Oil and gas giant Chevron is looking to move into the data center market.
As reported by Reuters, a company executive told the publication that Chevron is currently entering the "permitting and engineering phases" for multiple US data center sites.
Chevron would be developing the data centers, and also supplying the necessary electricity to them.
In an interview at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, vice president of power solutions at Chevron Daniel Droog noted that customer interest in such projects are high.
"It's really trying to intersect where they have that level of need because they're building new or expanding facilities at a rate that's ahead of the power supply," said Droog.
The company is targeting data center sites and power plants with around 1GW of capacity which could come online in 2027 or 2028, according to Droog.
Details about the sites or customers associated were not shared, but the company is looking at regions in the south, western interior, and Midwest in the US.
The data centers would not be connected to the grid, instead primarily relying on natural gas power. Chevron has seven GE Vernova gas turbines scheduled for delivery in 2026 that would be used to help generate the power.
Chevron has previously announced plans to power colocated data centers at its gas plants, but this seems to be the first time that the company has revealed it is also behind the data center projects.
DCD has contacted the company for more information.
The deployment of behind-the-meter natural gas to support data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations has grown significantly over the past year.
For example, last November, AXP Energy inked a binding Joint Development Agreement (JDA) with Blackhart to sell natural gas to power modular crypto mine data centers in Colorado.
Before this, in October, MARA launched a 25MW micro data center operation across oil wellheads in Texas and North Dakota, powered exclusively by excess natural gas.
Earlier this year, Duos and New APR Energy announced plans for 100MW of power from four mobile gas turbines for a data center project.
