Amp has closed $70 million in project debt financing led by San Francisco-based asset manager Galvanize to construct a new sortation facility and an organics processing system in Portsmouth, Virginia, the company announced this week. The package backs the next major phase of Amp's 20-year partnership with the Southeastern Public Service Authority (SPSA), signed in late 2025.

What is Amp building in Portsmouth?

The Denver-based AI-sortation developer says the Portsmouth complex is engineered to process more than 500,000 tons of municipal solid waste annually — roughly 1,400 tons per day — and divert at least half of that tonnage from landfill once operating at full scale. The project consists of:

• A second sortation facility designed to extract recyclables and organics from mixed MSW, expected to come online in early 2028
• An adjacent indirect-heating system that converts recovered organics into biochar for daily landfill cover, with potential construction and cement end-uses
• AI-powered cameras, robotics and pneumatic jets that identify plastics, metals, fiber and organics from raw waste streams

The build follows more than two years of operating experience at Amp's flagship Portsmouth plant, where the company says it has validated commercial-scale sorting of unseparated MSW — a feedstock most conventional MRFs reject because it depends on household and commercial source separation.

Why did Galvanize anchor the financing?

Galvanize, a global credit and capital solutions investor, structured the debt as a project financing tied to the contracted MSW volumes under the SPSA agreement. Suresh Vasan, a partner in Galvanize's credit and capital solutions group, framed the deal as a test case for financing waste infrastructure at scale.

"Waste is a massive, under-modernized infrastructure market, and AMP is changing its economics," Vasan said. "The combination of proven AI-powered technology, long-term contracted demand and measurable economic and environmental benefits makes this an especially compelling infrastructure investment. This financing provides a model for deploying capital at scale to help communities lower costs, extend landfill life and recover value from material that would otherwise be discarded."

Clean Energy Counsel LLP advised Amp; Sidley Austin LLP advised Galvanize.

What changes for SPSA's 1.2 million residents?

SPSA serves eight member communities in southeastern Virginia. Amp and the authority have publicly projected that the combined system will extend the life of the regional landfill into the next century and lower long-term disposal costs. The biochar stream is also tied to a separate commercial arrangement: Amp's agreement with Google to remove 200,000 metric tons of CO2e by 2030, which biochar production is intended to support through verified carbon removal credits.

Mary Macpherson, senior vice president of finance at Amp, positioned the financing as a transition from pilot technology to deployable infrastructure.

"We've shown that this model works at commercial scale, and this financing demonstrates that we can pair our technology with long-term project capital to accelerate deployment," Macpherson said. "Galvanize's investment is an important validation that AI-powered waste sorting has moved from novel technology to financeable infrastructure, creating a repeatable path for deploying AMP's systems with communities and waste operators across the country."

What happens next?

The near-term milestone is mechanical completion of the second sortation facility, which Amp has targeted for early 2028. Permitting, equipment installation, and commissioning of the indirect-heating organics line will determine whether the project hits the throughput benchmarks embedded in the SPSA contract and the project's debt service schedule. Biochar output will also feed into the 2030 carbon removal commitment to Google — a delivery deadline that will test whether the landfill-cover use case can scale into construction and cement markets.