Crusoe and Lancium are running the Abilene play again, 150 miles north. The two companies announced a 1.0 gigawatt AI data center campus on 270 Lancium-owned acres in Childress, Texas on July 15, purpose-built for what the release calls “a leading hyperscale technology company.” The client isn’t named. Construction is expected to start in the third quarter.
A partnership structure worth copying
The division of labor is the reason this keeps working. Lancium acquires and owns the land, secures the power interconnect and manages energy orchestration. Crusoe designs, builds and operates the data center. Neither company is doing the other’s hardest problem, and the interconnect queue position, which is the actual scarce asset in this market, sits with the party that specializes in getting it.
That structure produced results at Abilene fast enough to be worth noting. Crusoe broke ground there in June 2024, energized the first two buildings inside a year, expanded the campus to 1.2 GW, and is now building a second 900 MW facility on adjacent Lancium land. Speed at that scale is unusual, and it’s mostly a function of not restarting land and power work at every site.
Cooling without the water fight
The campus will use a closed-loop, non-evaporative liquid cooling system, plus on-site energy storage. Closed-loop matters in the Texas Panhandle, where groundwater from the Ogallala is the local political flashpoint and evaporative cooling towers on a gigawatt campus would consume tens of millions of gallons a year. The tradeoff is efficiency: closed-loop systems reject heat at higher approach temperatures and cost more to run in summer. Developers are accepting that penalty because water is the permitting risk they can’t engineer around.
Lancium CEO Michael McNamara said the companies will “directly invest in local water and other civil infrastructure,” along with housing, education and emergency services. Childress has roughly 6,000 residents. A campus of this size arrives with a construction workforce that the town’s housing stock cannot absorb, which is why the civil commitments are in the announcement rather than in a later negotiation.
The build-ahead-of-the-tenant pattern
Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller said working with Lancium again “in the same partnership model we built together in Abilene, made Childress an easy choice.” What’s changed since Abilene is that the anchor tenant now gets announced later, or not at all. Developers are moving on power position first and papering the offtake afterward.
The pace is also drawing the first serious regulatory pushback, most visibly New York’s statewide permit freeze. Texas has shown no such inclination. See also the Abilene campus that set the template. Source: Crusoe.