Google-backed geothermal firm Fervo valued at $10bn on back of AI wave

Share price soars 30 percent following IPO

Google-backed enhanced geothermal company Fervo Energy has seen its valuation top $10 billion following its initial public offering on the Nasdaq.

20 Nov 2025

Drilling for data: Can geothermal power meet hyperscale ambitions?

Meta and others have thrown their backing behind experimental geothermal projects as energy demand from AI continues to rise

The Houston-based firm saw its share price increase by more than 30 percent, which pushed it to its current bumper valuation.

Its market debut followed its upsized IPO, where it raised approximately $1.89bn at $27 per share, making it the largest energy or utility IPO since 2013. According to investors, the IPO far exceeded the company’s expectations by more than $500 million.

The huge valuation has been driven predominantly by the growth of AI and its increasing appetite for reliable baseload power. Fervo, which develops enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) that drill much deeper than conventional methods and offer much higher capacity factors, has caught the eye of some of the largest data center developers.

Fervo became one of the first EGS firms to gain backing from a major hyperscaler, inking a 100MW deal with Google in June 2024 to power the search giant's data centers in Nevada.

Google has also invested directly in the company, leading its Series B funding round last year, where the company successfully raised $462m.

Its flagship project is the Cape Station geothermal scheme located in Beaver County, Utah. It is slated to begin delivering 100MW to the grid by 2026, with plans to increase that to 500MW by 2028. If fully built, the project will be the largest EGS project in the world.

Google isn't the only hyperscaler to back geothermal energy. Meta has also signed offtake agreements with two EGS developers in the US. Last year, it signed a deal with Sage Geosystems for 150MW of power from a project under development “east of the Rocky Mountains.” Following this, in June, it signed a 150MW agreement with XGS Energy for a project under development in New Mexico.

Microsoft has also gotten in on the act. In 2023, the tech giant signed a ten-year PPA with Contact Energy for 51MW of power in New Zealand. The company also partnered with G42 to construct a data center in Kenya that will be run exclusively on geothermal energy.