In a move that suggests even the world's largest tech companies are starting to feel the heat, Google has agreed to buy nearly half a gigawatt of geothermal electricity from Fervo Energy to power a planned data center in Utah. The power purchase agreement, announced Tuesday, commits Google to purchasing 396 megawatts from Fervo's Cape Station plant, which is expected to go online in 2028, with an option to buy an additional 600 megawatts through June 2030.

This deal comes as hyperscalers like Google scramble to find new sources of electricity, a quest that has become increasingly urgent since Google's April agreement to buy 933 megawatts of natural gas power from data center developer Crusoe in Texas - a move that made its net-zero-by-2030 goal seem more like a pipe dream. The Fervo deal could help Google power its AI ambitions without completely torching its climate promises.

Fervo is permitted to develop up to 2 gigawatts of geothermal energy at Cape Station, but Sarah Jewett, Fervo's senior vice president of strategy, told TechCrunch in May that a third-party engineer believes the site could generate twice as much. If fully developed, those 4 gigawatts would roughly double the entire geothermal generating capacity in the U.S., according to a recent Department of Energy report. And thanks to enhanced geothermal technologies, the U.S. could theoretically generate up to 57 terawatts of electricity - enough to power the entire country and then some, if only we could figure out how to tap it all.

Fervo and Google's new deal deepens a relationship that spans more than five years, with Google having bought some of Fervo's first electrons and recently investing in its last funding round before the geothermal startup went public. Fervo's stock initially popped on its first trading day, then shed those gains and more - until news of the Google deal drove it up about 30% yesterday, before traders decided to take some profits today. Ah, the stock market: always a reliable source of drama.