Data Center POST had the opportunity to connect with Freddie Sarhan, Chief Executive Officer of Sapphire Technologies, who founded the company in 2021 after incubating the business within Calnetix Technologies for three years.
He joined Calnetix in 2018, heading business development in the industrial, energy, and aviation sectors. Prior to that, he served as Vice President of the Americas for Praxair Surface Technologies, overseeing the company’s business across North and South America. Earlier in his career, he was Vice President of Customer Service at Capstone Turbine Corporation.
Freddie began his career at Rolls-Royce as a member of the Trent industrial gas turbine development team, building a strong technical foundation that continues to inform his leadership today.
At Sapphire, Freddie is focused on advancing practical energy solutions that help customers generate clean power and improve the efficiency of their facilities. Under his leadership, Sapphire has recently expanded its presence in the data center market, where its turboexpander solutions create fast-to-deploy power and efficient cooling capacity.
Please share more about your background and how you came into your current position with Sapphire?
My background has been built across the industrial and energy sectors, with a strong emphasis on business development, operations, and scaling technology-driven businesses in ways that are both practical and customer-focused. Over the course of my career, I have had the opportunity to work across a range of markets, including energy, industrial systems, and aerospace-related applications, with a consistent focus on commercializing valuable technologies and building strong strategic partnerships.
What led me to found Sapphire was the opportunity to deploy a technology that addresses a clear and growing infrastructure need in a highly practical way. At Sapphire, we’ve developed a solution that recovers pressure energy that would otherwise be wasted and converts it into electricity and cooling. As market demand has evolved, particularly with the rapid expansion of AI and digital infrastructure, we recognized that our technology can play an important role in helping the data center sector manage its increasingly complex energy requirements. That combination of technical innovation and real-world applicability made the opportunity especially compelling to me.
What is Sapphire’s core mission?
At Sapphire, our mission is to recover otherwise wasted energy from gas infrastructure and convert it into monetized electricity and cooling. This is important to industry, and the data center sector in particular, as companies grapple with the challenges related to energy availability, operating efficiency, and speed to deployment.
Our technology enables customers to capture energy that already exists within upstream, midstream, and downstream gas infrastructure. High-pressure pipelines move gas across the world, but they are not equipped to recover pressure energy at the point of use. In data center applications, the recovery of this pressure energy enables operators to address two critical process needs simultaneously: generating baseload power and supplying efficient thermal management. By converting existing pressure drop into usable electricity and cooling, we provide a practical solution that improves site performance with no carbon footprint.
How would you describe the current state of the global digital infrastructure market in terms of challenges and opportunities for your business?
The digital infrastructure market is advancing rapidly, but many of the most pressing constraints are now infrastructure-based rather than computational. Operators are contending with limited grid availability, extended interconnection timelines, rising cooling demands, and increasing pressure to accelerate project delivery.
This environment underscores Sapphire’s product market fit. With our turboexpander platform, we are offering a practical, modular solution that can supply both power and cooling with very short equipment lead times. Turboexpander projects can be sited at the intersection of natural gas infrastructure and fiber access, creating thousands of deployment locations in the United States alone. For many operators, particularly those supporting edge, urban, and emerging AI deployments, speed is as important as scale. We see a market increasingly shaped by grid constraints, cooling requirements, and compressed project timelines, all of which drive demand for integrated solutions that can be deployed quickly and deliver immediate operational value.
Who do you see as your primary customer base today, and how has that evolved over the past few years?
Historically, Sapphire’s primary customer base has been in the natural gas value chain, including those exploration and production companies drilling new natural gas wells, pipeline companies operating both transmission and distribution assets, LNG facility operators, and other industrial facilities that have local power demand. This remains an important part of the business.
The data center sector has become a major area of focus over the past year. As demand for fast, behind-the-meter power solutions has accelerated, we’ve seen growing interest from data center developers, operators, and infrastructure partners seeking new ways to improve energy availability and reduce cooling load. As a result, the company’s customer base has evolved to include digital infrastructure stakeholders.
What are the top priorities or concerns you hear from your customers, and how is your company addressing them?
The primary concerns we hear from customers center on speed to power and reliability. The market needs to know how quickly a prime mover can be brought online, with what reliability the solution operates, and how it will affect their capital planning and long-term operating costs.
Our equipment packages are modularly designed so that they can be deployed quickly and integrated into existing infrastructure within months of order. One of the key advantages of turboexpanders compared to traditional power generation equipment is their dual use. Turboexpansion creates highly efficient electricity production, and it also creates instantaneous fluid cooling which can be integrated into a data center’s thermal management system through a heat exchanger. This enables operators to reduce refrigeration load while supplementing site power, creating a meaningful impact on performance metrics like power usage effectiveness.
Customers are also highly focused on uptime and maintainability. The Sapphire FreeSpin® system was designed for the most demanding oil and gas applications. Mission-critical subsystems like magnetic bearings reduce maintenance and downtime and create long equipment life compared to conventional rotating equipment.
Are there emerging customer segments or industries that you see as growth areas for your business?
Yes. Data centers represent one of the clearest growth areas for Sapphire, particularly in edge computing and enterprise deployments that require power close to population centers or existing network hubs. The company is especially focused on projects where behind-the-meter generation and efficient cooling can materially improve the overall business case.
Beyond data centers, we continue to work to expand our offerings for the oil and gas sector. Many high-pressure natural gas wells have high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, requiring equipment specified for these assets to have corrosion-resistant components and designs. These assets represent a sizable market, and Sapphire is developing a product offering for the application.
