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Google on Friday announced a $40 billion investment in Texas in the form of three new data centers in West Texas and the Panhandle.
The announcement by Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was joined by Gov. Greg Abbott in Midlothian, is the latest multibillion dollar investment in Texas by tech companies racing to build infrastructure that can support advanced AI models.
Google will build three new data centers in the state — one in Armstrong County and two in Haskell County. One of the Haskell County data centers will be paired with a new solar and battery storage plant, designed to minimize the center’s impact on the electric grid, according to the company.
“Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy,” Abbott wrote in a statement. “Google’s $40 billion investment makes Texas Google’s largest investment in any state in the country and supports energy efficiency and workforce development in our state. We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.”
Texas has seen a rapid increase in data capacity in recent years thanks to the state’s relatively cheap energy prices, the ease with which facilities can connect to the grid and its overall business-friendly tax and regulatory environment.
There are at least 411 data centers located in Texas, second in the U.S. only to Virginia.
Pichai underscored Texas’ importance to the growth of AI in Friday’s announcement.
“They say that everything is bigger in Texas — and that certainly applies to the golden opportunity with AI,” Pichai said.
Data centers are energy-intensive facilities that house servers that provide computing power, along with fans and cooling units needed to keep the equipment from overheating. The boom of data centers coupled with the state’s rapid growth overall has led to projections by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas that demand on the power grid could nearly double by 2030.
Companies generally employ around 50 to 150 or more employees in each data center, in addition to an array of building and maintenance contractors, according to the Data Center Coalition, which estimates that each job in a data center supported six jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Google said its investment will also fund workforce development to train existing electrical workers and more than 1,700 apprentices in Texas by 2030.
Disclosure: Google has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.