Google didn't go looking for a better chip or a bigger model this time. It went looking for power that never stops, and found it in a company that has been drilling for heat since the 1960s.
Ormat agreed in February to supply Google with up to 150 megawatts of new geothermal capacity in Nevada, through NV Energy and its Clean Transition Tariff, a program that lets large buyers pay a premium for emerging clean-firm technology. Until this year, Ormat had never sold power directly to a large data center.
From Drilling for Heat to Powering the Cloud
The company's first data center agreement came in January, a much smaller deal with Switch covering about 13 megawatts over 20 years at a plant in western Nevada. The Google contract is more than ten times that size.
The projects behind the deal are expected online between 2028 and 2030, with Nevada regulators due to approve the arrangement in the second half of this year. The portfolio structure means the contract term begins once the first project reaches commercial operation and runs 15 years past the last one.
What Google is actually buying is continuity. Geothermal runs day and night regardless of weather, the exact quality that makes it worth a premium to a computing site that can't tolerate intermittent power the way a residential grid can.
What Continuity Is Worth
Ormat currently operates about 1.85 gigawatts worldwide and is targeting 2.6 to 2.8 gigawatts by 2028 using conventional plants and storage alone, a faster pace than its historical rate of roughly 100 megawatts added per year.
The financials back up the growth story. Revenue reached $662.7 million in the first half of 2026, up 43%, with net profit of $71.2 million.
"All the stars are aligned exactly on time," said Doron Blachar, Ormat's chief executive.
The Bigger Bet: Enhanced Geothermal
Ormat's larger ambition goes beyond its existing plants. The company is running enhanced geothermal pilots with Sage Geosystems and oil services firm SLB, borrowing drilling and fracturing techniques from oil and gas to reach hotter rock than conventional geothermal can access.
Both pilots are expected online in late 2027, with individual projects potentially reaching 500 megawatts.
That comparison carries some risk too. Fervo Energy, the enhanced geothermal specialist most often compared to Ormat's ambitions, listed in May at a $10 billion valuation and is now worth roughly half that.
Why Europe Is Choosing Restraint Instead
Europe faces the identical demand problem with a completely different response.
Denmark's grid operator paused new large-load connection agreements in March after requests reached roughly 60 gigawatts against a peak national demand of just 7 gigawatts, with data centers accounting for a large share of that queue. The European Union has separately asked households to shift electricity use away from peak hours.
The resource itself isn't Europe's problem. Iceland already runs largely on geothermal power, Italy has generated it since 1911, and Germany and the Netherlands both have active national programs studying the deep rock beneath them.
What Nevada has that Europe doesn't yet is a signed contract. While European regulators work through how geothermal might eventually replace natural gas at scale, American hyperscalers are locking in 15-year agreements now.
What This Means for Miami
This is the same underlying problem MAIN covered with Miami-based Exowatt, whose entire business is betting that AI data centers will pay a premium for power that doesn't wait on grid connection queues. Ormat is proving the same thesis at a much larger scale, with a legacy energy company pivoting toward AI demand rather than a venture-backed startup building from scratch.
For Miami's energy and infrastructure investors, the contrast between Nevada's contract-driven approach and Denmark's connection freeze is a clean real-world test of two different responses to the same bottleneck.
One path is producing signed 15-year deals. The other is producing moratoriums. Which model AI infrastructure ultimately follows in the US, permissive contracting or the kind of grid-capacity reckoning already forcing pauses in parts of Europe, is a genuine open question worth watching alongside the community backlash MAIN has already reported building against data centers domestically.