Construction on Stargate One data center campus set to run through early 2027

Abilene leaders received an update on the Stargate One data center campus, a project described as the city’s largest single investment since Dyess Air Force Base. The update included Lancium CEO and co-founder Michael McNamara, Crusoe senior vice president Jamie McGrath and Development Corporation of Abilene CEO Misty Mayo, who met with Abilene Mayor Weldon Hurt and City Manager Emily Crawford. McNamara said Lancium owns the land and has been in the area since 2020, handling development work and coordinating with the utility commission, the operator and the transmission provider. He said the electrical infrastructure and the land are Lancium’s, while Crusoe built the data center. McNamara said Crusoe’s customer is Oracle. McGrath said construction is expected to last through the first quarter of 2027 for the eight buildings currently under construction. He said about 9,000 craft workers are on-site every day. McGrath described the project as about 4 million square feet and said it is using power provided through Lancium’s land development. He said the company is also “excited to potentially expand” based on the needs of its existing client. Asked what happens inside the buildings, McGrath said the facilities use graphic processing units, or GPUs, run in clusters for model learning and machine learning. He said Crusoe owns and operates the facility but does not operate the systems inside. McGrath said once the systems are “done learning,” the work can be turned into “an inference,” which can be used in tools such as ChatGPT. He added that data centers have become more dense in compute power and networking to process large models, and said he suspected the work could be “something like” ChatGPT but did not know for sure. McGrath also addressed questions about power and water use, saying AI requires significant power because of the density of compute needed to generate models quickly. He said older air-cooled technology is outdated for these systems and that liquid cooling is needed because chips are close together and require more effective cooling. McGrath said the campus uses a closed-loop system in which water is filled once and then cooled and reused through heat exchange, describing it as “just a one time use of, of water” with “relatively no loss” over the life of the project. McGrath said Crusoe looks for “stranded energy,” energy that was not being used, to power compute, and said that approach helped lead to the partnership with Lancium. McNamara said the company came to West Texas because of access to low-cost power, calling it “the most under low cost power in the world.” He also described the broader competition around AI infrastructure, saying he was at the White House before Christmas and that the issue was framed as both economic and national security. He said the ability to build quickly and access energy sources including natural gas, wind and solar are key factors. Mayo said the Development Corporation of Abilene continues working to identify opportunities to grow new industry and support existing companies, including Lancium, Crusoe, “coop and I” and Oracle. She said the organization is working to attract vendors and suppliers connected to the project and noted the recent announcement of a company named Wesco, which she said is operating in a Development Corporation-owned facility at Five Points. Mayo said the goal is to expand and diversify Abilene’s commercial tax base and translate growth into jobs and long-term opportunity for residents. READ MORE: KTXS News on Facebook / ktxstelevision KTXS News on X https://x.com/KTXS_News KTXS News on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ktxsnews/?h... For more information, visit https://ktxs.com/ Have a news tip? Send it to us at news@ktxs.com