Every Storage Company Is Pitching Data Centers. How Do You Stand Out?

The AI and energy storage opportunity is real, and so is the competition. As energy storage companies race to serve the same data center buyers, the challenge has shifted from getting in the room to being the company the buyer actually remembers.

Background: The demand is as significant as it appears

U.S. data center electricity consumption is growing at around 15% per year — more than four times faster than every other sector combined — and is expected to reach 134 gigawatts by 2030. These aren’t edge cases or optimistic projections from one bullish analyst. Projections from the IEA, DOE, Goldman Sachs, and Gartner are all roughly telling the same story: The grid isn’t ready for this reality.

At the individual facility level, the numbers are just as striking. Server racks (i.e., the physical units that house the computing hardware doing the actual AI processing) are seeing power demands evolve from today's average of around 15 kilowatts to 120+ kilowatts, with power profiles that spike and drop in sub-seconds. In fact, power disruptions are the leading cause of significant data center outages — and they’re costly. According to the Uptime Institute’s Annual Outages Analysis, 70% of data center outage incidents cost $100,000 or more. 25 percent costs more than $1 million. 

Battery storage is a legitimate solution to energy spikes and reliability challenges, and is increasingly being treated as a core control layer for AI-heavy power systems. The commercial case is clear. Which is exactly why every storage company in America is currently trying to sell into it.

The buyer's reality: every vendor looks the same.

Data center operations, facilities, and energy procurement teams are constantly being approached by storage developers, integrators, EPCs, and everyone who added "data center solutions" to their website in the last eighteen months.

While these buyers are sophisticated, they’re being asked to evaluate multi-decade power infrastructure solutions at a speed their procurement processes weren’t designed for. What’s more, they’re vetting a vendor landscape that looks largely identical from the outside. For vendors who want to stand out from the crowd, the opportunity lies in smarter positioning and value-led messaging that addresses buyer concerns head-on.

Four ways to stand out to data center decision-makers 

We work with energy storage companies that are navigating this dynamic and looking to sharpen how they show up to data center buyers. Here’s how we recommend cutting through. 

1. Speak uptime, not energy

   
   

This buyer cares about electricity, but uptime and guaranteed compute are the real mission. Each hour of downtime isn’t just an energy cost. It’s a broken Service Level Agreement, a delayed AI training run, a customer credit, and a headline risk.

The storage companies winning mindshare in this market are the ones who’ve made that translation visible in their own positioning. Not "our system provides X megawatt-hours of backup." Instead, "our system means your GPUs keep running even when the grid doesn’t."

That shift in framing can be the difference between selling into a facilities budget and selling into an infrastructure strategy.

2. Lead with Compute Per Megawatt

   
   

We’re seeing a shift in how serious data center operators are evaluating energy storage capabilities, and most storage companies haven’t yet updated their language to match.

A new measurement framework called Compute Per Megawatt (CPM) is beginning to take hold among hyperscalers and large colocation operators as the real unit of value for behind-the-meter storage. Storage companies that understand this and bring it into their messaging are operating on a different level than the ones still leading with megawatt-hours and grid revenue.

The underlying problem CPM solves is worth digging into because it's the one your messaging should be tailored towards. That is: AI workloads create unpredictable power spikes. Without a buffer, a data center's grid connection has to be sized for worst-case peak demand, which utilities price punitively or won't approve at scale. The result: the installed compute sits idle, not because of hardware but because of power. Storage removes that constraint. 

Storage companies that make this messaging shift stop sounding like energy vendors and start sounding like infrastructure partners. In this market, that’s a much more compelling place to be.

3. Own the interconnection wait time conversation publicly

   
   

There’s another problem worth addressing directly, and it’s the one keeping more infrastructure leads awake at night than almost anything else.

Grid connection timelines have stretched from under two years in 2008 to nearly five years today — and in major data center markets, it can be even worse. In Northern Virginia, some proposed campuses are looking at grid connection timelines stretching to seven years. Google has publicly flagged the possibility of twelve-year transmission delays for certain new facilities.

For a hyperscaler trying to bring AI compute online in the next 18 to 36 months, that’s not an inconvenience. It’s a real constraint on their build strategy.

Storage has a real answer to this problem, but many companies are whispering it in sales conversations rather than owning it publicly. That story deserves a dedicated, detailed, honest piece of content with numbers, timelines, and honest caveats about where storage can and can’t help.

A buyer who finds that content before they’ve issued an RFP arrives educated and more trusting. 

4. Get a data center operator to say something on your behalf

   
   

Technical credibility travels differently when it’s validated by someone who has already placed the bet. According to a recent Almcorp study, 73 percent of B2B buyers trust peer recommendations during the purchasing process. This matters especially in a market where outages are costly and selecting the right energy solutions is critical. A peer who has deployed battery storage in a live data center environment and is willing to say so publicly is worth more than any white paper your marketing team will ever produce.

The formats that work here are specific. A co-authored piece in a trade publication like Data Center Knowledge or Uptime Institute Journal puts your deployment story in front of the exact audience you’re trying to reach, with the credibility of a third-party venue attached to it. A jointly presented session at a major industry event like DatacenterDynamics or Gartner IT Infrastructure gives your buyer a face and a name to attach to the claim. 

This is where twentytwo & brand comes in. We know this market, we know the publications that matter, and we know how to turn a deployment story into the kind of content that reaches the right buyer before they start their search.

The window is real, and so is the urgency

The data center power dilemma is creating significant commercial opportunities and competition in the energy storage sector. The companies that meet the moment and win will be the ones that stand out and resonate when a buyer, drowning in look-alike pitches, is deciding who gets a second look and who doesn't.

Want to sharpen your pitch and positioning? Get in touch: hello@twentytwoandbrand.com