Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is set to acquire Intersect, a data center and energy infrastructure company, for $4.75 billion in cash plus the assumption of debt, with Intersect continuing to operate independently, CNBC December 22 reports. Alphabet said the acquisition will help it bring more data center and generation capacity online faster, directly addressing the infrastructure demands created by its AI ambitions.
Intersect is expected to work closely with Google’s technical infrastructure team, including on a co-located power site and data center in Haskell County, Texas, where Google has already announced part of a broader $40 billion Texas investment through 2027 spanning new data center campuses in Haskell and Armstrong counties.
AI-Era Infrastructure
CNBC placed the deal in the context of intense AI competition with players like OpenAI, which has made more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure commitments to support its data center buildout. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, framed the acquisition as a way to expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with data center load, and “reimagine energy solutions to drive US innovation and leadership.”
Google already held a minority stake in Intersect from a funding round announced the previous December, where the partnership with Google and TPG Rise Climate aimed to develop gigawatts of US data center capacity and invest $20 billion in renewable power infrastructure by the end of the decade.
Deal Scope, Remaining Assets
Alphabet’s deal reportedly does not include all of Intersect’s portfolio, which is split between assets that are part of the acquisition and those that remain with existing investors. Intersect’s operating and in-development assets in California, as well as its existing operating assets in Texas, are excluded from the transaction. Those assets will continue to be supported by Intersect’s existing investors, including TPG Rise Climate, Climate Adaptive Infrastructure, and Greenbelt Capital Partners, and will operate as an independent company separate from the Alphabet-owned entity.
The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions. Alphabet emphasized that, within the acquired perimeter, Intersect will retain operational independence while integrating tightly with Google’s technical infrastructure team, particularly around co-located power and data centers such as the Haskell County, Texas site. This structure suggests a model in which Alphabet gains strategic control over key integrated energy and data center capacity, while a portion of Intersect’s portfolio continues to play in broader clean energy and infrastructure markets under existing ownership.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Infrastructure-led AI expansion is reshaping platform roadmaps. Alphabet’s move to fold Intersect into its infrastructure strategy illustrates how AI-era competitiveness now depends on orchestrating data centers and power generation together, not treating them as separate concerns. For ERP vendor and platform leaders, this raises the bar for how cloud- and AI-ready roadmaps are framed, with energy availability, location strategy, and long-horizon infrastructure commitments becoming core dependencies for large-scale ERP and AI workloads.
Energy-integrated data centers will influence deployment and integration patterns. The focus on co-located power and data centers in Texas highlights sites engineered from the ground up around predictable, scalable energy for compute-intensive workloads. For enterprise architects and transformation program owners, deployment strategies for ERP, analytics, and AI services will increasingly hinge on where hyperscalers can guarantee both capacity and energy characteristics, influencing multi-region architectures, latency expectations, and resilience planning.
Clean energy partnerships are becoming part of the ERP ecosystem context. Intersect’s retained assets, backed by climate-focused investors, show that large-scale data center growth and renewable power buildout are now tightly linked in investment narratives and infrastructure planning. For system integrators and ERP ecosystem players, sustainability metrics, power sourcing, and regional energy infrastructure will sit alongside performance and cost considerations when advising on cloud and AI platform choices, especially for energy-intensive, always-on ERP and AI estates.
