Amazon has acquired a shovel-ready solar-plus-storage facility in Morrow County, Oregon.

First reported by Latitude Media, the company acquired the facility from Pine Gate Renewables, which filed for bankruptcy in November. The Sunstone project has a proposed capacity of 1.2GW of solar and 1.2GW of battery energy storage capacity. According to reports, the acquisition obtained court approval last week and will see Amazon pay $83 million for the project.

The project is expected to be constructed over six phases, with each phase adding approximately 200MW to the grid. According to reports, the project has already secured staggered interconnection agreements for each phase with the local electric cooperative and has several transmission service requests through the Bonneville Power Administration.

Construction on the project is slated to begin later this year, with phase I expected to be completed in November of 2027. However, given the project's size, it's likely to take some time to reach its full capacity.

The agreement goes against the grain for Amazon, which usually procures power via Power Purchase Agreements. It would represent one of the first instances where the hyperscaler would take the lead in constructing a renewable project as its primary owner.

However, it reflects a growing trend in the sector where data center developers are being incentivized to develop their own power projects to supply energy to their facilities. Late last year, Google announced the acquisition of Intesect Power for $4.75 billion.

Intersect is a US-based clean energy company with a portfolio of 2.2GW of operating solar PV and 2.4GWh of battery storage in operation or construction – mostly in Texas and California. The company first partnered with Google last year to develop colocated renewable power and storage technologies with new data centers across the US.

The Amazon deal is slightly different, with the company acquiring the project rather than the company itself. It reflects the company’s position in the Oregon market, where it has struggled to secure power from the state utility, PacifiCorp.

Amazon issued a formal complaint against the utility in October, arguing that it had “breached its statutory obligations and contractual duties by failing to supply [Amazon] with the promised power.”

The company contended that PacifiCorp had supplied significantly less power than promised to several data centers the company had been developing in the state. Subsequently, the hyperscaler has appealed to the Oregon Public Utilities Commission to force the utility to provide the power capacity it agreed to or remove the sites from the exclusive service territory so Amazon can seek power elsewhere. The suit has yet to be settled.

Amazon has had a data center presence in Oregon for a number of years. It began building in Boardman in Morrow County around 2011, and expanded in Hermiston, in nearby Umatilla County, from around 2017. The cloud giant operates its US West 2 Oregon region from those data centers. The region has four availability zones, suggesting at least four operating data centers.

In 2023, Amazon applied to power three of its data centers in Morrow County with Bloom Energy natural gas fuel cells. It withdrew the plans in June 2024 after facing criticism.