AI startup Poolside is teaming up with CoreWeave for the development of a 2GW data center in West Texas.

Set for 568 acres of land on the Longfellow Ranch owned by the Mitchell Family - which has run oil and gas companies for decades in the state - the data center aims to leverage the natural gas produced in the Permian Basin.

Dubbed Project Horizon, CoreWeave will be the anchor tenant for the first phase of the project, which alone will offer 250MW of power capacity under a 15-year lease, expandable to 500MW.

The data center will be developed using a "hybrid modular module" and is designed for "parallelization rather than sequential construction."

Construction is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2027.

In the interim, the agreement between CoreWeave and Poolside will also see the AI cloud company providing Poolside with a cluster of Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems with more than 40,000 GPUs starting in December.

“Poolside’s approach to foundation models represents exactly the kind of breakthrough work the CoreWeave platform was designed to accelerate,” said Michael Intrator, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of CoreWeave. “Together, we’re building the performance layer that will define how AI research becomes real-world capability.” 

“To compete at the frontier you need to be vertically integrated from dirt to intelligence,” said Eiso Kant, co-founder and co-CEO of Poolside. “This partnership with CoreWeave ensures immediate access to next-generation silicon, enabling us to train multi-trillion parameter models with large-scale reinforcement learning. With this secured, we can now demonstrate our compounding research, engineering, and data advantages.”

Poolside was founded in 2023 by Eiso Kant and Jason Warner. The company develops software that it claims can automate coding with enough accuracy and security that it can be used by governments. They are also working on artificial general intelligence.

Poolside is currently conducting a $2bn fundraising round that would value the company at $14 billion. The majority of this funding will go towards buying 40,000 of Nvidia's GPUs, reports Bloomberg.

In 2024, it raised $500m at a $3bn valuation. The AI startup is a known customer of Fluidstack. It also previously leased a relatively small number of Nvidia H100 GPUs from Iris Energy.

Texas has seen significant interest from data center developers due to its large amounts of natural gas and power availability. According to CBRE, it is currently the US' second-largest market. The state is home to the first Stargate data center project, and just this week, Meta broke ground on a 1GW data center in El Paso. Fermi, a newcomer to the data center market, has secured a gas pipeline connection for up to 11GW in Amarillo.