Pranav Hotkar
San Francisco, United States - December 22, 2025 - Google parent Alphabet has agreed to acquire U.S.-based clean energy and data centre infrastructure developer Intersect Power in a deal valued at USD 4.75 billion, underscoring the growing urgency among hyperscalers to lock in power capacity for large-scale artificial intelligence deployments.
The transaction, announced late Monday, will see Alphabet purchase Intersect in cash while assuming certain liabilities. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
Intersect Power develops and operates renewable energy projects and has increasingly focused on co-located energy and data centre campuses, a model that allows compute infrastructure to be built directly alongside large-scale power generation. The company has assembled a multi-gigawatt pipeline of solar, storage, and energy-enabled data centre projects across the United States, with Texas emerging as a key hub.
Alphabet said the acquisition will strengthen its ability to scale cloud and AI infrastructure at a time when access to reliable electricity has become a primary constraint on new data centre development. “This agreement supports our long-term strategy to ensure that energy availability does not limit our ability to deploy the computing capacity our customers require,” the company said in a statement.
Intersect founder and chief executive Sheldon Kimber will continue to lead the business following the acquisition. Kimber said the transaction reflects a broader shift in how digital infrastructure is being planned and financed. “AI workloads are changing the relationship between power and compute,” he said. “Co-locating energy and data centres allows projects to move faster and operate more efficiently at scale.”
Industry analysts view the deal as one of the clearest signals yet that hyperscalers are moving beyond power purchase agreements toward direct ownership of energy-linked infrastructure. The rapid expansion of AI training and inference clusters has driven unprecedented demand for electricity, often measured in hundreds of megawatts per campus, putting pressure on utility grids and permitting processes.
Alphabet has already been one of the world’s largest corporate buyers of renewable energy, but executives have acknowledged that traditional procurement models may not be sufficient as AI workloads grow. By bringing Intersect in-house, the company gains direct control over project development timelines, grid interconnections, and long-term capacity planning.
The acquisition also highlights intensifying competition among cloud providers to secure power-rich sites ahead of rivals. Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have all signalled that energy availability is now a gating factor for future data centre expansion.
For the data centre industry, the deal reinforces a structural shift; power strategy is no longer a supporting function, but a core element of hyperscale growth. As AI-driven demand accelerates, vertically integrated energy and compute platforms are rapidly becoming the new baseline.
