The shell is up.
Crusoe topped out the eighth and final Phase 1 building at the OpenAI Stargate data center campus in Abilene, Texas this month, closing out the vertical work on what’s become the largest AI training campus under one fence in the United States. Eight buildings, roughly 4 million square feet, 1.2 GW of total power capacity, and four of the eight buildings already humming, running Oracle Cloud Infrastructure workloads for OpenAI.
What Got Built
Phase 1 started moving dirt in July 2024, with first Nvidia GB200 racks landing earlier this year. By September 2025, the first two buildings were live. The build cadence on the back half, six buildings vertical and topped out in roughly eight months, is the pace you’d see on a portfolio housing job, not a hyperscale data center. That speed is the whole story.
The campus runs on 1.2 GW. At peak, a single training run on the most ambitious frontier models lights up six-figure GPU counts pulling several hundred megawatts of continuous load. The buildings sit on a transmission-grade interconnect with Lancium handling the behind-the-meter power coordination, which is how Crusoe avoided the multi-year ERCOT queue that’s stalled other Texas data center projects.
Trade-staffing is the other number worth pausing on. About 7,000 electricians, mechanical workers, structural ironworkers, and concrete crews have been on site daily during peak construction. That’s a full-blown labor market inside a town of 125,000 people. Local hotels, RV parks, and short-term-rental occupancy in Abilene tells the same story.
What Topping Out Doesn’t Mean
The structural milestone is real, but a topped-out data center isn’t a finished data center. Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing scopes still have to land, the white-space fit-out for each hall takes 4 to 6 months per building, and the commissioning sequence for high-density GPU pods runs longer than legacy CPU halls because of the liquid-cooling integration. Crusoe has said the eight Phase 1 buildings will be in commissioning through Q1 2027.
A Phase 2 plan is already public. Crusoe announced two additional buildings plus an on-site power plant, this time with Microsoft as the customer instead of OpenAI. That campus sits right next to Phase 1. If Phase 2 lands on a similar schedule, Abilene reaches roughly 6 million square feet of data center footprint by 2028.
The Broader Megaproject Picture
Stargate Abilene is the most complete site in the OpenAI / Oracle / SoftBank-coordinated Stargate program, but it isn’t the only one. Other sites under early site-prep include locations in New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, each sized in the gigawatt range. The first Phase 1 project also landed a $7.1 billion construction loan earlier in 2026, which is what unlocked the speed on the back half of the build.
For the broader construction market, Stargate fits the data-center backlog story Exchange has been tracking. ABC’s quarterly backlog hit a 10-month high in early 2026 driven almost entirely by data center awards. Abilene is what 1.2 GW of that backlog actually looks like when it’s vertical and topped out.
The next benchmark is whether Phase 2 can replicate the pace. The labor market in Abilene is now the question. With Phase 1 staffing out and Microsoft’s Phase 2 spinning up alongside it, the contractors involved are about to find out how deep the local trade pool actually goes. The DCD report on the topping out has the full milestone breakdown.