Google and Intersect Power break ground on Meitner Energy Center in Texas

Google and Intersect Power have officially broken ground on the Meitner Energy Center, a combined data center and renewable energy complex in the Texas Panhandle pairing over 1 gigawatt of wind, solar, and battery storage with a new Google computing facility. The project, located in Gray and Roberts Counties near Pampa, is designed to run entirely on clean energy from day one. Somewhere, a proof-of-work purist is nodding approvingly at a hash rate you can actually see.

What's actually being built. The Meitner Energy Center combines three types of clean energy — wind, solar, and battery storage — totaling more than 1 GW of capacity. The facility uses an air cooling system instead of traditional water-based cooling, eliminating water withdrawals entirely. Construction is expected to support up to 3,500 jobs through what's being called the Caprock Workforce Hub in adjacent Wheeler County. The project's name honors Lise Meitner, the Austrian-Swedish physicist who helped discover nuclear fission but was famously overlooked for the Nobel Prize — a familiar arc for anyone who has watched a solid protocol get rekt by a louder competitor.

The Google-Intersect relationship. This is the second major collaboration between the two. Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced its acquisition of Intersect Power on December 22, 2025, in a deal valued at $4.75 billion in cash plus debt assumption. That acquisition formalized a strategic partnership solidified in December 2024. The Meitner project itself has roots going back even further: Intersect originally proposed the concept in 2013, more than a decade before construction finally began. Patience, as they say, is a feature, not a bug.

Why this matters beyond Google. Most data centers are built first and then paired with renewable energy contracts after the fact. The co-location model Google and Intersect are deploying at Meitner flips that sequence. By building generation and consumption together, the facility avoids the transmission losses and grid congestion issues that plague remote renewable energy purchases. Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption jumped 34% in fiscal year 2022, largely driven by data center expansion. Google's decision to engineer water out of the equation at Meitner may signal a broader industry shift, especially as municipalities start pushing back against water-hungry tech facilities.