Power
Rankine Sorbocharging
Fuel-specific efficiencies exceeding standalone cycle limits — proportional to available waste heat.
A sorbocharged power cycle designed around the AI factory.
Synterran is engineering an industrial symbiosis for AI infrastructure — compute today, clean power tomorrow, and durable carbon products on the horizon. From one thermodynamic cycle. Waste heat from the co-located compute load feeds back into the cycle. Carbon capture is built into cycle closure, not added downstream. At full scale, the architecture extends upstream — disaggregating hydrocarbons pre-combustion, where the molecule still has the free energy to rearrange itself into durable carbon and power.
Approach
Power, compute, and carbon as one thermodynamic system.
Most power systems reject waste heat. Most AI factories treat it as a cooling burden. And most carbon capture is bolted onto power plants as downstream cleanup. Synterran designs all three as a single system, so no “waste” leaves without doing work first.
The Synterran Cycle is an internal hydrocarbon combustion sorbocharged Rankine architecture that converts waste heat — from the cycle itself and the co-located load — into chemical potential, recovering latent and sensible energy that conventional cycles reject and resetting the cycle for the next power stroke.
Carbon
Capture in cycle closure
Residual CO₂ is captured as part of how the cycle closes — the same way water is “captured” in a steam turbine.
Compute
Fuel-to-token integration
Electricity becomes saleable compute; waste heat returns to the cycle.
The Synterran Cycle
System architecture.
Development
Built in stages. Each pays its way.
Synterran is a development-stage company based in Atlanta, operating AI compute infrastructure as part of its zeroth deployment. The next deployment debuts the Synterran Cycle — retrofitted onto an Allison 250 helicopter turbine that will A/B co-power our next few racks of compute. The first major milestone in power generation.
Deployment 0
Compute operations
64× A100 GPU cluster generating over a quarter-million in annualized revenue — real production workloads, real operational discipline.
Cycle development & IP
Architecture specification, component design, four provisional patent filings, and additional IP maintained as trade secrets.
Site, lab & team preparation
Facility, equipment, and team development for the Deployment 1 build program.
Deployment 1
1
2
3
Hardware provisioning & thermal integration
A rack-scale unit of liquid-cooled AI hardware on grid power, with waste-heat-driven desiccant enhancement bolted onto commodity cooling towers.
Self-generated power & inlet conditioning
Fully provisioned 8-rack compute node with Allison 250 turbines providing B-side power alongside the grid. Desiccant inlet air chilling delivers deeply chilled, dried air to the turbine through direct contact with waste-heat-driven sorbent infrastructure.
Cycle closure
Full Synterran Cycle integration including constitutive carbon capture at pilot scale. The cycle provides primary power to the compute node with the grid as backup.
Deployment 2+
Legacy gas turbine retrofit
Validated cycle performance applied to stranded and underutilized gas turbine infrastructure at scale.
HydroCarbon Forge development
Pre-combustion carbon valorization pathway. Concrete deployment plans under development.
Purpose-built SCGT
A gas turbine designed around the Synterran Cycle from the ground up, rather than retrofitted to an existing platform.
Founder
Brendan van der Es
I’m a physics guy with over a decade of deep technical work across a diverse set of domains, from refinery automation and real-time fraud models to enterprise-scale data and service platforms. Synterran applies the same integrative instinct to revenue-aligned industrial symbiosis.
LinkedIn →
Intellectual property
The moat.
Four provisional patents protect the cycle architecture, sorbent cooling systems, load-side thermal integration, and compute infrastructure design. Additional mechanisms are held as trade secrets until development begins. That coverage defines the recommissioning pathway for stranded gas turbine infrastructure — more economical than greenfield alternatives, with carbon sequestration built into cycle closure rather than bolted on downstream.
Invention areas
- A novel thermodynamic power cycle
- Sorbent-based cooling for high-density compute
- Modular, vertically integrated compute infrastructure
- Load-side thermal harvesting
Long view
From cycle closure to carbon materials.
Hydrocarbons are the feedstock of economical carbon sequestration.
The near-term architecture captures carbon as part of cycle closure. The long-horizon architecture goes further: the HydroCarbon Forge disaggregates hydrocarbon fuel before combustion, so carbon exits as durable construction materials while the remaining hydrogen-enriched energy drives the cycle. The two pathways are additive — in-cycle capture near-term, pre-combustion valorization at Forge scale. See the Forge →
At 250 GW, three thresholds converge: global-scale compute capacity, structural carbon output sufficient to reshape the construction materials industry, and combined carbon sequestration and material displacement at a scale commensurate with global annual emissions — under conservative assumptions, not by offset or pledge. That’s the target. Preferably in my lifetime.
Contact
Get in touch.
Engineers, research collaborators, and press.
Investors: Synterran is in investor conversations for the Deployment 1 pilot.