MetroVolt and Data Centers, Honestly
MetroVolt is the burner in a data-center housing — a design study with four open gates, described without softening.
What MetroVolt is
MetroVolt is not a separate machine. It is the burner (a D-3He tandem-mirror generator) packaged for a specific customer: data centers. The same physics defines it as defines the Aegis housing — a 26.49 T plug, a 17 T throat, direct energy conversion, and a neutron fraction of 5.44%. The name reflects intended use, not a distinct technology.
Because MetroVolt is the burner, it inherits the burner's four honest gates. We restate them here rather than bury them, because a data-center operator evaluating this concept deserves the unvarnished picture.
The four gates, applied to MetroVolt
- Plug coil overstressed roughly 3–3.9x at the design bore — infeasible as specified
- Plug operating regime 166–830x beyond any existing device — not post-dictable today
- He-3 fuel demand ~400x domestic supply per commercial unit — gated on fuel that does not exist at terrestrial scale
- Availability 0.86–0.995 vs hyperscale Tier III 0.99982 — 30–100x short on downtime
Two of these bear directly on the data-center use case. The fuel gate means commercial-scale operation depends on a He-3 supply that would have to come from breeder breeding or lunar sources (see helium-3 supply and strategy). The availability gate means MetroVolt is not, today, a sole reliability source for a Tier III facility.
Why we publish this
It would be easy to present MetroVolt as a finished data-center solution. We do not, because the gates are real and because a customer misled about reliability or fuel would discover the truth in operation, not the brochure. Honesty here is also self-interest: trust earned by candor outlasts a sale won by overclaiming.
See Aegis and defense installations, honestly and data centers and firm power.