Meta is betting big on geothermal for data centers

In 2027, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms, Inc. will purchase up to 150 megawatts of geothermal baseload power for its data center infrastructure, the company announced today.

• The top line: The tech giant inked a deal with Houston-based Sage Geosystems, an advanced geothermal company whose approach to harnessing clean energy involves pumping water into fractures that are 12,000 feet deep in the earth.
• The market grounding: Advanced geothermal, which aims to expand the relatively limited geographic scope of traditional geothermal by digging deeper, is a niche and still-developing industry. But it has seen a funding boom in the last year, thanks in part to tech advancements in drilling, well design, and exploration.
• The nuts and bolts: Sage Geosystems utilizes off-the-shelf oil and gas technologies to target subsurface temperatures between 150 and 250 degrees Celsius, generating power anywhere there’s hot, dry, rock formations. The startup’s key differentiator, however, is its long-duration storage solution: using curtailed renewable energy to inject water into fractures that operate as storage tanks until the well is reopened, and that water flows through a turbine to produce electricity. 

The deal with Meta — which is strictly for electricity generation, rather than storage — isn’t advanced geothermal’s first foray into the data center market. Last year Fervo Energy started sending electricity to the Nevada grid as part of a pilot with Google. Sage Geosystems’ delivery for Meta will be the first offtake deal for next-gen geothermal east of the Rockies, the company said.

A Sage Geosystems study of the subsurface in the continental U.S. indicates there are “multiple terawatts” of geothermal potential available to technologies that can drill deep enough, said CEO Cindy Taff. A lot of that potential is in the western U.S., she explained, but also at slightly deeper depths in places like Louisiana.

Next-gen geothermal, including that being deployed by both Sage Geosystems and Fervo Energy, is still in development, Taff said. “The biggest question that the big tech companies are having is around getting next generation geothermal to a commercially viable installation,” she said. And until there’s an installation online that is reliable and cost-effective, that question will remain, she added.

There’s certainly movement on that front: Fervo’s MW Cape Station project in southwest Utah will start its phased implementation in 2026. And in June Google unveiled a “clean transition tariff” modeled on its partnership with Fervo, designed to help fund clean baseload power like geothermal.

Meanwhile, Sage Geosystems’ first commercial long-duration storage facility is set to come online at the end of this year in Texas, targeting up to ten hour durations. The company’s first electricity generation project is set to come online in 2025, also in Texas, via a partnership with the Air Force, Taff said.

The data center opportunity

Given the projected boom in data center electricity demand, Sage Geosystems is currently very focused on that particular market, Taff said. “The data center industry is very interested in geothermal, and we’re very interested in providing that clean power for their data centers, and that’s really the path that we’re going down,” she told Latitude Media.

The energy demands of AI may be the liftoff that next-gen geothermal needs. Given the explosion in their energy needs, tech companies are starting to be a little more flexible in their considerations on data center siting, Taff added.

Data center companies Sage Geosystems is in conversation with, including Meta, generally have three criteria for their data centers, she explained: They want to be within 100 miles of a city that has a population of at least 100,000; they want access to electricity at a reasonable cost; and they want access to water for cooling purposes.

In the longer-term, Sage Geosystems plans to offer off-grid power for data centers, Taff said, in order to skip interconnection bottlenecks. That’s something companies seem to be very interested in, she added, but that may require some flexibility on the location criteria.

“We’ve been questioning whether they really need to be close to a population center, because there are staffing methodologies that have been used in the oil and gas industry for years for remote locations,” Taff said. “We’re having those discussions with data center developers, kind of stress testing their models and their mindsets, and trying to bring in different ways of thinking about where they might want to place the data centers.”

Taff and her team are currently in the process of modeling an eventual one gigawatt “green energy campus for data centers,” she said.

“What we’re thinking for the first campus is that we may want to be close to a grid for backup if it gives the data centers more confidence, until we’ve got the technology built and we’ve gotten years of proving that we can provide reliable energy,” Taff said. 

But the ultimate vision for the campuses would be completely independent of the grid, she added. “You take interconnection to the grid out of the equation, as well as the fragility of the grid out of the equation.”