AI is expanding its capabilities. It’s no longer just about generating text or code — today’s systems can serve as 24/7 assistants, launch full applications, and oversee entire multinational operations, among many other specific tasks.
But this growth comes with a cost: energy use. As AI systems become more advanced, they require increasingly more power to run. That becomes a problem when the traditional grids supporting the data centers behind these tools start getting overloaded, as too much demand can lead to slowdowns, failures, or system-wide outages.
This is the issue that Luis Martin is working to address. As the growth and strategic initiatives lead at renewable energy company Exowatt, he’s helping energy providers adopt more flexible solutions that can keep pace with AI’s power demands. With a background in finance, clean energy, and AI, he’s playing a major part in providing companies with systems that can keep up with this rising ecosystem.
Luis’s Early Work With AI
Luis began his career in Spain, working in management consulting and later in fintech strategy at Allfunds, a major fund distribution platform. There, he led several strategic projects that helped transition the company into a more tech-driven operation. His work spanned €1.5 billion in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity and culminated in managing the company’s IPO, which was named EMEIA IPO of the Year in 2021.
Over time, his focus shifted from finance alone to the underlying systems that enable businesses to scale. That interest led him to pursue an MBA at MIT Sloan, where he studied AI and its growing role in improving business operations. During his time there, he also served as an assistant professor in the Fintech Ventures Studio course, guiding early-stage founders from initial concept through to fundraising.
While studying at MIT, he and other colleagues began leading AI implementation projects across different companies, such as GoTyme, a digital bank in Southeast Asia. There, he helped implement machine learning tools to reduce customer churn and built a generative AI chatbot that improved customer service at scale. Just as important, he worked directly with internal teams to ease their concerns about automation — showing them how AI could support their work rather than replace it.
Across these roles, Luis developed a consistent approach: seeing technology not just as a tool, but as part of the infrastructure that allows businesses to grow, adapt, and scale over time.
Addressing AI’s Power Consumption Problem At Exowatt
Today, Luis works as a growth and strategic initiatives lead at Exowatt, a company producing renewable energy solutions for companies worldwide. There, he’s directly contributing to solving one of the most critical (yet overlooked) bottlenecks in the AI ecosystem: energy.
As models fueling apps like chatbots or customer service assistants become more powerful and widely used, the energy needed to run them has naturally increased. Recent reports show AI workloads represented 24% of server electricity demand and 15% of total data center energy demand in 2024, figures expected to double by 2030. This rising load is pushing traditional power grids to their limit, primarily as AI increasingly depends on real-time processing and often has to deal with unpredictable and volatile user demand.
Complicating things further, most other clean energy sources like solar and wind power can’t easily ramp up on demand, making them a poor fit for AI’s more dynamic and flexible energy needs.
The result is a growing gap between what AI systems require and what existing infrastructure can reliably provide.
Exowatt’s products are designed to close this gap by offering systems that deliver reliable, dispatchable power with lower operational strain, helping clients dealing with heavy infrastructure (like data centers) avoid outages, reduce dependency on the grid, and scale with confidence.
Luis’s role is central to ensuring that these solutions aren’t just built, but actually reach the companies that need them and are implemented effectively.
Growth and Strategic Initiatives
As the growth and strategic initiatives lead, he leads Exowatt’s expansion. This includes building long-term strategic partnerships with hyperscalers and energy developers, coordinating with investors to secure the capital needed for scaling, and guiding multi-site deployment strategies. He also works internally across engineering and operations teams to make sure product development stays aligned with market needs — ensuring that what Exowatt builds is usable, scalable, and ready for use.
This work has positioned Luis to play a key role in expanding the reach of Exowatt’s core technologies — most notably the Exowatt P3. This compact and modular solar thermal platform can deliver 25 kWh of dispatchable energy per unit and provide power continuously for up to 24 hours.
Instead of storing electricity, the P3 captures solar energy as heat, stores it in solid-state thermal media, and converts it into electricity on demand using a closed-loop heat engine. This setup allows the system to deliver steady baseload power and adjust to changing demand, making it ideal for powering data centers, edge compute, and other high-performance workloads — without relying on the grid.
By scaling solutions like the Exowatt P3, Luis is helping ensure that companies across the world can power the next generation of AI systems.
Developing A More Sustainable Energy Layer
Through his work at Exowatt, Luis Martin is helping position energy as a core requirement for the future of AI. By advancing solutions that make power more reliable, flexible, and easier to scale, he’s helping companies plan for the increasing demands of AI without being limited by outdated infrastructure. In doing so, he’s building a future where AI can grow sustainably — supported by systems designed to keep up.
Kyle Lewis is a seasoned technology journalist with over a decade of experience covering the latest innovations and trends in the tech industry. With a deep passion for all things digital, he has built a reputation for delivering insightful analysis and thought-provoking commentary on everything from cutting-edge consumer electronics to groundbreaking enterprise solutions.
