Google Boosts "Net-Zero" By, Uh . . . Powering TX AI Site With Gas Plant That Will Emit More CO2 Than San Francisco

Google’s plan for a partnership with a natural gas power plant that could provide energy for one of its datacenters in Texas was unearthed by new research and confirmed by the company. The move is part of an ongoing about-face for the tech giant, which once pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030 and has long been seen as a pioneer in clean energy.

The gas power plant is slated to be built in Armstrong county, a sparsely populated area in the Texas panhandle. According to a report by the research organization Cleanview, the project is being led by Crusoe Energy, which partnered with Google to develop the datacenter campus known as “Goodnight”, named after a nearby town. Crusoe filed for a permit in January to build the 933-megawatt power plant on the site of the Goodnight campus, which showed the facility would operate off the grid and provide energy to at least two buildings on the campus, according to Cleanview.

Satellite images commissioned by Cleanview confirm construction is well under way.According to Crusoe’s 465-page permit application, the power plant would emit as much as 4.5m tons of carbon dioxide, a primary driver of the climate crisis, per year. For comparison, the entire city of San Francisco emits about 4m tons of carbon dioxide annually.

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The power plant in Texas is the third known gas facility that Google has become involved in over the past few months. In October, the company announced an agreement to buy power from a gas plant in Illinois, and last month Flatwater Free Press obtained documents showing that Google is exploring another huge gas project in Nebraska. Google says its focus is still carbon-free energy and that it does not see using natural gas as a departure from its climate goals. The company has stated that it is moving from a strategy of buying carbon credits to one of building the grid. Asked by Axios last week at an energy conference in Houston about how natural gas jives with the company’s clean energy goals and overall strategy, Google’s head of advanced energy, Michael Terrell, said: “We don’t have anything to say on that.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/02/google-ai-datacenter