- Oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil sees a key advantage in developing power plants for AI data centers as tech companies race to secure energy sources for the vast amounts of electricity required to run the technology.
Fortune 500 company Exxon Mobil is bullish on its ability to supply power for AI data centers and claimed a key advantage in building decarbonized gas-fired plants.
In a conference call with analysts on Friday after the oil and gas giant reported earnings, CEO Darren Woods noted the company isn't interested in getting into the utility business.
"But leveraging the end-to-end system that we have for capturing, transporting, and storing CO2 is a huge advantage and brings a lot of value for those who are looking to have decarbonized power and to manage their emissions," he added.
In December, Exxon said it is designing a power plant fueled by natural gas that can capture more than 90% of its carbon emissions, marking the first time it would build a plant that doesn't serve its own operations.
At the time, the company said it was talking to potential customers and didn't disclose the plant's cost or possible locations. On Friday, Woods said there continues to be a very strong desire from companies for decarbonized data centers.
"We're having a lot of continuing conversations," he said. "We have sites that have been selected."
Exxon is currently doing early engineering, and given its successful track record in project organization, the company is serving as an integrator to accelerate the schedules, Woods explained.
Timing is critical as so-called hyperscalers like Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and Meta plan to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into AI to train new models and deploy them to users as quickly as possible.
"Our view is we'll bring this on faster than anybody else in the industry, and we'll certainly bring it on faster than any other opportunities for decarbonization," Woods said, adding that a site could be running by 2028 and decarbonized by 2029.
That's despite fears that China's DeepSeek, which claimed to develop a more energy-efficient and less-expensive chatbot, has upended notions of how much investment and energy AI needs. But Woods said DeepSeek hasn't impacted the conversations Exxon is having with customers.
For its part, Fortune 500 rival Chevron announced Tuesday that it formed a partnership with the investment firm Engine No. 1 to build gas-fired power plants for data centers and plan to be in service by late 2027.
Its plants will also be designed to capture most carbon emissions and will be co-located with data centers in the U.S. Southeast, Midwest and West regions, the company said, without disclosing cost estimates.
During a separate call with analysts Friday, CEO Mike Wirth said Chevron has been in discussions with the hyperscalers for a year or more to understand what they're looking for and if the company can deliver.
"And we think that it really does make good sense for us," he said.
Later in Exxon's call, Woods said the company has the world's only end-to-end system for capturing, transporting, and storing carbon emissions.
In fact, Exxon has a carbon capture and storage (CCS) business that its says is leading the creation of a new industry and is assembling the world’s first large-scale CCS system on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
