Google turns to natural gas to power AI datacenters, walking back climate pledges
Google is building a partnership with a natural gas power plant in Texas to supply energy for one of its datacenters, marking a sharp departure from the company's long-standing climate commitments. The 933-megawatt facility, discovered by research organization Cleanview, would emit as much as 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually-roughly equivalent to the entire city of San Francisco's yearly emissions.
The project, called the Goodnight campus, is being developed with Crusoe Energy in Armstrong County in the Texas panhandle. Crusoe filed for a permit in January, and satellite imagery shows construction is already underway. Google confirmed the partnership but said it does not yet have a contract in place for power from the plant.
This is the third known gas facility Google has involved itself with in recent months. In October, the company announced an agreement to buy power from a gas plant in Illinois. Last month, documents emerged showing Google is exploring another major gas project in Nebraska.
From carbon neutrality to "climate moonshots"
Google's shift on fossil fuels contradicts years of positioning itself as a climate leader. In 2020, the company set a net-zero emissions goal to use carbon-free energy across all operations by 2030. It invested heavily in wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear projects.
That commitment has eroded as AI demands have grown. In 2023, Google stopped claiming "operational carbon neutrality" in its sustainability report. By 2024, the company reported a 48% rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 2019, driven primarily by datacenter consumption.
This year, Google abandoned concrete 2030 targets altogether. Instead, it reframed its climate goals as "climate moonshots"-a term the company uses for speculative projects that may or may not succeed, similar to self-driving cars or wifi balloons. The company's latest environmental report describes its emissions ambitions as "ambition-based" and cites AI's rapid growth as creating "significant uncertainties" around future emissions.
When asked at an energy conference how natural gas aligns with its clean energy goals, Michael Terrell, Google's head of advanced energy, said: "We don't have anything to say on that."
Tech giants race for power, abandon climate targets
Google is not alone. Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft-all of which pledged net-zero carbon goals-are also turning to natural gas for their AI datacenters. Meta is building a facility in Louisiana designed to run on gas. Amazon operates several multi-gigawatt datacenters powered by gas. Microsoft announced a new gas project for a West Virginia datacenter and signed a deal with Chevron this week to build a 2.5-gigawatt gas power plant in west Texas.
The shift reflects a fundamental tension in the industry. For years, major cloud providers resisted natural gas despite its lower cost and faster deployment. That resistance has crumbled as competition to build AI infrastructure has intensified.
The infrastructure decisions made now will shape energy systems for decades. IT and operations teams managing these resources should understand that the companies supplying their cloud services are making energy trade-offs that diverge sharply from their public climate commitments.
Google still points to separate wind and solar projects in the region, but those investments have not prevented the company from pursuing gas-powered capacity. The company frames its strategy as building the grid rather than buying carbon credits, though the practical effect is the same: increased reliance on fossil fuels to meet AI computing demand.
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