In the last week of June, France's rivers ran too warm to cool its reactors. The national operator, EDF, curtailed as much as 6.4 GW of nuclear capacity, day-ahead power swung from minus 53 to 433 per MWh, and Germany averaged 111 for the month.¹
Power prices are set at the margin: when always-on supply drops out, the most expensive plant still running, usually a gas peaker, sets the price for everyone. That week put a price on supply that doesn't depend on the weather.
The money had come in the year before: across 2025, next-generation geothermal companies raised about $2.2B, up 80% on the year, from $22M as recently as 2018.² The $2.2B is the fast-growing edge of a bigger flow: conventional geothermal power drew close to $5B in 2025, roughly four times its 2018 level, and geothermal heating projects took in more than $11.5B. Meta and Google alone have contracted roughly 650 MW of geothermal power, much of it from plants that don't exist yet.³
Why now
In June the US House passed the Geothermal Energy Advancement Act, and the Department of Energy's geothermal office took a 20% budget bump this year. Germany's Geothermal Acceleration Act called for 100 new projects by 2030; the planning map already shows more than 150.
Data centers need round-the-clock power close to the load, and geothermal delivers capacity factors above 90% ; that is what Meta and Google were buying. (The demand side of that equation, how data centers cut and flex their own consumption, is something we mapped in an earlier deep dive.)
Fervo (the current star of the geothermal world), meanwhile, drills at around 30 meters an hour in rock where 10 was long the industry standard, mostly with bits, tooling and workflows carried over from shale. That 30 is a best case, not a steady state, but it came at Cape Station, Fervo's flagship site in Utah, in granite, the hardest rock the industry drills. Oil and gas crews, rigs and subsurface software have found a second market for their expertise.
Today geothermal covers less than 1% of global energy demand. The International Energy Agency (IEA) thinks it could reach 800 GW if drilling costs keep falling; running near-constantly, that much capacity would generate some 6,000 TWh a year. The energy think tank Ember calculated in February that geothermal could replace up to 42% of the EU's fossil electricity at under 100 per MWh.
Fervo's Cape Station should put its first 100 MW on the grid late this year, on its way to a 500 MW build-out, and the company's Nasdaq listing in May settled whether public markets would take a next-generation geothermal company.¹ Vulcan closed 2.2B in project financing for its geothermal-and-lithium build in the Upper Rhine (a different 2.2 from the venture number in the opening, and in some ways the bigger statement: that one is debt, for a single build).¹¹ Equity's share of next-generation financing is shrinking as debt like that becomes available.²
