After suing an Oregon utility for not supplying enough power to its data centers, Amazon this week ironed out a potential workaround: The hyperscaler won the bankruptcy auction for one of the world’s biggest solar and energy assets, conveniently located in the same Oregon county where it has been struggling with capacity shortages.
Pine Gate Renewables, which filed for bankruptcy in November after more than a year of liquidity strain, is selling its shovel-ready Sunstone project, with 1.2 gigawatts of solar and 1.2 GW of storage. Amazon’s winning bid, which won court approval on Wednesday, was for $83 million.
It’s an unusual move for Amazon; the hyperscaler has almost exclusively secured energy via power purchase agreements in the past. If and when the sale goes through, Amazon will take direct ownership of the Oregon project, which has received all of its approvals but has not yet broken ground. The company is conducting the purchase by its special purpose vehicle Oregon Solar 1.
This is just the latest example of how the speed-to-power rush is transforming the hyperscaler energy strategy. Just a year or two ago, Big Tech companies were saying that they didn’t want to have to own and operate their own power. Now, however, their tune has changed.
Last month, Google acquired the energy and data center developer Intersect Power for $4.75 billion in cash. That acquisition notably does not include any of the company’s existing assets, but rather the company’s development capabilities. Caroline Golin, Google’s former global head of energy, said on a recent episode of Open Circuit that the hyperscaler was after the ability to claim grid-ready power where and when needed. It’s a capacity push, not necessarily a race for electrons alone.
In Oregon, Amazon is doing almost exactly the opposite: acquiring the project, but not the company. However, it’s a particularly valuable project for the company’s data center strategy, thanks to its geographic location and the timing. Amazon has been struggling with securing the power it needs from local utility PacifiCorp, going so far as to file a claim with the Oregon Public Utility Commission.
Ownership will allow the hyperscaler to better integrate the project’s storage assets — almost certainly more valuable than the solar generation for a company searching for capacity wherever it can get it — than would be possible with a traditional PPA for storage.
The project will be built in six phases, adding 200 megawatts to the grid at each step. Sunstone has already secured a staggered interconnection agreement for each phase with the local electric cooperative, and has several transmission service requests through the Bonneville Power Administration. Construction is currently scheduled to begin later this year, with the first phase expected to conclude by November 2027. However, building 1.2 GW of both solar and storage could take at least a decade to complete fully.
Founded in 2016, Pine Gate operated over 100 solar projects, or nearly 30 GW, in addition to its storage assets. In Oregon alone, at the time of its bankruptcy filing the company had a pipeline of 27 projects, or 2.9 GW.
The company had a complex capital structure designed for a highly liquid market: more than $7 billion in funded capital and less than $10 million in cash. But faced with challenges like regulatory and tax credit changes as well as rising interest rates, the company floundered.
Substantially all of Pine Gate’s assets are now for sale. The company maintains on its website that it has enough liquidity to continue operating in the meantime; existing lenders have committed up to $412 million in financing. (Sunstone’s smaller projects are going to auction via portfolio, but Sunstone’s size means that it is being treated as a standalone asset.)
Why Amazon wants Sunstone
The appeal of Sunstone is clear. The fact that the project is shovel-ready would allow Amazon to skip the utility and regulatory roadblocks typically involved in securing new capacity near its new Oregon data centers.
The project’s sheer size is undoubtedly a draw. Its 1.2 GW of storage capacity is comparable to the storage associated with Meta’s recent deal with TerraPower for nuclear power. And there’s potentially an opportunity for Amazon to convert segments to behind-the-meter power to supply its growing Oregon footprint.
The hyperscaler is rapidly developing data centers in Morrow County, Oregon, where Sunstone will be located. Amazon currently has four data centers there, but has approval from the Port of Morrow to more than double that footprint.
This area initially became a data center hub because of the hydroelectric resources associated with the Columbia River. However, Amazon revealed in its October 2025 complaint against the utility PacifiCorp that there is nonetheless a capacity shortage.
“PacifiCorp breached its statutory obligations and contractual duties by failing to supply [Amazon Data Services] with the promised power,” the hyperscaler wrote in its initial complaint. This alleged breach concerns four campuses that Amazon has been developing since 2021: Specialized, Litespeed, Pivot, and Gray. The company alleges that PacifiCorp is supplying significantly less power than promised to Specialized, none at all to Litespeed, and “has refused to even complete its own standard contracting process” for Pivot and Gray.
Amazon is asking the Oregon Public Utilities Commission to either compel PacifiCorp to provide the agreed-to power, or else remove the sites from the utility’s exclusive service territory so Amazon can go elsewhere for power. The suit is still underway.
But in the meantime, Sunstone entered the picture. Both the timing — Pine Gate filed for bankruptcy just a week after Amazon filed with the Oregon PUC —- and location are strikingly well-suited to the hyperscaler’s purposes. And the project, even if it’s a decade away from being fully up and running, is shovel-ready.
The companies have until February 28 to close the deal, which will involve Amazon filing transfer applications with both federal and state regulators, and actually paying the $83 million.
