Energy efficiency: Abbott (left) and Pichai at the Google event on Nov 14, 2025, in Texas. Google emphasised its commitment to bringing new energy resources onto the grid, and paying for costs associated with its operations. — AFP
NEW YORK: Alphabet Inc’s Google plans to invest US$40bil in three new Texas data centres, part of an effort to add artificial intelligence (AI) computing power in a state that’s also drawn multibillion investments from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.
The investment will be made through 2027, Google said in a statement last Friday.
One data centre will be in Armstrong County, in the Texas panhandle, and two in Haskell County, a stretch of West Texas near Abilene.
One of the Haskell facilities will be co-located with a new solar and battery energy storage plant designed to ease the impact on the power grid.
“This investment will create thousands of jobs, provide skills training to college students and electrical apprentices, and accelerate energy affordability initiatives throughout Texas,” Alphabet chief executive officer Sundar Pichai said at an event near Dallas, where the company already has two data centre locations.
Texas has become a magnet for data centres as companies chase relatively cheap energy, vast tracts of land, and a state eager to host the infrastructure that’s powering the AI boom.
In outlining its latest plans, Google emphasised its commitment to “bringing new energy resources onto the grid, paying for costs associated with its operations, and supporting community energy efficiency initiatives.”
The company also said an electrical-training programme will boost the number of apprentices in Texas with funding from Google.org’s AI Opportunity Fund.
“Texas will be the centrepiece for AI data centres for Google,” governor Greg Abbott said at the event with Pichai.
“They can come here and operate here knowing that Texas moves at the speed of business.”
Texas has been gaining commitments from other companies as well.
Last week, Anthropic announced that it will invest US$50bil in data centres across the United States, including in New York and Texas, which has an abundance of land and relatively cheap energy.
The first data centre being built by the Stargate venture backed by ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Oracle Corp and Softbank Group Corp is in Abilene, Texas, and executives have telegraphed they’ll locate more in the state.
Meta Platforms Inc is also building a new 1GW data centre in Texas. For reference, 1GW of electricity can power 750,000 homes at any given moment.
Microsoft Corp inked a nearly US$10bil deal earlier this month for five years’ worth of computing capacity in Texas.
Fermi Inc – the real estate investment trust co-founded by former Texas governor Rick Perry, who also served as energy secretary during President Donald Trump’s first term – has plans to build four nuclear-power reactors in the state for a private data-centre campus.
With data centres expanding rapidly in Texas and across the United States, investors are showing signs of concern that vast spending plans will far outstrip the revenue that businesses can generate from the AI services powered by data centre buildouts.
Multibillion-dollar spending pledges are commonplace for Google, which is expected to drop more than US$90bil on capital expenditures this year alone – a significant rise from earlier estimates, with the bulk going into servers, custom chips and new data centres to support its AI and cloud businesses.
Just in the past two months, the company has announced a US$15bil plan to build an AI infrastructure hub in southern India; pledged to invest US$6.4bil in computing resources and operations in Germany; and committed to spending more than US$6.5bil in the United Kingdom to help spur more AI development.
The spending spree underscores the company’s ambition to scale globally and move beyond its legacy search advertising business, while testing how quickly the company can turn its heavy AI infrastructure spending into returns demanded by investors. — Bloomberg