How are you aligning Sapphire’s strategy to address sustainability and regulatory requirements in the coming years?
Sapphire’s product value proposition is built around a customers’ process efficiency and directly impacts sustainability metrics. By generating electricity without combustion and integrating the produced thermal cooling with existing facility processes, FreeSpin® improves efficiency and reduces emissions exposure without fundamentally changing existing operations.
From a regulatory standpoint, we believe solutions that make better use of existing infrastructure will remain highly relevant and create attractive investment opportunities. While requirements may evolve by region, the need to lower operating costs, reduce wasted energy, and improve overall site efficiency is not going away. In data centers, in particular, sustainability is increasingly tied to practical infrastructure decisions related to power, water, and cooling. We view this as a more comprehensive approach to site efficiency, one that considers power generation, cooling, and overall campus energy use together.
How is Sapphire fostering partnerships to create value for customers and enhance your competitive position?
Partnerships are central to Sapphire’s model because its technology sits at the intersection of several ecosystems. We work closely with gas infrastructure owners, data center developers, engineering teams, and electric utilities to identify sites where pressure energy recovery can create meaningful value.
In the data center market, this often requires coordination across multiple parties, including the gas company, the project developer, and the operator. Sapphire also works with strategic investors and industry partners that recognize the value of deploying energy solutions that are practical, modular, and fast to market. These partnerships help accelerate execution and bring more complete offerings to customers.
A recent example is Sapphire’s partnership with Anax Power to deploy an integrated power and cooling system for distributed data centers. Under the partnership, Sapphire is supplying its FreeSpin® In-line Turboexpander for a co-located data center project designed to convert excess pipeline pressure into electricity and cooling. Anax will build, own, and operate the system. The collaboration reflects how Sapphire works with partners to deliver scalable infrastructure more efficiently and help customers unlock new capacity more quickly.
What are Sapphire’s core products or services?
Sapphire’s core product is FreeSpin®, a turboexpander-generator that runs on pressure, consumes no water or fuel, and generates zero greenhouse gas emissions. Since 2021, it has been deployed throughout the energy sector to deliver reliable, clean generation.
Designed to the strictest requirements of the oil and gas industry, the turboexpander-generator contains a high-performance, high-speed permanent magnet generator with an integrated radial in-flow expansion turbine and low loss active magnetic bearings. The expansion turbine uses high-pressure gas to drive an electric generator and create a stream of cooled fluid that supplies heat exchange capacity to onsite operations.
FreeSpin® may be skid-mounted at the factory and is available in modules of 300-kilowatts electrical generation with 5 million BTU per hour cooling capacity. These systems enable infrastructure owners to rapidly add new power and cooling capacity, improve operational efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, and lower electricity costs.
What markets do you offer Sapphire’s solutions?
Sapphire offers its solutions globally to the gas infrastructure, utility, and data center sectors, and has supplied equipment for projects located in North America, Japan, Brazil, India, and Europe.
What long-term goals or initiatives are you most excited about, and how do you envision the industry evolving over the next decade?
What is most compelling is the growing recognition that energy infrastructure and digital infrastructure are no longer separate conversations. Over the next decade, the industry is likely to move toward far more integrated site design, where operators evaluate power, cooling, land, connectivity, and resiliency together from the outset.
For Sapphire, the long-term objective is to make pressure energy recovery a standard component of site efficiency evaluation and behind-the-meter power planning. We see a meaningful opportunity to support a new class of data center deployments, particularly those that need to move quickly and operate efficiently in constrained environments. We believe that EPC companies and construction firms will adopt turboexpander systems into their standard drawing sets for natural gas-powered data center campuses.
What upcoming industry events will you be attending?
We are participating in several leading energy and digital infrastructure events this year, including Data Center World (exhibitor), Data Center Expo North America, 7×24 Exchange Spring Conference, Datacloud USA, Gastech (exhibitor), Yotta, OCP Summit, and DCD Virginia (exhibitor).
We hold active membership and participate with iMasons and AFCOM.
Is there anything else you would like our readers to know about your company and capabilities?
What differentiates Sapphire is that the company is not approaching the data center challenge from only one angle. Turboexpanders address two of the industry’s most significant infrastructure constraints at the same time: power and cooling. Sapphire’s technology is designed to work with existing gas infrastructure, recover energy that would otherwise be wasted, and convert that into practical site-level value.
We believe there is an important role for modular, fast-deployment solutions in the market. Not every opportunity is a gigawatt-scale campus. There is growing demand for smaller and mid-sized projects that require reliable power, improved efficiency, and a practical path to operation. This is where Sapphire offers a particularly compelling solution.
Where can our readers learn more about Sapphire Technologies?
For additional information, please visit our website, www.sapphiretechnologies.com, or contact the Sapphire Technologies team through the website contact page.
You can also learn more about our products and services through our resource library.
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About Sapphire Technologies
Sapphire Technologies develops and manufactures modular power generation and cooling solutions that convert pressure energy from gas infrastructure into usable electricity and cooling. Since 2021, Sapphire’s FreeSpin® In-line Turboexpanders have been deployed across the energy sector to deliver reliable, low-emissions power generation while recovering energy that would otherwise be wasted. Scalable from kilowatt- to megawatt-class installations, Sapphire’s systems help infrastructure owners quickly add power and cooling capacity, improve operational efficiency, lower electricity costs, reduce emissions, and create new revenue opportunities across data center, gas infrastructure, utility, industrial, and LNG applications. For more information, visit sapphiretechnologies.com.
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