Alphabet Buys Intersect For $4.75 Billion — Is That A Good Thing?

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

I’m sure everyone here knows the company Intersect. Just kidding, I assume most people don’t know the company, since I had never run across it before. Apparently, though, it’s a data center and energy infrastructure solutions provider. It builds big power projects for data centers and booming electricity needs.

Alphabet, of course, is the parent company of Google. Like other big tech companies, it is building an enormous amount of data center and energy infrastructure.

Some solar energy news sites have highlighted Alphabet’s $4.75 billion purchase of Intersect and have called the company a renewable energy developer. It is a renewable energy developer, but not only. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

While looking through Alphabet’s announcement about the acquisition, I was focused on trying to find any mention of solar energy, renewable energy, or clean energy more vaguely. There was basically none the be found. I find that odd, and suspicious. Historically, companies are quite eager to highlight purchases of clean energy projects and clean energy solutions. Perhaps Alphabet is just concerned about potentially saying illegal words during the second Trump presidency, knowing that he hates renewable energy and doesn’t want to support it or its fans in any way. Or perhaps there are other reasons for excluding the previously popular buzzwords.

In the About section of Intersect’s website and this press release, the company does make this claim: “Our approach delivers the fastest, cheapest, cleanest and most reliable energy and infrastructure solutions for our customers and the inevitable scale of what comes next.”

I have to call bull crap there. Intersect does build clean, renewable energy projects, but it also builds hybrid gas & renewable power projects. No power plant incorporating fossil gas is the “cleanest.” In fact, no power plant incorporating the burning of gas of any sort is. But that article linked above does refer specifically to fossil gas power plants.

Perhaps Alphabet does just plan to used Intersect to build renewable energy and battery storage projects. But I’d feel much more confident of that if that’s what they actually wrote in their press release. Instead, we get this: “Alphabet today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Intersect, which provides data center and energy infrastructure solutions, for $4.75 billion in cash, plus the assumption of debt. […]

“The acquisition will enable more data center and generation capacity to come online, faster, while accelerating energy development and innovation.”

If it’s gas power plants Alphabet and Google are going to be building, color me not impressed.

Should I be more optimistic? Perhaps, but it’s still 2025, and a lot has gone south in 2025 in the cleantech industry and CO2 reduction momentum. Oh, also, there’s this: “Intersect will also explore a range of emerging technologies to increase and diversify energy supply, while supporting Google’s U.S. data center investments to meet its Cloud customers’ and users’ demand.” What the heck is that talking about?

Featured photo courtesy of Intersect.