Chevron And Microsoft Chart New Path To Power In Landmark Data Center Deal

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In a move that could send the net-zero zealots scrambling for the smelling salts, Chevron announced this week that it has inked a massive 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft. The deal centers on Project Kilby, a co-located natural gas-fired power plant and data center campus in West Texas that will eventually deliver a staggering 2.67 gigawatts of reliable, dispatchable electricity.

This is real, sustainable, 24/7 power, built on abundant Permian Basin natural gas, coming online in phases starting in 2028. If you’ve been paying attention to the AI-driven energy crunch, this deal shouldn’t surprise you one bit. But it sure does drive another nail into the coffin of the fantasy that windmills and solar panels can somehow run the digital future.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just some niche application anymore. Training models, running inference at scale, and powering hyperscale cloud operations demand enormous quantities of always-available electricity. Data centers don’t tolerate brownouts, curtailments, or the fickle whims of the weather. You can’t tell a multi-billion-dollar compute cluster to pause while the wind dies down or the sun goes behind a cloud. Reliability isn’t optional: For this industry, it’s........

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