Crusoe Energy Systems LLC, Blue Owl Capital Inc. and Primary Digital Infrastructure are launching a $3.4 billion joint venture to build a data center campus in Texas.
The companies announced the project today.
Crusoe is a Denver-based data center builder that was founded in 2018 with an initial focus on cryptocurrency mining. It later launched a cloud platform for running intelligence workloads. The Crusoe Cloud, as the platform is called, provides access to graphics processing units from Nvidia Corp. and other infrastructure.
Blue Owl Capital, the second backer of the newly detailed joint venture, is an NYSE-traded investment firm. The third participant is Primary Digital, which specializes in providing financing to data center operators. The two firms will provide the capital for the joint venture while Crusoe is set to build and operate the data center campus at the center of the project.
The planned development will comprise two facilities in the city of Abilene, Texas. The buildings are set to offer 998,000 square feet of aggregate floor space supported by 205 megawatts of power. One megawatt corresponds to the electricity consumption of several hundred households.
Crusoe plans to power the campus with off-site renewable energy sources such as nearby wind farms. Down the road, it will explore the possibility of building an on-site solar power station.
Crusoe estimates that the campus will have capacity for up to 100,000 GPUs. The company plans to dissipate the heat generated by those processors using direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology, which works by circulating coolant through GPU servers. Crusoe also plans to install conventional air cooling technology, which is typically used with servers that only include central processing units.
“We’ve designed this data center to enable the largest clusters of GPUs in the world that will drive new breakthroughs in AI,” said Crusoe co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Chase Lochmiller.
Crusoe has already signed a long-term lease for the campus with a “Fortune 100 hyperscale tenant.” The unnamed company plans to start moving in its data center equipment during the first half of 2025.
Crusoe’s tenant is rumored to be Oracle Corp., which will reportedly use the campus to host AI workloads for OpenAI. Microsoft Corp. is said to be involved as well. The latter company became OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider last January as part of a $10 billion investment.
Oracle is reportedly not the only third-party infrastructure provider with which Microsoft is partnering to support the ChatGPT developer’s work. Last year, sources told CNBC that the software giant had inked a similar agreement with CoreWeave Inc., which operates an infrastructure-as-a-service platform optimized for AI workloads. The deal could reportedly be worth several billion dollars.