Sunrun

Sunrun is the largest residential solar and battery-storage company in the United States, founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco. It designs, installs, and finances rooftop solar systems and home batteries — including Tesla Powerwall and its own storage — typically on a subscription model, and operates one of the country's biggest fleets of distributed home-energy systems. It is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker RUN.

For an AI Pro Playbook reader, Sunrun matters from the energy side of the AI story. As AI data centers strain the grid, Sunrun has turned its installed base of home batteries into a virtual power plant — software that aggregates hundreds of thousands of distributed batteries and dispatches them as on-demand grid capacity. In June 2026 it joined Tesla and Renew Home to offer more than 16 gigawatts of this flexible capacity to data centers and utilities — capacity that needs no new land, water, or hardware and can come online in months rather than years.

The AI in that story is the dispatch-and-forecasting intelligence behind the virtual power plant — machine learning that predicts demand and orchestrates a vast, distributed fleet in real time — not a frontier model. Sunrun is best understood as an enabler of the AI buildout rather than an AI developer: its role is to help power the data centers that AI runs on, from the distributed edge of the grid.