Microsoft takes up residence next to OpenAI, Oracle at Crusoe's 900 MW Texas datacenter expansion

Summary

Bitcoin farmer turned bit barn builder Crusoe revealed plans to add 900 megawatts of capacity to its Abilene Texas datacenter campus on Friday to support Microsoft's AI ambitions. The new campus will be located alongside the 1.2 gigawatt facility Crusoe is building for Oracle and OpenAI as part of its $500 billion Stargate initiative, announced early last year. Oracle and OpenAI had reportedly planned to lease the additional capacity until negotiations and financing fell through. Meta was expected to lay claim to the unbuilt and yet untapped datacenter expansion, but it seems Microsoft will now take up residence at the site instead. While Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI has certainly changed in recent years, its possible that Redmond could end up using the site to serve the model dev. The new campus will feature two new data halls along with an on-site power plant capable of delivering 900 MW of behind-the-meter energy to the facilities. The bit barns themselves will each support 336 megawatts of critical IT load. "By integrating 900 megawatts of new on-site power generation, we will continue building the industrial foundation for American AI – at a velocity the industry has never seen," Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe CEO said in a canned statement. According to Crusoe, this expansion will bring the site's capacity to 2.1 gigawatts, though "capacity" seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Only about 200 megawatts of existing 1.2 gigawatt projects have actually been powered on. Crusoe says that the remaining gigawatt should come online throughout 2026. Work on the second campus, which Microsoft's AI models and services will call home, is currently in the "land-clearing and site preparation" phase. Crusoe doesn't anticipate the facilities will be operational until the middle of next year. Crusoe didn't elaborate on how its on-site power plants generate their power, but given the timeline, natural gas generators or fuel cells are the most likely candidates. ...