AI's next bottleneck is power. That's why I left the creator economy to build a data center startup.

Patrice Becker (left) and Leonhard Soenke (right) founded a creator economy startup in 2021 — and recently pivoted to energy and data centers.Courtesy of TARLeonhard Soenke founded a creator economy startup called Throne. Now, he's working on data centers.

After leaving New York for San Francisco, he and his cofounder wanted to tackle a new problem.The new company, TAR, is focused on energy efficiency in data centers.Leonhard Soenke cofounded Throne, a creator economy startup, in 2021 to help influencers create wishlists where fans could buy and send them gifts.

Five years later, Soenke and his cofounder Patrice Becker are setting out on a new venture. It's not in the creator economy. Instead, it's in the data center business.

TAR, which stands for Transformative American Resources, is a new energy startup aiming to make data center power more efficient. Soenke told Business Insider that TAR recently raised a $27 million seed round at a $500 million valuation from an undisclosed strategic investor.From the outside, influencers and AI data centers seem like two different worlds.

However, Soenke says there are transferable skills between the two. While I caught up with Soenke about his new endeavor, I noticed he was wearing a nearly identical gray Patagonia quarter-zip to the one he had while at Throne, now with the TAR logo embroidered on the chest."Our attitude is if ain't broke, don't fix it," he told me.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Soenke. It's been edited for length and clarity.Patrice, my cofounder, and I met in university.

We founded our first company, sold that, and then we founded Throne.Sometime through the summer of last year, we were speaking about the need to get away from running something that's very stable. We're very, I would say, spiky personalities.

We spent a while in the creator economy. We got partnerships with major vendors, work closely with Amazon — it had really grown to a large org.The creator economy has matured a lot.