Google has dropped a game-changing investment—$40 billion—to build three new data centres that'll power the artificial intelligence (AI) future in Texas by the end of 2027. This is a bold move that cements the Lone Star State as a central hub in its AI and cloud expansion. Google made this announcement via its website—where the company further explained that it's using the investment to expand more on its cloud and AI infrastructures in the state.
The data centre sites are planned for Armstrong County (in the Panhandle) and Haskell County (West Texas, near Abilene). One of the Haskell facilities will be co-located with a solar plus battery energy storage plant, a smart design to ease grid strain and push sustainability. In addition to the building of the data facilities, Google is also investing the funds in its existing Texas footprint—including its Midlothian campus and Dallas cloud region.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said, in a press release, that no other state has received an investment from Google on this scale before. "This is the largest amount Google has ever poured into any state across the U.S., the governor cited. Google says the investment will create thousands of jobs and deliver skills training—especially for college students and electrical apprentices. But Google made it cleared that it's partnering with the Electrical Training Alliance to train existing electrical workers and more than 1,700 new apprentices by 2030.
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This will let the tech giant to build up local expertises—especially from the college students and electrical apprentices it plans to train. There’s also a $30 million “Energy Impact Fund” to support clean energy and community energy-efficiency initiatives across Texas. In addition to that, Google pledges “responsible growth”: it plans to bring new energy resources to the grid and pay for the operational cost of running these mammoth data centres. This will let the tech giant to pair a data centre with a solar plus battery plant to boost energy resilience and reduce strain on the local electric grid.
In addition to that, Google is addressing one of the biggest concerns surrounding data centers: water consumption. The company plans to use advanced air-cooling systems designed to significantly reduce its reliance on water. This huge investment comes amid a fierce competition among tech giants to build out AI infrastructure. It's worth noting that Google isn't the only major tech company developing more AI infrastructure in the United States. OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Anthropic are all pouring money into new data centres.
Not quite long ago, Meta—the parent company of some major social media platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads—announced a $600 billion investment to build AI data centres in many U.S. states but the company didn't mention the states it'll be building them. In the beginning of this year, NVIDIA—which is the world’s dominant supplier of AI chips—also unveiled it plans to build manufacturing facilities for AI supercomputers in Houston and Dallas.
