AustinIO > AI Data Center Exemplars > Stargate Abilene

Stargate Abilene (Campus 1)

Stargate Abilene is the flagship of the entire Stargate program and the only site in Texas with substantial live AI capacity. It is the exemplar of the layered hyperscale-cloud stack: Lancium owns the land, Crusoe built it, Oracle owns the chips and runs it as cloud, and OpenAI is the tenant — all under the Stargate joint venture. It is also the first of two adjacent Abilene campuses, and the source of most of the confusion around the name.

Attribute	Detail
Program	Stargate JV (OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, MGX)
Land owner	Lancium (Lancium Clean Campus)
Developer / builder	Crusoe
Compute owner / operator	Oracle (runs it as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)
Tenant / workload	OpenAI (AI training + inference)
Location	Abilene, Taylor County, TX
Distance from Austin	~185 mi W
Capacity	1.2 GW planned across 8 buildings, ~4M sq ft, 875 acres; ~0.3 GW live
Power model	Behind-the-meter, on-site generation (Lancium campus)
Compute chip	Nvidia GB200 (~450,000 planned)
Known tenants / workloads	OpenAI (named tenant, sourced); Oracle operates the cloud layer
Financing	$9.6B JPMorgan debt; $5B Crusoe/Blue Owl equity; $7.1B Newmark phase-2 loan
Timeline	First buildings live 2025 (OCI); final building topped out late 2025; full campus mid-2026
Status	Operational (partial)

Abilene is two campuses, not one. The name is used for two adjacent but separate sites on Lancium's land near Abilene, Texas. This page covers Campus 1 (Stargate/OpenAI). The combined footprint is about 2.1 GW.

	Campus 1 — Stargate (this page)	Campus 2 — Microsoft
Capacity	~1.2 GW, 8 buildings, 875 acres	~900 MW, 2 buildings
Status	Partially operational (~0.3 GW live)	Under construction (from Mar 2026)
Compute owner / operator	Oracle (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)	Crusoe (merchant AI factory)
Tenant / workload	OpenAI	Microsoft
Program	Stargate JV	None — standalone Microsoft deal

How they got separated: In March 2026, OpenAI and Oracle cancelled a planned 600 MW expansion of Campus 1 after financing stalled and OpenAI's demand forecast shifted. Microsoft took a new adjacent build (Campus 2) instead — which is why both "OpenAI's Abilene" and "Microsoft's Abilene" are correct, and confusing.

The layered stack

Abilene is best read bottom to top, because the roles stack rather than compete. Lancium owns the land and the power campus — the Lancium Clean Campus everything is built on. Crusoe is the developer: it designed, built, and topped out the eight buildings, and was an early equity player. Oracle owns the GPUs and operates the capacity as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the layer most coverage misses — the compute is Oracle's, delivered as cloud. OpenAI is the tenant, whose models train and run on that Oracle-operated capacity; it owns neither the land, the buildings, nor the chips.

Over all of it sits Stargate — not a company but the joint venture the campus belongs to, formed by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and the Abu Dhabi vehicle MGX in January 2025. Nvidia supplies the silicon, roughly 450,000 GB200 GPUs planned, and financing came from JPMorgan ($9.6B debt), Crusoe and Blue Owl (equity), and a $7.1B Newmark construction loan for the second phase. This is the fullest expression of the layered Stargate model: land, build, compute-as-cloud, and workload each held by a different party.

The only live flagship

Abilene is the proof that Stargate could deliver operating data centers rather than announcements. The first two buildings — about 980,000 sq ft and 200-plus MW — went from groundbreaking to operational in roughly a year, and Oracle took its first OCI capacity there in September 2025. Crusoe topped out the final building in late 2025, with full completion targeted mid-2026. As of the latest figures it runs roughly 0.3 GW of a planned 1.2 GW live — the only site in the Texas AI buildout with substantial operating AI capacity. Every other gigawatt on the map is still a forecast.

What runs here

OpenAI is the named tenant, so OpenAI workloads — training and inference — run here as a sourced fact, delivered through Oracle's cloud on Nvidia GB200 hardware. That two-layer arrangement is the distinctive part: the tenant (OpenAI) and the compute operator (Oracle) are different companies, with Oracle owning the chips and selling the capacity as OCI. As with every site, which specific models or runs execute at Abilene versus OpenAI's other Stargate campuses is not disclosed. The tenant and the program are public; the run-level detail is not.

Where it fits

Abilene is the hyperscale-cloud exemplar and the anchor of OpenAI's concentrated Stargate footprint — one program repeated across three Texas campuses. It contrasts sharply with its own next-door neighbor: Campus 1 is a four-layer JV stack operated as Oracle cloud for OpenAI, while the adjacent Campus 2 is a single-operator merchant build (Crusoe) for Microsoft. Same land, same builder, same chips — different owners, tenants, and deals. Reading the two side by side is the clearest way to see how much the word "Abilene" hides.

Last updated September 11, 2026. Capacity is planned; ~0.3 GW is live of 1.2 GW. Campus 1 (Stargate/OpenAI) is distinct from the adjacent Campus 2 (Crusoe/Microsoft). Figures from Stargate announcements and reporting. Status: operational (partial).