AI Data Center Exemplars

The 13 campuses

Two Axes: Energy Model and Deal Structure

How a campus gets its power and how its compute deal is structured vary independently. Each bubble is one campus, sized by planned megawatts.

These 13 Texas AI campuses were each chosen because it anchors a distinct model the others do not. These are not simply the largest sites - they are the ones that define a way of powering, financing, or structuring an AI data center. Read together, they map how the frontier buildout is actually being built. There are nine energy models, from off-grid gas to fuel cells, and five compute-deal structures, from cloud JV to four-party stacks.

Two things to hold in mind. First, announced is not energized: only Stargate Abilene runs substantial live AI capacity today (~0.3 GW). Everything else is under construction, permitted, or planned. Second, these sites vary along two independent axes - how they get power, and how the compute deal is structured - and several anchor a variant on each.

* Full buildout target. A dash means capacity is not disclosed.

Announced and live

Announced Is Not Energized

Only Stargate Abilene runs substantial live AI capacity today. Everything else is under construction, permitted or planned.

Read by energy model

Read by Energy Model

How a campus gets its power is the axis most of these sites vary on, and nearly all of them bring their own - the behind-the-meter default the Texas grid queue forced.

Gas, in three forms

Off-grid gas at its purest is AWS GW Ranch, up to 7.65 GW of on-site turbines. Oil-major gas is Microsoft Pecos, where Chevron builds and owns the 2.67 GW plant. Modular gas is Sailfish Comanche Circle, delivering power in subdivided islands across a nine-campus park.

Beyond gas

Co-located renewables with firming is Google Meitner - wind, solar, and 3 GWh of storage, air-cooled. Nuclear is Fermi Matador, the only campus building gigawatt-scale reactors into the mix. Hydrogen is Data City, designed to island fully off the grid on salt-dome hydrogen. Fuel-cell and geothermal is MSB Matrix, the only non-combustion, net-zero-substrate case.

Inherited grid and transmission

Two sites run on power an earlier era built. Amp Z Lufkin steps up a paper mill's inherited 55 MW interconnection toward 2.1 GW. IREN Sweetwater runs 100% renewable on the CREZ wind-transmission grid Texas overbuilt in the 2010s.

Read by deal structure

Read by Deal Structure

How the compute deal is put together is the second axis - and it is where the market is visibly inventing new arrangements site by site.

One company, all functions

Hyperscaler first-party builds for itself: GW Ranch (AWS) and Meitner (Google). Integrated miner-cloud collapses land, power, and cloud into one public company: IREN. Merchant developers build and lease to whoever comes: Crusoe Abilene (single tenant), Matrix, Data City, and the Sailfish park.

Functions split across companies

Cloud JV is Stargate Abilene - Lancium land, Crusoe build, Oracle cloud, OpenAI tenant, under the Stargate joint venture. Four-party stack is Beacon Point - Hut 8 owns, Nvidia leases, Lambda operates, Anthropic buys. Three-party guarantee is Nexus Hubbard - Nexus builds, Anthropic occupies, Google underwrites. Off-balance-sheet is Pecos, where the generation is a partnered asset rather than Microsoft's own.

What the whole set shows

What the Whole Set Shows

Patterns appear across the 13 that no single site reveals.

Behind-the-meter is the default, not the exception. Every campus above 800 MW brings its own generation rather than waiting in the ERCOT queue. Six operators reached that conclusion independently, which makes it a fact about the Texas grid, not a preference.

The chip and model giants are guaranteeing the buildout. Google backstops the Fluidstack leases and guarantees Hubbard; Nvidia holds the master lease at Beacon Point and put a deposit on Crusoe Abilene; the guarantor behind Fermi's TensorWave lease is reported to be AMD. The companies that make the silicon are increasingly underwriting the leases that deploy it.

Private credit is the other financier. Blue Owl funds Crusoe's equity at Stargate Abilene and owns 80% of Meta's Hyperion; BlackRock owns 80% of Meta's El Paso and bought Hyperion bonds. The same handful of private-capital firms recur across otherwise unrelated campuses.

Dead industries are the substrate. Converted bitcoin mines (Beacon Point, Barber Lake, Abernathy), a paper mill (Amp Z), an aluminum smelter (Rockdale, Milam), and overbuilt wind transmission (IREN) all host AI capacity an earlier industry made ready. See brownfield inheritance for the full pattern.

And the labs mostly do not own their compute. Read the three frontier labs' portfolios to see how differently they solve it: Anthropic owns nothing, OpenAI concentrates in Stargate, and Meta finances off its balance sheet.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• Texas LLM Compute Footprint
• Anthropic's Texas Compute
• OpenAI's Texas Compute
• Meta's AI Data Center Financing
• Texas Data Center Moratorium
• Behind-the-Meter Power
• ERCOT Large Load Interconnection