It Goes to 11… Intersect’s Next Chapter

Today marks the next evolution of what we started almost a decade ago. We’ve signed an agreement for Google to acquire Intersect. After close, we’ll continue doing exactly what we were built to do—develop, construct, and operate the most ambitious power and data infrastructure in the country. Intersect will remain Intersect, remaining separate from Alphabet and Google under the Intersect brand, and I’ll continue as CEO.

A portion of Intersect’s assets will be bought out by existing investors and run as a separate company. They will continue to construct billions of dollars in new assets, including the world’s largest BESS. While there is definitely some sadness in this it just makes sense and it will mean our impact is even broader in the long run. More to come on this in the coming weeks. 

When we founded this company in 2016, the goal was to build something durable, an organization defined by execution, not aspiration. A team of friends bound together by a mission: to preserve our planet for future generations through innovative energy solutions and modern infrastructure. That mission pushed us to rethink how energy projects are conceived, financed, and built. To ask why not? when the industry reflexively said, that’s not the way it’s done.

We also wanted to build something capable of taking on the largest energy challenges on the planet. That’s what ultimately brought us into partnership with Google last year, delivering the scaled digital infrastructure and energy solutions that are helping drive Google’s next generation of AI data centers. This transaction is simply the logical extension of that partnership.

The truth is that modern energy infrastructure now sits at the center of American competitiveness in AI. And we share a deep conviction that energy innovation, community investment, and responsible use of resources are the pillars of what must come next.

AI today is stuck behind one of the slowest, oldest industries in the country: electric power. The country has racks full of GPUs that can’t be energized because there isn’t enough electricity for them. The grid is a patchwork operating system that’s been running for a century. An engineering miracle in its time, but not built for the AI era. 

America deserves a better business model for electricity. That model is increasingly ​“bring your own generation.” Companies like Google are thoughtfully building AI the responsible way. In the case of Intersect, that has meant renewables paired with flexible backup sources and energy storage, often on the same site as the data centers themselves. This approach can significantly accelerate speed to power and unlock scarce transmission capacity. 

In large parts of this country, abundant clean energy sources can cover a significant majority of the hours in a year. When you pair that with fast-ramping, firming sources, you get a system that’s more flexible, more reliable, and more cost effective. 

Add batteries to balance the whole thing and you’ve built a power solution that is nothing like the conventional baseload plants of the last century. It’s a modern, modular, low-cost power solution that can be built faster, scaled more easily, and in many geographies, delivered more cheaply than anything the grid can provide today.

This is the power solution that will define the next century. It’s what we should’ve been building all along if we’d stopped to look at the math. A portfolio built on abundant renewables, supported by flexible backup sources, and stabilized with batteries is the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable way to bring new energy online—not just to support America’s leadership in AI, but to power the next wave of human progress with abundant, low cost energy.

It’s a virtuous cycle. New business models enable new technologies which enable new business models. Microgrids. Next-gen batteries. Advanced nuclear. Space solar. Solutions we haven’t imagined yet. All of these require commercial innovation as much as technical innovation. 

The power sector today is like telecom at the end of the last century. It wasn’t reinvented from the inside. New technologies—cell phones, fiber, the Internet— forced it to evolve. A calcified system was shocked back into modern existence. AI is that catalytic event for power. It’s forcing us to redesign the system for the world we actually live in.

Intersect aspires to be the most nimble, most innovative, and most scalable platform in our industry today. A few years ago, every renewable developer was going to go beyond development and build an operating power company. We did that. From scratch. Today, every power company is going to power AI. We’re doing that. Now. 

We’ve done what others only talk about doing. And we intend to keep doing it.