In West Texas, a new data center complex is set to be built by Poolside, an artificial intelligence company specializing in code generation, and CoreWeave, a cloud computing firm. The facility, named Horizon, will occupy 500 acres on the Mitchell family’s Longfellow Ranch in the Permian Basin. This region is known as the busiest oil field in the United States.
The project aims to generate its own electricity using natural gas produced on-site. This approach reflects a broader trend among AI companies that are seeking greater control over their infrastructure as demand for computing power grows and chip supplies remain limited.
The construction of Horizon comes during a period of consolidation in the data center industry. Recently, Aligned Data Centers, based in Plano and operating 50 campuses across the Americas, was acquired by a consortium led by BlackRock and Nvidia for $40 billion. This transaction ranks among the largest deals ever made in this sector.
Rick Perry’s Fermi Real Estate Investment Trust is also developing “Project Matador,” a 5,000-acre advanced energy campus nearby. That project plans to offer up to 11 gigawatts of power from multiple sources including natural gas, solar, and nuclear energy by 2038.
CoreWeave will anchor the first phase of Horizon with an initial capacity of 250 megawatts. The site has room to expand by another 500 megawatts and is expected to begin operations late next year. By generating its own power on-site, Horizon aims to avoid some of the grid constraints that have delayed other projects in Texas.
Poolside co-founder Eiso Kant commented: “the ability to deploy infrastructure quickly is now ‘the real physical bottleneck’ in AI development.” He noted that modular construction methods and proximity to energy sources should help reduce costs and speed up delivery timelines. A comparable two-gigawatt build could cost about $16 billion before factoring in advanced chips supplied by Nvidia.
Poolside is currently raising $2 billion in funding at a valuation of $14 billion—an increase from $3 billion last year—as competition intensifies among AI startups like xAI and OpenAI for large-scale computing resources.
