Google LLC today announced plans to spend $40 billion through 2027 on a network of data centers in Texas.

The company will build three new facilities as part of the project. One will be located in Armstrong County, the other two in Haskell County. The latter locale is about an hour’s drive from the city of Abilene, which hosts OpenAI’s flagship Stargate artificial intelligence data center.

Google didn’t go into detail about the design of its three upcoming facilities. However, the company did disclose that the data centers will use air cooling. That provides clues about what kind of chips they could host.

Air cooling methods, which use fans to dissipate heat produced by servers, are less efficient than liquid cooling. The reason is that air doesn’t conduct heat as well as liquid coolants. At the same time, fans are easier to install and operate, which can help streamline data center construction.

Google debuted its newest custom AI accelerator, Ironwood, in April. The chip is optimized to run in liquid-cooled server clusters with up to 9,216 AI accelerators. That suggests Ironwood might not find use in the air-cooled sections of Google’s planned Texas data centers.

It’s possible the facilities’ air-cooled racks will contain Nvidia Corp. hardware. The chipmaker offers an air-cooled appliance called the HGX B300 that includes eight of its flagship Blackwell Ultra chips. The liquid-cooled version of the system, the DGX GB300 NVL72, ships with 72 Blackwell Ultra chips.

Google also plans to invest in two existing data centers in Midlothian and Dallas that help power its public cloud. The company didn’t specify what upgrades it plans to make at the facilities.

“This investment will create thousands of jobs, provide skills training to college students and electrical apprentices, and accelerate energy affordability initiatives throughout Texas,” Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said at an event near Dallas.

Nvidia recently stated that building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs $50 billion to $60 billion. At the high end of the range, that’s 50% more than the sum Google has set aside for its Texas infrastructure initiative. The company didn’t disclose the amount of computing power the facilities are expected to provide.

Google is launching the data center project a few days after Anthropic PBC announced plans to spend $50 billion on AI infrastructure in the U.S. The initiative will see the OpenAI rival open data centers in Texas and New York. Anthropic has partnered Fluidstack Ltd., a venture-backed infrastructure startup, to build the facilities. 

Image: Google