eventual outcome, the Prieska plan illustrates the direction of the debate. As AI pushes demand for computing upward, the industry is rethinking not only how much power data centers need but where that power should come from. Terranum's answer is to build campuses that bring their own renewable energy with them. Huettenbach also has a profile on Medium.