Google plans to invest tens of billions of dollars to grow its digital infrastructure footprint in Texas by building three new data centers in the state and expanding two other campuses.
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The $40B Texas investment will be deployed through 2027, the company announced Friday. The spending will fund the development of three new data centers in Armstrong and Haskell counties, in addition to expanding Google’s existing data center complexes near Dallas in Ellis County.
This investment in the Lone Star State underscores the tech giant's accelerated build-out of its data centers and the fast-paced growth of the Texas data center market.
Two of the new data centers are slated for Haskell County, a rural stretch of north Texas midway between Fort Worth and Lubbock and just north of the high-profile Stargate data center backed by Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank in Abilene. Although no details were provided as to the specific locations or sizes of the planned facilities, one of the campuses will be colocated with a solar and battery storage power plant.
Google didn't unveil any specific details around its plans for a data center in Armstrong County, which sits directly southwest of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle.
CEO Sundar Pichai, flanked by fellow Google executives and a host of Texas lawmakers and federal officials, touted the new spending at a press conference Friday held outside the firm’s Midlothian data center, one of two Ellis County data center campuses slated for expansion under the plan.
Google began developing the Midlothian campus in 2018. The company also plans to expand its newer Ellis County campus in Red Oak, which it started building in 2023.
In addition to growing its data center footprint, Google said it is creating a new $30M energy impact fund “to scale and accelerate energy initiatives” in Texas. It has also pledged 6.2 gigawatts of new energy generation and capacity through power purchase agreements with energy developers in the state.
Texas has emerged as one of the fastest-growing regions for data center development largely because of the relative ease with which tech giants and other data center firms can bring new power generation online for large-scale campuses, either behind the meter or through partnerships with utilities. Such projects include the gas-powered Stargate, as well as a proposed 11 GW complex by startup Fermi America that aims to use nuclear energy.
Texas is home to 15% of all U.S. data center capacity, second only to Northern Virginia, according to DC Byte. Texas has more capacity planned or under construction than any other state, with as much as 16 GW slated to come online by 2030.
Google’s latest investment in the Lone Star State continues its escalating data center spending that has picked up steam over the past two months. The hyperscaler announced last month that it had sharply increased its anticipated capital expenditures this year to as much as $93B.
Since the beginning of October, Google’s infrastructure spending announcements include commitments to spend $9B on data centers in South Carolina, $4B in Arkansas, $6.4B in Germany, $5.8B in Belgium, and $15B in Andhra Pradesh, India.
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