Powering the cloud after 60 years underground: Ormat’s geothermal pivot to AI

For 60 years, Ormat Technologies strategically built geothermal power plants where nature allows—over underground reservoirs of high-pressure water or steam—including around the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire” from Asia to the Americas.

Doing so made Ormat the largest geothermal operator in the world.

Today, Ormat hopes to grow exponentially with the AI data center boom, aiming to build baseload, clean power plants throughout the Western United States utilizing both new technologies and old.

The goal is called EGS—enhanced geothermal systems—marrying the traditional geothermal business with the newest oil-drilling and fracking techniques.

The idea is that EGS will allow for the construction of next-generation geothermal power almost anywhere the customer desires by tapping into deeper, higher-temperature underground reservoirs much more easily.

While the science is proven, Ormat and competitors are racing to show they can build the plants economically and efficiently enough to contend with other sources of power generation, including gas-fired power, renewables, and nuclear .

That’s why Ormat is launching two separate EGS pilot projects with different partners—a geothermal startup, Sage Geosystems, and the century-old, largest oilfield services firm in the world, SLB .

Ormat also is working closely with Google and data center developer Switch.

“We’re in a very rare situation where all the stars are aligned exactly on time,” Ormat CEO Doron Blachar told Fortune .

“We have the hyperscalers and the AI demand.

This basically puts us in a situation where we see endless demand for our product.

The more electricity we can generate, the more we sell, and we’ve been doing a lot of exploration in the U.S. over the last few years.” Blachar’s thesis is that Ormat already combines traditional geothermal growth and a newer battery energy storage business that’s growing with renewable solar power installations nationwide.

Even if the push into enhanced geothermal systems fails, he says, Ormat will be successful.

But Blachar is confident that the EGS business—the company’s biggest potential growth driver—will thrive and that Ormat is better positioned than any other geothermal player to do EGS at scale.