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The much-anticipated stock market debut netted $1.9B for Fervo, indicating strong investor interest in the around-the-clock, carbon-free promise of geothermal.
Fervo Energy, a startup that has pioneered new ways to produce electricity from the earth’s heat, is officially a publicly traded company. It’s the first next-generation geothermal firm to go public.
Today’s initial public offering netted the Houston-based Fervo about $1.9 billion and valued it at roughly $7.7 billion. The company had reportedly sought a much lower valuation of between $2 billion and $3 billion in January but eventually raised its target amid strong investor interest. Fervo secured nearly $2 billion in financing over the course of its nine years as a private firm.
“We are seeing demand grow in a way that we have not seen in the electricity sector in quite a long time,” said Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s senior vice president of strategy. “To come onto the scene at a time when we’re seeing that inflection point of demand, with proven technology… it’s a really welcome time for a story like ours.”
The debut is a major moment for geothermal energy, which can deliver carbon-free power around the clock but has remained a marginal source of electricity worldwide given its serious geological limitations. Fervo makes geothermal energy viable in far more places by harnessing horizontal drilling techniques borrowed from the oil-and-gas industry, for which its CEO and co-founder, Tim Latimer, previously worked.
Fervo’s upsized IPO reflects investor exuberance for any company promising to help meet gargantuan power demand from AI data centers. Fervo has particularly tight ties with Google, which is both an investor in and a customer of the firm. Meta has signed deals with two other advanced geothermal startups in recent years.
“Fervo going public reflects growing confidence in the ability of new geothermal technology to serve soaring electricity demand across the country,” John Coequyt, director of U.S. government affairs at clean energy think tank RMI, said in an email.
Fervo joins longtime geothermal leader Ormat on the public market. Ormat, which completed its IPO in 2004, has been building traditional geothermal power plants in the U.S. and beyond for decades, and it recently began expanding its focus to include “enhanced geothermal systems” like Fervo’s. Ormat saw its stock price climb steadily for years and then nearly double over the last year and change.
Fervo’s IPO comes months ahead of another expected milestone for the startup: the commissioning of its first-of-a-kind power plant in Utah. The development, dubbed Cape Station, broke ground in 2023 and is on track to start sending electricity to the grid in late 2026. A total of 500 megawatts are under construction at the site, but Fervo has the permits in place to quadruple that amount.
Fervo also plans to bring a 115-MW development in Nevada online by 2030, as part of its power purchase agreement with Google and utility NV Energy.
The $1.9 billion Fervo has raised with its IPO will help the company acquire new land and fund general operations — but, Jewett said, “in reality the majority of that money is going to go to project development.”
“We are very, very focused on deploying megawatts — and of course now we say gigawatts,” she said. “The majority of our equity raised today will go to that.”
In its IPO filing, Fervo identified a total of 3.65 gigawatts of power plant capacity that is under construction, ready to be built, or in advanced stages of development. The U.S. currently has roughly 4 GW of installed geothermal capacity.
Fervo’s success will depend on its ability to drive down the cost of the power it produces.
Phase 1 of the Cape Station project is set to deliver power at $7,000 per kilowatt, a price that is competitive with traditional and next-generation nuclear power but far higher than that of natural gas or renewables. Phase 2 of Cape Station, which is also now underway, will deliver power at $5,500 per kW, Jewett said. The company aims to slash that rate to $3,000 per kW.
Fervo has shown some ability to cut costs to date. Between 2022 and 2025, Fervo says it has reduced drilling times by about 75% and slashed per-foot drilling costs by about 70%, marking a significant achievement for the nascent industry. Those trends will need to hold up as the company completes larger-scale installations in the years to come.
Fervo expects to run a loss for “several years,” per its IPO document, as it spends more aggressively to build out its power plants. Its net loss was roughly $57.8 million last year, up from $41.1 million the year prior.
Revenue was a scant $138,000 last year — but Fervo’s IPO document says there is a lot more waiting in the wings. To date, it has signed 658 megawatts’ worth of binding power purchase agreements with major utility Southern California Edison, community choice aggregators, and firms like Google and Shell. That adds up to “approximately $7.2 billion in potential revenue backlog,” per the filing.
It also has an agreement in place with Google, whereby Fervo will give the tech giant the right of first refusal to purchase 3 GW of electricity from certain new projects, though Google itself is under no obligation to say yes. Either party can terminate the deal if no binding commitments have been made by March 2028.
Geothermal energy enjoys more bipartisan support in the U.S. than any other renewable energy source.
While President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act sunset federal tax credits for solar and wind this July, those for geothermal were left intact. The fracking firm founded and formerly led by Energy Secretary Chris Wright invested in Fervo in 2022. Not one but two bipartisan pro-geothermal bills are under consideration in Congress right now.
And although the Trump administration continues to obstruct wind and solar projects on federal lands, next month the Interior Department is slated to auction off an additional 197,000 acres of land in New Mexico for geothermal energy development.
Maria Gallucci contributed reporting to this piece.
An update was made on May 13, 2026, to include comments from Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s senior vice president of strategy.
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