"Meta's Geothermal Bet: Why Data Centers Are Going Underground"

When you think about powering data centers, solar farms and wind turbines probably come to mind first. But Meta is betting on something deeper — literally. The company has partnered with geothermal startup XGS Energy on a 150-megawatt project in New Mexico, and the project just took another step forward with XGS bringing on two senior operations executives to steer the buildout toward completion.

What makes this partnership worth watching isn't just the scale — it's the technology. XGS uses a closed-loop geothermal system that doesn't depend on finding natural underground hot-water reservoirs the way traditional geothermal does. Instead, it circulates fluid through hot dry rock formations, capturing heat that exists almost everywhere if you drill deep enough. If this approach proves commercially viable at 150MW, it opens the door to geothermal in places that were never on the map before.

The real story here is about baseload power. Solar and wind are cheap and clean, but they're intermittent — clouds roll in, wind dies down, and your data center still needs to serve cat videos at 3 AM. Geothermal runs 24/7, rain or shine. For a company like Meta that's racing to build AI infrastructure while meeting aggressive climate targets, that reliability premium matters enormously. The project has also drawn in Baker Hughes for subsurface engineering, which signals that the oil-and-gas supply chain is quietly pivoting toward clean baseload — a trend that's bigger than any one plant.

New Mexico's governor called it a "$1 billion partnership." If XGS and Meta pull this off, it won't just be a win for one data center campus — it'll be a proof point that next-gen geothermal can compete where it counts.

Further reading: ThinkGeoEnergy on the original Meta-XGS announcement