Fervo Energy is looking to raise more than $1.3 billion in its initial public offering, which would value the enhanced geothermal company at $6.5 billion, according to a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today.
That’s more than double the $2 billion to $3 billion valuation that the company was reportedly seeking in January, when it first filed the confidential SEC paperwork preceding a public offering.
It is the IPO that the geothermal industry has been waiting for as a bellwether for the market potential of next-generation approaches, which have seen a surge of investment over the past couple of years. Such a high valuation speaks to the sector’s historic momentum — and places a spotlight on Fervo, which will become one of the first enhanced geothermal startups to rise to the standards and disclosures that public markets require.
This latest, official step in the company’s IPO comes five months after Fervo closed an oversubscribed $462-million Series E funding round, which had brought the total amount of capital raised by the company to nearly $1.5 billion.
When Fervo began its IPO preparations the following month, that funding round — which is often a bridge to the public markets in the venture world — led to reports that the company would target a valuation between $2 billion and $3 billion. At the time, Axios described that $3 billion figure as “lofty,” and suggested that the market was still unsure how to value a company like Fervo, with vast capital needs and a technology yet unproven at a large scale. But today, the company is seeking a valuation that’s more than twice that initial estimate. As forecasts of load demand across the country keep increasing, the explosion of AI data centers makes firm, carbon-free power more marketable and valuable than ever.
Fervo’s ability to cross the “bankability divide” and get traditionally risk-averse lenders to provide financing for its first-of-a-kind Cape Station project was also probably instrumental.
Cape Station is the 500-megawatt greenfield project that Fervo is developing in Utah, which is expected to deliver its first power “by late 2026,” according to the company’s latest SEC filing. The company has been laboring to make the project, which was first financed through corporate equity, ready for traditional project finance. And in March, Fervo finally announced it had raised $421 million in commercial project finance for the projects from investors such as RBC, Barclays, HSBC, and J.P. Morgan.
The financing underwrote the risk of a single project, and it was an important sign that institutional lenders have gotten comfortable with the repeatability and predictability of Fervo’s drilling technology, and with its project revenue model. Being non-dilutive, it was also kept off the company’s balance sheet, which had the benefit of protecting Fervo’s IPO valuation from any project-level delays or challenges.
Equally encouraging in backing such a large valuation are Fervo’s 658 MW of aggregated binding power purchase agreements with buyers including Southern California Edison and Shell across the company’s full portfolio, as revealed in the SEC filing. The PPAs represent over $7 billion in potential revenue backlog, according to Fervo.
The filing also details Fervo’s deepening ties with Google, a strategic partner since 2021 and an official investor since December 2025. Under a 3-gigawatt framework agreement, Google holds the right of first refusal on any newly developed capacity through March 2028.
