TL;DR
Google has partnered with Crusoe Energy on a 933-megawatt natural gas power plant in Texas to supply its AI datacenter campus. The facility would emit up to 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually. It is the third known gas project Google has become involved with in recent months, marking a clear shift from the company’s earlier carbon-free energy commitments.
What was discovered
Research organisation Cleanview uncovered the project through Crusoe Energy’s permit filings and satellite imagery. The gas plant is being built in Armstrong County in the Texas panhandle, on the site of Google’s datacenter campus codenamed “Goodnight.” Crusoe filed for the permit in January, and construction is already under way.
Google spokesperson Chrissy Moy did not deny the partnership but said the company does not have a contract in place for the Texas plant, suggesting negotiations are ongoing. She pointed to a separate wind farm project in the region with utility provider Serena Energy.
A pattern, not an outlier
This is not an isolated decision. In October, Google announced an agreement to buy power from a gas plant in Illinois. Last month, documents showed the company exploring a major gas project in Nebraska. Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are on similar trajectories — Meta is building a gas-powered facility in Louisiana, Amazon has multiple gigawatt-scale gas-powered datacenters, and Microsoft recently signed a deal with Chevron for a 2.5-gigawatt gas plant in west Texas.
The climate timeline
Google’s environmental commitments have evolved noticeably over six years. In 2020, the company set an ambitious goal to use carbon-free energy across all operations by 2030. By 2023, it had dropped operational carbon neutrality. In 2024, it reported a 48% rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 2019, driven by datacenter energy consumption. By 2025, concrete 2030 targets had been replaced with “climate moonshots” — a term Google itself uses for speculative projects that may or may not succeed.
Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, said he had previously considered Google the most committed hyperscaler to its climate goals. “But these projects suggest a major strategic pivot could be under way.”
Looking forward
The tension between AI infrastructure expansion and climate commitments is not going away. With all major cloud providers now turning to natural gas, the question has shifted from whether the industry will use fossil fuels to how much and for how long. Google’s framing of its goals as “ambition-based” rather than binding suggests the company has already decided which side of that tension wins.