Google and Intersect are building a data center co-located with over a gigawatt of new energy generation in Texas. It is the first project the companies have announced since Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced the acquisition of Intersect for $4.75 billion in cash in late December.
The project, dubbed the Meitner Energy Center, is located in Gray and Roberts Counties. It features a data center of unspecified size, which will come online alongside wind, solar, and battery storage. The site will also include on-site gas, which will “ensure reliable operations” and meet a “minority share” of the site’s demand, according to the announcement.
The co-located power generation will be dedicated to the data center, and help “meet its demand while reducing the need for new power supply on the local grid.”
The data center will also use advanced air-cooling technology to limit its water consumption. That’s in line with the responsible stewardship practices about water use that Google publicized earlier this week, in an attempt to appease some of the mounting data center pushback in communities across the country.
This is the second site the companies are developing together; the first, also in Texas, involves a data center co-located with solar and storage, and was unveiled just a few weeks before the acquisition announcement.
The acquisition in December signaled a shift in hyperscalers’ relationship with the power sector: away from a distinction between customer and builder, and toward more vertical integration. Now, Google only took on Intersect’s development capabilities and not its operating assets at the time. But it provided the hyperscaler with the strategic flexibility to claim uncommitted power where and when they need it.
At the time, Caroline Golin, Google’s former global head of energy, noted on an episode of Open Circuit that while “five years ago [vertical integration] didn’t make sense… now it does, because there is no way to procure the option on power in this country unless you own it.”
That said, Google’s peers so far have not followed suit. Other hyperscalers have approached the need for control over power assets in different ways.
Rather than securing the development capabilities, Amazon has started acquiring either data centers in proximity to energy assets or, more recently, the energy assets themselves. In January, for example, after years of almost exclusively getting energy via power purchase agreements, it bought the shovel-ready Sunstone project in Oregon, with 1.2 GW of solar and 1.2 GW of storage. The project had been put up for auction when Pine Gate Renewables filed for bankruptcy in November 2025.
And in 2024, Amazon acquired a Pennsylvania data center campus from Talen Energy, in a deal that included a 10-year PPA for Talen to power the campus from the co-located Susquehanna nuclear power plant.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has mostly leveraged its capital to fund exceptionally large corporate offtake agreements. Most notably, in September 2024, it signed a $16-billion, 20-year PPA with Constellation to restart a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. And in March of this year, it signed a “letter of intent” to get nearly 1.4 GW from a gas-powered microgrid in West Virginia, in a deal that raised some eyebrows as the hyperscaler’s first off-grid gas commitment.
