In the heart of Traverse City, a place better known for cherries than kilowatts, Takanock is quietly orchestrating one of the most audacious moves in modern infrastructure. And when I say quietly, I mean the kind of stealth that doesn’t need headlines because it’s already three steps ahead. Today, that silence just got $500 million louder.
Let’s break it down. Founded in 2023 by Kenneth Davies, the architect of Google Energy and the person who rewired Microsoft’s renewable energy strategy, Takanock isn’t just building infrastructure. It’s building urgency solutions for a market addicted to digital growth and allergic to waiting on power. This round, a seismic $500 million capital commitment, is backed by ArcLight Capital Partners and DigitalBridge Group. When firms like that go all-in, it’s not a bet, it’s a signal flare for the entire data center ecosystem.
Takanock’s model is razor-sharp: develop critical digital and power sites in Tier I and Tier II markets, prep them to shovel-ready, then pass the baton to the data center operators. But here’s the real flex, they’re not waiting on grid upgrades. They’re engineering around the mess. Their patent-pending utility yard doesn’t just solve a problem, it makes the grid’s limitations irrelevant. Dual-fuel resiliency. No diesel crutches. Five-nines reliability. And forget about those diesel-belching backups, their environmental tech keeps emissions in check and water usage light.
They’ve got active projects rolling in Northern Virginia (Project Tallmadge, two 1M+ sq ft buildings in Strasburg) and Phoenix, with more queued in Indiana’s Hobart Campus in Goshen. And don’t sleep on the team either, Emily Davies (VP Ops & Treasurer), Mike Carite (CFO), Camden Brown (VP Commercial Strategy), Adam Smith (General Counsel), and senior leadership like Joel Zemanek, Jesse Schnitker, Jacob Paul, and Tony Burley are stacking wins while most folks are still playing buzzword bingo.
Props to Houlihan Lokey for threading the needle on the advisory side. And respect to the pre-seed believers at Michigan Rise Pre-Seed Fund III, who saw the spark early. But make no mistake, this isn’t about early bets or late-stage check sizes. It’s about power, literal, commercial, and narrative.
What Takanock is building isn’t just infrastructure. It’s escape velocity for an industry trapped by its own growth curve. They aren’t waiting for the grid to catch up. They are the catch-up.
You can call it power infrastructure if you want. I call it kinetic strategy, locked and loaded by a founder who’s spent his career rerouting what’s possible. This isn’t Traverse City quaint. This is Traverse City quantum. And with $500 million in capital, Takanock’s no longer just preparing for the future, they’re dragging it to the present.
