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Chevron will provide natural gas to power a large Microsoft data center in Texas, a deal that puts a major oil-and-gas producer directly in the energy supply chain for hyperscale computing infrastructure.
The arrangement marks a visible shift in how Microsoft is approaching power procurement, with the company now willing to contract with a fossil-fuel company to secure the electricity its data centers demand.
The Physical Setup: Upstream Barrels, Downstream Compute The structure here is straightforward on the commodity side: Chevron sits upstream, Microsoft sits downstream, and natural gas is the feedstock moving between them.
Data centers require continuous, high-density power that intermittent renewables cannot reliably deliver at scale without significant backup capacity.
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