Blattner, the Minnesota contractor that says it has built a fifth of US utility scale wind, solar, and storage capacity, is putting $75 million behind Built Robotics' autonomous pile drivers and excavators to scale solar site construction across its pipeline.
The data centers powering AI are hungry for electricity, and the construction industry is racing to keep up. The same category of automation that made the hyperscale buildout possible is now being scaled to build the solar farms meant to feed it: AI-guided heavy machinery.
Blattner, the Avon, Minn.-based contractor that says it has installed more than a fifth of US utility-scale wind, solar, and storage capacity, is putting $75 million behind that bet. The contract, announced jointly with San Francisco-based construction-robotics startup Built Robotics, expands a partnership that has already deployed autonomous pile drivers, dozers, and excavators across seven utility-scale solar projects totaling more than 1 gigawatt of capacity.
The framing from both companies is workforce augmentation, not replacement. Brandon Bruski, Blattner's senior vice president for solar, cast the deal as a response to two pressures at once: worker safety on remote, fast-tracked job sites, and the need to build faster than conventional crews can be hired and trained.
The new contract formalizes what was first announced in September 2025 as a safety-focused pilot and turns it into a pipeline-scale deployment. Built Robotics' CEO Noah Ready-Campbell has argued that autonomous construction equipment, the marketing category vendors call "physical AI," can compress build times on utility-scale solar by removing the labor bottleneck. Trade press coverage of the partnership has been largely limited to the parties' own announcements since the original launch.
A second signal is harder to verify from the announcement alone. Business Insider reported this month that Built Robotics' autonomous solar machines are being deployed on a site tied to Meta's Hyperion data center, evidence that the same equipment is showing up at the intersection of the AI buildout and the power buildout meant to feed it. The companies have not confirmed a direct business relationship with Meta or any other hyperscaler; the macro pull, not a single named customer, is what the contract is built around.
What to watch next: whether the autonomous equipment can move from a seven-site, 1-gigawatt track record to multi-gigawatt pipeline throughput. The on-site autonomy piece does not yet have a comparable track record at this scale.