Stargate Abilene (Crusoe / Lancium Clean Campus)

Two years ago this was scrubland on the north side of Abilene. Today it’s the first physical piece of Stargate, the $500 billion AI infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. The Crusoe-built campus on Lancium’s Clean Campus is the project’s Site 1, and it has grown into one of the largest data center builds in the country.

Project Scope

The campus is heading to eight buildings and roughly 4 million square feet, with a total power capacity of 1.2 gigawatts. The first two buildings, spanning about 980,000 square feet, came online supporting more than 200 MW of IT load for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which runs the systems for OpenAI. A second phase added six more buildings and pushed the campus to its full footprint, with the final structure topping out in 2026.

Each building is engineered to run up to 50,000 NVIDIA GB200 chips on a single network fabric, which is the whole point of the design: dense, tightly coupled compute for training and inference at frontier scale. The build has run hot from the start. The site has carried roughly 2,000 workers a day, a figure expected to approach 5,000 during peak phase-two construction.

The structure of the project is unusual. Lancium developed the land and coordinates with the grid. Crusoe owns, built and operates the facility but doesn’t run the computers inside it. Oracle handles the technical integration of the supercomputers, and OpenAI is the end user. DPR Construction served as the lead construction partner, and the speed of delivery is a big part of why the campus has drawn national attention.

Why It Matters

Abilene is the proof of concept for a new category of megaproject: the AI factory. It compresses a power plant’s worth of electrical and mechanical work into a build schedule measured in months, not years, and it’s reshaping how the industry thinks about data center delivery. The campus also explains a lot of the recent construction data. When analysts say data center work is pulling the national backlog higher while the rest of the market stays flat, this is the kind of project they mean.

It’s not without friction. Powering 1.2 GW in West Texas means leaning on on-site generation, and the water and grid questions that follow projects like this haven’t gone away. But as a demonstration of how fast a hyperscale AI site can go from dirt to operational, Stargate Abilene set the pace that other campuses are now measured against. Exchange tracks the broader buildout, including Meta’s 1-GW Indiana campus and ‘The Barn’ Stargate site in Michigan.

Project Team & Details