The CFO charged with courting investors in a nascent asset class

Terawatt Infrastructure is on a quest to develop charging infrastructure for fleets of autonomous rideshare vehicles. One of the chief tasks of Sujoy Haldar, who joined Terawatt as CFO last summer, is securing enough equity and debt financing to power the organization’s buildout of a network of charging hubs, an infrastructure category that in a press release, the company called “still largely untapped.”

“Think of us as being in the very early stages of what will be a really large industry and asset class,” Haldar told CFO Brew. Autonomous ride-sharing companies have expanded from just a few cities to dozens, he said. To widen their reach and “operate at scale in these cities, they need to have access to charging infrastructure. And that’s where we come in.”

Indeed, autonomous ridesharing is on the rise. McKinsey estimates highly automated robotaxis will be available “at a large scale” globally by 2030. CNBC reported in December that Alphabet’s Waymo crossed 450,000 weekly paid rides.

In another report, McKinsey projected a $106 trillion need for infrastructure investment globally through 2040 for, along with traditional assets like roads and power grids, “the next generation of those assets”: charging stations, fiber-optic networks, and data centers.

Haldar recently spoke with CFO Brew about the message he takes to prospective investors and the role he plays in acquiring and developing the real estate for Terawatt’s charging hubs.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell me more about your role in raising the capital needed for Terawatt’s growth?

One of [my priorities] will be capital raising. This will take a lot of capital to go and acquire these core sites in different areas. The scale of capital is going to be a lot. We’re talking [about] investing $3 billion to $5 billion over the next few years, probably billions in the near term and trillions once everything moves to autonomous, which will likely happen over the next couple of decades. It’s a lot of capital, and in order to do that, we have to do that with both debt and equity. And so one of my key priorities is putting in the foundation work that allows us to raise capital more scalably.

That involves introducing Terawatt to the investor base out there, both on the debt side and the equity side, getting them excited about what we are doing, and also…working with all our customers and delivering on the contracts we have in the pipeline so that we can get these sites operational, and scaling from there.

What do prospective investors look for this early on in this particular asset class?

As we’re thinking about the various capital raises, we’ve had a lot of traction with the investor community generally, but my role is to be able to sell [our business model of acquiring and developing the land with power and zoning]. On the one hand, you’re telling the story about this being an extremely new asset class, but one that will be rapidly growing and will become the next big thing, in the same way that maybe data centers were 10 to 15 years ago. We’re very early in that, but it’s going to be a really big asset class. And then you layer in the fact that our business model actually gives them what they want, which is access to steady cash flows over an extended period of time, and the ability to own powered land in the middle of these large cities where that’s becoming more and more of a scarce resource. So it’s really sort of marrying up the narrative with the fundamentals of the business.

What is your involvement as CFO in acquiring and developing the real estate for charging sites?

At our core, we are an investment company. We are deploying large amounts of capital, and so we have some very tight processes that involve finance in terms of how we make decisions along the way. [We’re] going after these pieces of real estate that are very hard to find. They have to be perfect on location, access to power, etc., and so you want to be able to find them [but] you don’t want to overpay for them. So we have certain parameters under which we make decisions on, “How do we think about market comparables, and how does this property sit in that?” And then we spend a lot of time going through the risks of, “What would it take to bring the site online and how do we think about the cost of them?” Ultimately, we obviously want to be as efficient as we can with both our time and money, and there are times when the cost metrics just don’t pan out and we end up moving on from that site.

What are Terawatt’s expansion plans in terms of geography?

Early days for Terawatt was very much focused on California sites—think San Francisco and LA. But over the last year and a half or so, as our customers have expanded their operations and have indicated to us that they need sites in all other major cities, we’ve actually now got a portfolio that spans the country. We’ve got active searches in 30-plus markets across the US.