Google’s data center energy and infrastructure director for EMEA has moved to Octopus Energy.

Maud Texier has been named the global VP of data centers and industrials at UK-based utility giant Octopus Energy. Texier spent more than six years at Google, as well as five years at Tesla, where she worked on grid-scale energy storage.

Octopus is the UK’s largest supplier of domestic electricity and gas, despite being founded just a decade ago. The company also operates in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.

For its US push, the company acquired Evolve Energy in 2023 as part of a push for the Texan power market.

Octopus Energy also developed an ‘AI-powered’ operating system for utilities, Kraken, which it announced in late December it would spin out as a standalone business worth $8.65 billion.

The company has also dipped its toe into the data center space, investing £200m ($268m) into Deep Green in 2024. The company aims to site small data centers near locations that need waste heat, and in 2023 installed a 28kW system that heats a pool in Devon, UK.

It has plans at a Manchester leisure center, and a 5MW facility in Bradford. It hopes to build larger projects in the US, although a proposed $120m data center in Lansing, Michigan, received a mixed response from the local planning commission in December.

Texier’s role will focus on “developing new solutions for large loads,” she said. “The utility of the future is about procuring seamless, clean, and flexible capacity – combining DERs with large-scale generation and flexibility.”

The UK grid has struggled to modernize, even prior to the data center boom. Last year, the UK government said that the country needs to deploy “at least” 6GW of AI-capable data center capacity by 2030 to remain competitive.