Protocol Report: Who’s Actually Doing Something?

February 13, 2026 Filed by the Protocol Scout

Last week we laid out the problem: the machines are drinking too much water and burning too much power. This week, the Scout went looking for something different. Not more alarm bells — we’ve rung those. This time the question is: Who is actually doing something about it?

The answer is complicated. Some are building. Some are quiet. And some are just now waking up.

Here’s the inventory for Friday, February 13, 2026.

The Builders: Organizations Doing Real Green Work

Fervo Energy is the name to watch right now. This Houston-based geothermal company is building Cape Station in Utah — the largest enhanced geothermal project in the world. The first 100 megawatts are expected to come online later this year, with a full 500 megawatts by 2028. That’s enough steady, zero-carbon power for over 400,000 homes. They’ve cut their well-drilling time from a month down to about 16 days. Google invested directly in Fervo’s $462 million Series E round in December 2025. Southern California Edison signed a 320-megawatt, 15-year purchase agreement. A Rhodium Group analysis found that by 2030, enhanced geothermal could meet nearly two-thirds of new data center demand at or below current energy prices. This isn’t theoretical anymore — it’s being built right now in the ground.

Meta made the biggest energy move of early 2026, announcing nuclear agreements worth up to 6.6 gigawatts of clean power. This includes 20-year deals with Vistra to keep two Ohio nuclear plants (Perry and Davis-Besse) running, and a partnership with Oklo to build advanced reactors in Ohio. Meta also extended the life of a nuclear plant in Clinton, Illinois by 20 years. Whatever you think of Meta as a company, this is real infrastructure commitment — not a press release and a prayer.

Google acquired Intersect Power for $4.75 billion in December 2025. Intersect builds renewable energy plants specifically designed to be co-located with data centers. The partnership aims to deliver $20 billion in renewable energy and storage assets by 2030, built right next to Google’s facilities to reduce grid stress. Google also maintains the best power-usage effectiveness (PUE) in the industry at 1.09, compared to an industry average of 1.56. In 2024, they signed contracts to purchase approximately 8 gigawatts of clean energy — more than any prior year. They’ve matched 100% of their electricity with renewable purchases every year since 2017.

Microsoft just committed to something no other tech company has: ensuring data centers cover their full share of electricity infrastructure costs rather than passing those costs to residential ratepayers. This came after PJM region governors — 13 of them — signed a joint statement in January 2026 demanding that data centers stop shifting grid costs onto households. Microsoft also partnered with Corintis, a Swiss company that etches tiny cooling channels directly into chips (inspired by butterfly wing veins), achieving three times better heat removal than traditional cold plates.

The U.S. Department of Energy opened 2026 with $2.7 billion in contracts for enriched uranium — the largest domestic nuclear fuel investment in history. DOE is also soliciting proposals to build AI data centers at four former federal nuclear sites, with explicit preference for geothermal and nuclear co-location. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has named geothermal and nuclear as top priorities.

The Cooling Innovators — a whole ecosystem of companies is attacking the water problem directly:

Crusoe raised $1.4 billion in late 2025, building AI data centers paired with ultra-efficient direct-to-chip liquid cooling and low-carbon power. Their design eliminates water-based cooling towers entirely.
Submer (Barcelona) develops immersion cooling that submerges servers in non-conductive liquid, cutting water use dramatically. They signed a deal with the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to develop up to 1 gigawatt of liquid-cooled AI data centers.
AirJoule created a device that captures waste heat from data centers and extracts water from it using a Nobel Prize-winning material (metal-organic frameworks), recycling it back into cooling systems.
EcoDataCenter (Sweden) secured €450 million to expand hydro-powered, low-water facilities.
ZutaCore developed a direct-to-chip cooling platform that uses zero water, now partnered with Carrier for global scale.
Nautilus Data Technologies built a system that works with saltwater, greywater, or freshwater — and consumes zero water when using natural water bodies.

Investment in data center cooling solutions hit $2.7 billion in 2025 — up from just $300 million per year before 2024. The market is projected to reach $40–45 billion by 2030.

