As part of the agreement, Crusoe will co-sponsor the construction of six new data center buildings
In sum – what you need to know:
Massive AI buildout – Crusoe and partners secured $11.6 billion to expand the Stargate AI data center campus in Texas.
Next-gen infrastructure – The eight-building site will support up to 400,000 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 units with direct-to-chip liquid cooling and renewable wind energy.
Flagship site for OpenAI – Abilene is the first major location in OpenAI’s Stargate initiative, a multi-phase, $500 billion project to build the largest AI data center network in U.S. history.
AI infra company Crusoe, working with asset manager Blue Owl Capital and advisory and data center investment company Primary Digital Infrastructure, announced the second phase of their $15 billion joint venture to develop a 1.2-gigawatt AI data center in Abilene, Texas.
As part of the agreement, Crusoe will co-sponsor the construction of six new data center buildings alongside funds managed by Blue Owl’s Real Assets platform and Primary Digital Infrastructure. These will be added to the two buildings already under construction, bringing the total to eight. The initial phase, launched in June 2024 with over 200 megawatts of capacity, is scheduled to go live in the first half of 2025. Work on the second phase began in March 2025 and targets mid-2026 for energization, Crusoe said.
The firm highlighted that each of the eight facilities is being built for top-tier scale and performance, supporting up to 50,000 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 units per building on a unified network fabric. Designed to support intensive AI training and inference, the data centers will incorporate closed-loop, direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems with zero-water evaporation, powered by the region’s abundant, low-cost wind energy.
Chase Lochmiller, CEO and co-founder of Crusoe, said: “Abilene will host one of the largest clusters of GPUs in the world, bringing thousands of jobs to the local community while delivering tens of billions of dollars in value to the economy.”
Bill Stein, executive managing director and chief investment officer at Primary Digital Infrastructure, added: “By partnering with Crusoe and Blue Owl, we are collectively delivering vital capacity with the scale, speed, and sustainability required to fuel AI innovation. We are proud to be a part of such a groundbreaking initiative that will serve as a cornerstone for advancing AI in the United States.”
The campus in Texas is the flagship site for OpenAI’s Stargate initiative. This project, unveiled earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump, has an estimated long-term cost of $500 billion, and an initial $100 billion already earmarked for early phases.
At its core, Stargate is a plan to build a network of state-of-the-art AI data centers across the United States. These centers will be used to train and run advanced AI models that require huge volumes of computing power. The main goal of the initiative is to create enough capacity and performance to keep up with rapidly increasing demand for AI in everything from scientific research and medicine to automation, defense and financial services.
The project is designed to span multiple locations and phases, potentially becoming the largest AI infrastructure buildout in history. Each phase will add computing capacity, storage, and networking to enable extremely large-scale AI training and inference.
The Stargate project is being led by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in partnership with SoftBank and Oracle.
OpenAI brings the AI vision and cutting-edge models. SoftBank is providing funding and strategic support. Its founder, Masayoshi Son, has publicly expressed his belief in AI as a central force shaping the future of the world.
Oracle is a key infrastructure partner. It will provide cloud computing expertise and manage large parts of the backend architecture needed to run AI workloads at scale.
These companies form the core of the project, but additional partners are expected to join over time — especially energy companies, construction firms and chipmakers.
