Today, enhanced geothermal developer Fervo Energy announced it has closed an oversubscribed $462 million Series E round. It was led by new investor B Capital, a venture capital firm founded in 2015 by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, with participation from investors including Google, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and CalSTRS, among others.
The new funding will support the expansion of its project pipeline. This includes the continued development of Cape Station, the company’s landmark 500 megawatt geothermal project in Utah, which is set to begin delivering 100 MW of firm power to the grid next year. It brings Fervo’s total capital raised since its 2017 launch to $1.5 billion.
The news extends a remarkable run for Fervo, which, in the span of two years, has raised several hundred million dollars in debt and equity — most recently in June, when it secured over $200 million in additional capital for Cape Station — and has emerged as the poster child of enhanced geothermal’s long-awaited moment in the spotlight, even making an appearance in The New Yorker.
The company, like many of its peers advancing novel forms of baseload power, owes much of this attention and money to hyperscalers’ push for artificial intelligence. As Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s senior VP of strategy, told Latitude Media this week, the “explosive growth in AI and data centers has really undeniably… created, meaningful and immense demand for [Fervo’s] product.”
Just five years ago, when Jewett first started at Fervo, the company was still unsure of when “the commercial market would actually meet us from a demand perspective,” she said, adding that the strategy at the time was focused on building small-scale projects at existing power facilities. But now, Fervo is about to bring online the first phase of what it says is the largest next-generation enhanced geothermal system in the world. “At this point in time, we could not build large-scale power fast enough.”
Hyperscalers have been key partners in more ways than one. Google is not only a new investor in the company’s latest funding round, but was also the offtaker of Fervo’s first commercial facility in Nevada, which came online in 2023. As Jewett recounted on The Green Blueprint podcast earlier this year, at the time, the ability to use the Google name while moving through the process of building and raising venture capital was “huge” for the company.
Google has also been instrumental in creating a new tariff, called the clean transition tariff, in collaboration with the Nevada utility NV Energy, that could be the key to the next phase of Fervo’s growth. The tariff, which was unveiled in June 2024 and was approved in Nevada one year later, allows large customers to forge a long-term agreement for power from emerging energy technologies, and access credits against the value of the resulting power — rather than passing the costs of commercializing the new technology to utility ratepayers.
As Fervo told Latitude Media in May, its collaboration with Google on such projects prompted outreach from “dozens” of other hyperscalers and artificial intelligence companies interested in clean firm power.
However, even as hyperscalers become increasingly intertwined with the power sector — which is also happening for legacy power companies, as further exemplified by NextEra’s recent announcement of new deals with Google and Meta — Jewett also stressed the importance of not relying solely on them as customers.
“It’s important to recognize that we are not overcapitalizing on AI as an industry theme,” she said. She added that while AI is a demand catalyst, trends like broader electrification and the onshoring of manufacturing give Fervo certainty that there will be a need for firm clean energy regardless of how the AI boom — or bubble — develops.
“There is a meaningful tension between continuing to provide power generation to grids and then providing power directly to AI consumers,” she said. “It’s a delicate balance that we are definitely having to engage in as an energy generator.”
A version of this story was published in the AI-Energy Nexus newsletter on December 10. Subscribe to get pieces like this — plus expert analysis, original reporting, and curated resources — in your inbox every Wednesday.
