The fastest way to power an AI data center now is to build the plant next to it. Chevron and Microsoft signed a 20-year power deal for a co-located, 2.67-gigawatt natural gas facility in West Texas, one of the largest behind-the-meter arrangements ever tied to a single tech tenant. It will feed Microsoft’s planned Pecos data center campus directly.
Why behind-the-meter
A behind-the-meter connection puts the generation on the same side of the meter as the load, which means the campus doesn’t sit in the grid interconnection queue that stretches for years across most of the country. That’s the entire appeal. Chevron’s power venture, working with Engine No. 1, plans a roughly $7 billion plant sized to scale with the campus, which itself targets about 2.5 GW of IT load across 7,000 acres.
The construction signal
Chevron expects a final investment decision by the end of 2026 and first power in 2028. As DCD reported, the deal is part of a wave of hyperscalers pairing dedicated gas generation with new campuses. For contractors, it redraws the scope: a data center job increasingly comes with a power plant attached.
The emissions math is the open question. Bolting gigawatts of gas to compute keeps the servers running, but it cuts against the same tech firms’ climate targets.