Nvidia-Backed Firms Plan Massive West Texas AI Data Center

In the latest land grab of the AI infrastructure boom, a Nvidia-backed startup is joining forces with cloud computing heavyweight CoreWeave to build a sprawling, self-powered data center complex in West Texas.

Poolside, an AI company focused on next-gen code generation, plans to construct the 500-acre facility — dubbed Horizon — on a portion of the Mitchell family’s Longfellow Ranch, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The site sits atop the Permian Basin, America’s busiest oil field, and will use natural gas produced on-site to power the operation, a growing trend among AI firms seeking more control over their infrastructure amid soaring demand and constrained chip supply.

The Horizon project lands amid consolidation across the data-center sector.

Plano-based Aligned Data Centers, which operates 50 campuses across the Americas, was recently sold to a BlackRock- and Nvidia-backed consortium in a $40 billion deal, one of the largest in the industry’s history, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Poolside and CoreWeave plan to build a data center capable of generating its own electricity, an unusual move in a sector where power access has become a critical choke point.

Another emerging player in West Texas, Rick Perry’s Fermi Real Estate Investment Trust signature project, “Project Matador,” is a 5,000-acre advanced energy and intelligence campus aiming to attract data center and hyperscaler tenants, with plans for 11 gigawatts of power by 2038 from natural gas, solar and nuclear sources on land leased from Texas Tech University.

CoreWeave will anchor the first 250 megawatts of capacity at Horizon, expected to come online late next year, with room to expand another 500 megawatts.

Horizon’s on-site power generation is designed to mitigate grid constraints that have slowed other data-center projects in Texas, where energy regulators are now empowered to throttle big users during shortages.

Poolside co-founder Eiso Kant said the ability to deploy infrastructure quickly is now “the real physical bottleneck” in AI development. Modular construction methods and proximity to energy sources are meant to cut costs and speed delivery; a 2-gigawatt build would normally cost about $16 billion, not counting Nvidia’s advanced chips.

Poolside is also in a $2 billion fundraising round that would value the company at $14 billion, up from $3 billion last year. It’s among a cluster of well-funded AI upstarts — including Elon Musk’s xAI and OpenAI — that are racing to secure computing at unprecedented scale.

— Eric Weilbacher