A 60-year-old geothermal company just became an AI infrastructure play

Ormat, a geothermal company founded six decades ago, has signed a power purchase agreement with Google for up to 150MW in Nevada and is running enhanced geothermal pilots with Sage Geosystems and SLB. Europe has the same demand problem and is meeting it with restraint rather than contracts.

A company that has been drilling for heat since the 1960s is now an artificial intelligence story. Ormat has agreed to supply Google with up to 150 megawatts of new geothermal capacity in Nevada, through the state utility and a tariff that lets the buyer pay a premium for emerging technology.

Until this year it had never sold directly to large power users at all. Its first data centre agreement, signed in January with Switch, covers about 13 megawatts over 20 years at a plant in western Nevada.

The Google contract is more than ten times that. The projects behind it are expected to come online between 2028 and 2030, with Nevada regulators due to approve the arrangement in the second half of this year.

What data centres are buying is continuity. Geothermal runs day and night regardless of weather, which is the quality that makes it worth more to a computing site than cheaper intermittent power.

Ormat operates about 1.85 gigawatts worldwide and is targeting 2.8 by 2028, using conventional plants and storage alone. It has historically added around 100 megawatts a year.

The bigger bet is enhanced geothermal, which borrows drilling and fracturing techniques from oil and gas to reach hotter rock. Ormat is running pilots with Sage Geosystems and the oil services group SLB, both expected online in late 2027, with individual projects potentially reaching 500 megawatts.

This is not a speculative balance sheet. Revenue reached $662.7mn in the first half of 2026, up 43%, with net profit of $71.2mn, and chief executive Doron Blachar says “all the stars are aligned exactly on time.”

The comparison that flatters him is Fervo Energy. The enhanced geothermal specialist listed in May at a $10bn valuation and is now worth about half that.

Europe has the same demand and a different answer. Denmark has paused grid connections because data centres are overwhelming the cleanest grid on the continent, and the EU has asked households to shift electricity use away from peak hours.

The resource is not the obstacle. Iceland runs on it, Italy has generated geothermal power since 1911, and the deep rock under Germany and the Netherlands is the subject of serious national programmes.

What Nevada has is a contract. Europe wants geothermal to replace natural gas, and while it works out how, the hyperscalers are signing 15-year agreements somewhere else.

Story by Alina Maria Stan

Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moment (show all) Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moments of discovery, shaping how teams find and adopt SaaS every day. Since 2020, she has led Tekpon’s brand voice, media strategy, and growth plays with a clear focus on human outcomes behind every metric. Before Tekpon, Alina followed curiosity across industries and countries. She was CEO of King Casino Bonus and led affiliate and brand strategy at Extremoo Media and Fable Media in Denmark, where she learned how to build partnerships that last. Early on, she sharpened her CRM and pricing instincts at K.H. ApS, always asking why customers choose what they choose. Her approach is rooted in more than a decade of international experience and two master’s degrees, one in Sustainable Consumption from the Technical University of Munich and one in Consumer Affairs Management from Aarhus University.