Google Signs the Largest Enhanced Geothermal Power Deal Ever for a Utah Data Center

Google has agreed to buy 396 megawatts of electricity from Fervo Energy’s Cape Station geothermal project in Utah, the largest enhanced geothermal power purchase agreement signed to date. The deal, announced Tuesday, September 1, is built to help power a planned Google data center in the state and gives Google an option to more than double its commitment to nearly 1 gigawatt by June 2030.

What Google and Fervo agreed to

Under the power purchase agreement (PPA), Fervo will supply Google with 396 MW from an expansion of its Cape Station enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) project in Beaver County, Utah, which is expected to come online in 2028. Fervo has also offered Google an option, exercisable through June 2030, to buy an additional roughly 600 MW, bringing the total commitment to nearly 1 GW.

Google says the power is intended as a “foundational building block” for a potential new data center in Utah, though the company cautions that final construction plans still depend on engineering feasibility, state and local approvals, and commercial conditions, according to Fervo’s own announcement. The 396 MW figure surpasses the previous record for the technology, a 320 MW PPA Fervo signed with Southern California Edison in 2024.

Fervo says the arrangement “unlocks new, around-the-clock electricity capacity at no cost to existing ratepayers,” and ties the new capacity to Utah’s SB132, a state law that, subject to regulatory approval, is expected to give Fervo and Google the option to contract power directly to the data center rather than routing it entirely through the regional grid, according to ThinkGeoEnergy.

Why Google is buying geothermal instead of just building more gas plants

The deal lands as Google and other hyperscalers scramble for new sources of electricity to feed AI data centers, and it arrives with a specific complication in the background. Google is separately partnering with data center developer Crusoe on a Texas campus called Goodnight that includes an on-site natural gas plant permitted for roughly 933 MW, a project that Axios reported in April could complicate Google’s pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. Google has said it has not signed a power purchase agreement for that gas plant itself, and how much of the campus’s power the company will ultimately draw from it remains unresolved. Geothermal power runs around the clock like a gas plant does, without the emissions, which is part of why Google keeps investing in Fervo even as it also weighs natural gas elsewhere. Amazon’s own gas-fired data center buildout in Texas and SoftBank’s gas-plant-backed data center in Ohio show the same pressure playing out at other hyperscalers: AI power demand is large and immediate enough that hyperscalers are pursuing clean and fossil sources at once, not one instead of the other.

Fervo’s CEO framed the Utah deal as proof that the underlying technology has matured past the demonstration stage. “This agreement reinforces that EGS is ready to power the next generation of computing infrastructure,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo’s CEO and co-founder, in the company’s announcement. “As demand for reliable electricity grows, customers like Google need energy resources that can be deployed at scale, operate around the clock, and deliver where power is needed. This new PPA is part of our repeatable commercial model that enables us to meet customer needs and directly deliver clean, firm power to large electricity users.”

Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy, described the Utah project in similarly ambitious terms: “The next chapter of advanced power generation technology is being written in Utah. This project will drive meaningful economic benefit to the local community and help catalyze long-term energy cost reductions by making enhanced geothermal more affordable and accessible.”

A five-year relationship, not a first date

Tuesday’s PPA is the latest step in a partnership that goes back to 2023, when Fervo’s first commercial project, Project Red in Nevada, came online and began delivering power to the local grid, including to Google’s Nevada data centers. In June 2024, Fervo signed a 115 MW PPA with Google and NV Energy that helped pioneer Nevada’s Clean Transition Tariff, a mechanism that let Google bring more geothermal power onto the grid without shifting the cost onto other ratepayers. Late last year, Google also became an equity investor in Fervo, participating in the company’s $462 million Series E round, its last private funding round before Fervo went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker FRVO in May 2026, per ThinkGeoEnergy’s reporting.

News of the new agreement pushed Fervo’s stock up roughly 30 percent the day it was announced, before traders gave back some of those gains the following day, TechCrunch reported.

How much more geothermal Cape Station could deliver

Cape Station is built around what Fervo calls GeoBlocks: standardized, repeatable 50 MW production units designed to bring costs down the way modular construction does in other industries. The site’s initial phase was 100 MW, and Fervo is currently permitted to develop up to 2 GW there overall. But Fervo’s own numbers suggest that ceiling may be conservative. Sarah Jewett, the company’s senior vice president of strategy, told TechCrunch in May that an independent, third-party engineering assessment found Cape Station holds enough underground heat to generate roughly twice its permitted capacity, or around 4 GW, which would by itself roughly double the total geothermal generating capacity currently installed in the United States.

That headroom exists because Fervo uses enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), which pump fluid through engineered fractures in hot dry rock rather than relying on naturally occurring steam or hydrothermal reservoirs the way conventional geothermal plants do. The technique, borrowed from oil-and-gas horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, lets developers tap heat in far more locations than traditional geothermal ever could. TechCrunch cited a recent Department of Energy-linked geothermal market assessment estimating that EGS techniques could ultimately unlock as much as 57 terawatts of generating potential across the country, a figure that dwarfs the roughly 1.3 terawatts of total utility-scale electricity generating capacity installed in the US today, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Why it matters

For enterprise and infrastructure buyers watching the AI power crunch, the Fervo deal is a data point in a much larger story: hyperscalers are no longer treating power procurement as background logistics. Google has now stacked multiple gigawatts of committed capacity behind a single geothermal developer over five years, using equity investment, offtake contracts, and now a record-setting PPA to lock in supply years before the underlying wells are even drilled. Whether Cape Station hits Fervo’s more optimistic capacity estimates will say a lot about how much of the next decade’s AI buildout can run on firm, around-the-clock clean power instead of the gas turbines hyperscalers keep signing up in parallel.