Rick Perry-Backed Fermi REIT Files for $550 Million IPO

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s real estate venture is seeking to raise up to $550 million in an initial public offering.

Fermi Inc., the real estate investment trust co-founded by Perry, the former U.S. Energy Secretary and one-time presidential hopeful, intends to sell 25 million shares at $18 to $22 each, Bloomberg reported.

At the top of that range, Fermi would be valued at $13.2 billion based on outstanding shares. The REIT expects to price the deal Sept. 30 and begin trading Oct. 1 on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, with a dual listing planned for London. UBS, Evercore ISI, Cantor Fitzgerald and Mizuho are leading the underwriting.

Founded in January, Fermi is marketing itself as an infrastructure and real estate play wrapped around energy security and digital demand. Its signature project, dubbed “Project Matador,” is a 5,000-acre advanced energy and intelligence campus on land leased from Texas Tech University. The firm said it aims to lure data center and hyperscaler tenants, with one gigawatt of power expected to be available by the end of next year and an ultimate buildout of up to 11 gigawatts by 2038. Energy would come from a blend of natural gas, solar and nuclear sources.

The pitch taps into a powerful convergence of real estate and technology: land and infrastructure near cheap energy for data centers, AI computing and cloud tenants. Fermi lost $6.37 million from its launch through June, according to its SEC filing. But the IPO offers a high-profile bet that massive energy and land commitments can be packaged as a REIT— a structure typically reserved for office landlords, hotel operators and more traditional asset classes.

Perry sits on the board. His political profile and energy background could help the firm land both capital and regulatory buy-in for its long-term vision.

The IPO comes as data centers have become one of the few bright spots in commercial real estate, drawing institutional money even as office and retail remain under stress.

— Eric Weilbacher