Less than a year after securing one of the Frontier Coalition’s largest offtake agreements, carbon removal startup Arbor is inking its first deals to deliver turnkey power to data centers.

Starting in 2029, Arbor will build and develop up to five gigawatts of its 3D-printed, modular, fuel-agnostic turbines to GridMarket, a platform that matches clean energy projects with sites and buyers. The turbines will largely run on fossil gas, rather than the waste biomass that was central to the company’s initial carbon removal pitch. In both cases, the turbine turns the fuel into syngas, which burns with pure oxygen to heat carbon dioxide and spin the turbine blades, creating electricity. The CO2 then cools and is recompressed, before being captured and stored underground.

As part of the agreement with GridMarket, Arbor will both manufacture the turbines and build the initial projects, rather than passing things off to a traditional energy developer, said CEO and co-founder Brad Hartwig. “At the beginning, we’re working with data center developers…so that we can transact for power, rather than turbines,” Hartwig, a former SpaceX engineer, explained.

“We are the most invested in our success and bringing our technology to market, and also our engineers are the most intimately knowledgeable of the technology itself,” he added. “So we see Arbor at the beginning as a one-stop-shop for clean baseload power.” In the longer-term, however, the goal is for Arbor to become an OEM turbine manufacturer, which could allow the company to scale more quickly.

Arbor’s pitch is for a baseload data center power solution that is faster, cleaner, cheaper, and more flexible than traditional gas turbines. The company’s modular, fuel-agnostic turbines are small: 25 MW each, compared to the 500 MW of a standard large-frame unit. Adding additional systems for reliability is prohibitively expensive when using traditional turbines, but is a core element of Arbor’s approach to data centers.

For a 500 MW data center, Hartwig explained, adding a few additional 25 MW turbines for redundancy is a relatively small capital expenditure. And compared with how long it can take to secure a turbine from a major manufacturer like GE Vernova for example, Arbor can get power to its customers faster; that speed, according to Hartwig, is often their “first, second, and third priority.”