Data center firm Crusoe has joined a multi-billion-dollar joint venture (JV) to build out a data center campus in Texas.
The company, along with alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital and data center advisory and investor firm Primary Digital, this week announced the $3.4 billion JV to fund purpose-built data center capacity at the Lancium Clean Campus in Abilene, Texas.
Already fully leased to a Fortune 100 hyperscale tenant - previously reported to be Oracle - the upcoming Crusoe AI data center will be a build-to-suit, two-building campus set to offer 200MW.
The design will be optimized for direct-to-chip liquid cooling and will also accommodate air cooling. At completion, the data center will be able to operate up to 100,000 GPUs on a single integrated network fabric. The campus will reportedly be powered by a mix of on- and off-site renewables. Occupancy is expected to begin in 1H 2025.
“Rapidly expanding demand for purpose-built data centers proves that markets know the future will be powered by AI,” said Chase Lochmiller, CEO and co-founder of Crusoe.
“We've designed this data center to enable the largest clusters of GPUs in the world that will drive new breakthroughs in AI. An investment of this magnitude from a leading, trusted asset manager like Blue Owl and Primary Digital Infrastructure is a reflection of Crusoe’s proven ability to meet growing demand for AI compute, and to power these workloads sustainably.”
Crusoe is pivoting from placing data center modules along oil pipelines to permanent data center buildings. It officially announced plans to develop a campus at the Lancium site in July.
The Information previously reported Oracle is the company leasing capacity from Crusoe at the site. The final end customer will actually be OpenAI, with Microsoft reportedly a middleman between the two companies to retain its status as the exclusive cloud provider to the AI firm.
“We are thrilled to be part of this joint venture as we see continued growth in cloud computing and increased investor interest in AI-related technologies. We want to assist our corporate partners by deploying meaningful capital in support of high-quality hyperscale data center assets across the US and abroad,” said Marc Zahr, co-president and global head of real estate at Blue Owl Capital.
Blue Owl has approximately $192bn in assets under management. Not previously known for investment in digital infrastructure, the company has made several major investments into the data center space in recent months.
It recently formed a $5bn joint venture with Chirisa and PowerHouse to develop data centers across the US – mostly for AI cloud firm CoreWeave. Earlier this month, Blue Owl acquired Stack and RadiusDC owner IPI Partners for $1bn.
“There is an unprecedented opportunity to deploy capital in the data center market, which is expected to experience a $1 trillion investment boom over the next four to five years in the US alone," said Bill Stein, executive managing director and chief investment officer, Primary Digital Infrastructure and current Crusoe advisor.
"Our strategic vision is to ‘risk match’ this incremental capital by purchasing the best-stabilized assets from developers and operators to allow them to recycle capital and finance their cloud and AI facility developments."
Lancium, which Crusoe has previously partnered with, is developing a cryptomine data center site in Abilene. When given the go-ahead in 2021, Project Artemis was described as a "renewable energy power data center campus" to be built on around 800 acres of land along Spinks and Summerhill roads in Taylor County. Able to offer 200MW, it reportedly has the potential to reach 1GW. Ground was originally set to break in Q1 2022.
Founded in 2018, Crusoe launched with a service to deliver containerized data centers to oil wells in the US, where they would harness natural gas that would otherwise be "flared off" and wasted. Originally the company was using the energy for Bitcoin mining, but later extended its compute services to HPC and AI through its Crusoe Cloud offering.
Its move to more permanent hosting locations began late last year when the company announced a deal to locate a number of GPUs in atNorth's ICE02 data center in Iceland. Crusoe has also partnered with Digital Realty.
A number of crypto firms are making major pivots into AI, both setting up their own GPU clouds and hosting hardware for providers (and in some cases both). Those making the switch include CoreWeave, Core Scientific, Northern Data, Hut 8, Earth Wind and Power, and Applied Digital.