Google signed a 396 megawatt power purchase agreement with Fervo Energy on September 1, 2026, the largest enhanced geothermal systems deal ever recorded, according to a report published by Avanza Energy. The contract includes an option to grow toward nearly 1 gigawatt by June 2030. That single agreement represents roughly 10% of America's entire installed geothermal power fleet, the report finds.
This marks Google's fourth disclosed geothermal commitment in three years: a 3.5 MW pilot in 2023, a 115 MW deal in Nevada in 2024, up to 150 MW from Ormat in February 2026, and now this 396 MW contract. If Google exercises every option, its total disclosed geothermal portfolio climbs toward 1.26 GW. The announcement sent Fervo's stock up 23% in a single trading session. America's installed geothermal power fleet currently stands at roughly 3.97 GW of nameplate capacity across 99 plants, with California and Nevada accounting for more than 90% of it. The US Department of Energy's commercial-liftoff scenario targets 2–5 GW of enhanced geothermal deployed across four to six states by 2030, with an aggressive case of 8–10 GW and a longer-dated projection of 90 GW of total US geothermal capacity by 2050. Wood Mackenzie projects US data center capacity growing from roughly 24 GW to 110 GW between 2026 and 2030, representing 68% of all US load growth in that window, and tracks more than $2 billion raised by next-generation geothermal companies since 2019.
Fervo priced at $27.00 a share on Nasdaq in May under the ticker FRVO, the largest clean energy IPO on record, reaching a roughly $10.2 billion valuation after a 33% first-day pop, the report notes. That valuation was built almost entirely on backlog and hyperscaler validation rather than current profitability—Fervo hadn't booked a full quarter of revenue at the time. The report describes Meta as running a "visibly different playbook," splitting roughly 300 MW across two earlier-stage providers: 150 MW with Sage Geosystems in Texas and 150 MW with XGS Energy in New Mexico, both sitting materially earlier in de-risking than Fervo's Cape Station project.
The report explains that Google's geothermal build-out follows a consistent template: the company arrives as anchor tenant, underwrites a nascent technology's learning curve with a long-dated offtake commitment, and absorbs the early, expensive supply of a resource that's scarce today but improving on a visible cost curve. The tradeoff is a higher price today for priority access tomorrow. Cape Station's advantage stack combines geologic data from a decade of federal research at Utah FORGE, existing transmission, an adjacent operating hydrothermal plant at Blundell, and federal approval to build to a full 2 GW—no other prospective US enhanced geothermal site currently combines all four, the report states. That combination, not the drilling technology itself, is why Google's power purchase agreement is better read as evidence of what a hyperscaler will pay to be first in line, not evidence that the line has gotten any shorter.