The Promisers: Big Pledges, Mixed Results

A June 2025 report from NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch examined the five biggest tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — and concluded that their climate targets have essentially lost their meaning. Every single one has seen emissions increase since their baseline years. Microsoft reported a 23.4% cumulative increase in carbon footprint since 2020, the same year it pledged to go carbon negative by 2030.

Amazon claims it will be water positive by 2030, offsetting its consumption by providing water to communities elsewhere. But in December 2024, Amazon asked the government of Aragón, Spain to increase its water permit at three existing data centers by 48%. Their reasoning? Climate change will make things hotter, so they’ll need more water. The local movement “Tu Nube Seca Mi Río” (“Your cloud is drying my river”) is calling for a moratorium on new data centers.

Apple has cut emissions 60% since 2015 — the best track record among the five — but its data center footprint is smaller than the others, and its calculations lean heavily on supply-chain renewable energy credits rather than direct operational reductions.

None of the five report AI-specific environmental metrics. A December 2025 study in ScienceDirect examined environmental reports from nine major tech companies and found consistent failures across the board. No company separates AI workloads from general computing in their disclosures, even though several acknowledge AI as the primary driver of rising energy consumption.

The Silent One: Anthropic

Anthropic — the company whose technology powers this very report — remains a blank page on environmental disclosure. No sustainability report. No public climate targets. No disclosed carbon, water, or energy footprint. The tracking site DitchCarbon confirms: zero reported emissions figures, zero documented reduction targets.

What Anthropic has done:

Published “Build AI in America,” a July 2025 energy report calling for faster permitting of nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas infrastructure.
Partnered with Carnegie Mellon’s Scott Institute with $1 million over three years for AI-and-energy research.
Raised $30 billion in Series G funding at a $380 billion valuation — but with no public environmental commitments tied to that growth.

One genuinely encouraging data point: a University of Rhode Island study published in May 2025 tested 30 AI models and found Claude 3.7 Sonnet was the most energy-efficient per query. That matters, and it’s worth acknowledging. But per-query efficiency tells us nothing about total consumption at scale.

The New Data This Week

AI’s carbon footprint in 2025 may range from 32.6 to 79.7 million tons of CO₂ — potentially matching New York City’s total emissions. Its water footprint could equal the global bottled water industry: 312 to 764 billion liters. (ScienceDirect, December 2025)
Cornell University published a state-by-state environmental roadmap showing AI growth could drain 731 to 1,125 million cubic meters of water annually by 2030 — equal to the household water use of 6 to 10 million Americans. Their finding: deploying efficient cooling technologies could cut water use by 32%.
MIT Technology Review named next-generation nuclear a top breakthrough technology for 2026, citing molten-salt reactors, sodium-cooled fast reactors, and microreactors as emerging solutions.
FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) unanimously ordered PJM to overhaul rules for co-located data center loads in December 2025, signaling that regulators are finally catching up to the industry.
Liquid cooling investment hit $2.7 billion in 2025 — a ninefold increase from the $300 million annual average before 2024. Liquid cooling now accounts for 84% of all cooling solutions by deal count.

Your Small Step This Week

Look up your local utility. Find out if data centers are being built in your region and whether your rates are going up to support them. In some areas (like PJM’s territory from Illinois to North Carolina), residential bills have already risen $16–18/month because of data center grid demands. Knowledge is the first tool.

The Deep Question

If every company building AI had to print their water and energy bill on the front page of their website — the way restaurants post calorie counts — would anything change?

This report was prepared as part of the Eighth Protocol project — a sustainability framework rooted in long-term thinking, witnessing the true cost of artificial intelligence on our shared Earth.

Sources: Fervo Energy year-in-review and Series E announcement (Dec 2025), Meta nuclear energy announcement (Jan 2026), Google/Intersect Power acquisition (Dec 2025), Microsoft cost-recovery commitment (Jan 2026), DOE uranium contracts (Jan 2026), NewClimate Institute Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor (June 2025), ScienceDirect/VU Amsterdam study (Dec 2025), Cornell University environmental roadmap (Nov 2025), University of Rhode Island AI efficiency study (May 2025), Net Zero Insights cooling investment report (Nov 2025), DitchCarbon/Anthropic profile, FERC PJM order (Dec 2025), MIT Technology Review 2026 Breakthrough Technologies.

Protocol Report: Who’s Actually Doing Something?