VivoPower PLC (NASDAQ:VIVO, FRA:51J) has appointed Porter Harris, a former SpaceX battery engineer, to its Advisory Council to bolster the company's AI data center power, battery storage, and thermal management strategy.
Harris spent more than two decades in high-performance battery engineering and served as lead battery responsible engineer at SpaceX, where his team developed battery systems for the Falcon 9 rocket, Cargo Dragon, and the human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft. He is currently founder and managing partner of Aeonix Studio, a Pasadena, California-based research laboratory and venture studio focused on advanced physical sciences and frontier energy systems.
VivoPower, a B Corp-certified developer and owner of powered land and data center infrastructure for AI compute applications, is scaling its sovereign AI data center platform across the Nordics, the Middle East, and Western Europe. The company operates a 41.5 MW site at Mo i Rana in Norway, has a further 40 MW under development, and holds a 300 MW pipeline in Finland.
“As VivoPower accelerates the build-out of its AI data center campuses in its focus markets, it is imperative that our energy systems are best of breed, encompassing behind-the-meter energy storage, demand-response, and thermal-integration requirements,” CEO Kevin Chin said in a statement.
“Porter's first-principles engineering perspective and his network across the global power engineering and energy storage ecosystems will be a significant advantage. His appointment further strengthens the depth of technical leadership on our Advisory Council and signals our long-term commitment to operational excellence as we scale."
Harris said the critical bottleneck in AI infrastructure is the integrated stack of power, thermal management, and behind-the-meter storage that determines whether a data center can deliver reliable, low-latency compute at scale. “The engineering discipline required to put humans in orbit is directly applicable, and so is the rigor required to design systems whose performance must hold across a 20-year+ operating life. I look forward to bringing both to VivoPower across the AI infrastructure assets and Tembo.”
Harris began his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on high-voltage pulsed power systems. He holds 22 US patents in high-voltage energy systems and lithium-ion battery design.