Cryptomine-turned-AI firm Crusoe has confirmed it is building a large GPU-focused data center in Texas.
The company said it has designed and engineered, and is now building, a 200MW data center at the Lancium Clean Campus outside Abilene, Texas.
The multibillion-dollar purpose-built data center will include high-density data halls specially designed to enable AI workloads and optimized for direct-to-chip liquid cooling or rear-door heat exchangers - while flexible enough to include air cooling.
At completion, each data center building will be able to operate up to 100,000 GPUs on a single integrated network fabric.
The data center is expected to be energized in 2025, and be the first phase of a planned 1.2GW data center that Crusoe will develop at the Lancium Clean Campus.
"Data centers are rapidly evolving to support modern AI workloads, requiring new levels of high-density rack space, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, and unprecedented overall energy demands," said Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe’s co-founder and CEO.
"We've designed this data center to enable the largest clusters of GPUs in the world to drive new breakthroughs in AI."
Lochmiller added that Abilene "presents a unique opportunity to sustainably power the future of AI," and said his company was "thrilled to have the support of the city in this ambitious endeavor."
Lancium, which Crusoe has previously partnered with, has long been developing a cryptomine data center site in Abilene. When given the go-ahead in 2021 the scheme, dubbed Project Artemis, was described as a "renewable energy power data center campus" to be built on around 800 acres of land around Spinks Road and Summerhill Road in Taylor County. Able to offer 200MW, it reportedly has the potential to reach 1GW. Ground was set to break in Q1 2022.
“Lancium’s mission to decarbonize compute for the most energy-intensive workloads and this scale and type of data center is a game-changing example,” added Michael McNamara, co-founder and CEO of Lancium. “Our energy management expertise, the integration of incremental storage and solar generation resources behind-the-meter at the campus, and Crusoe’s design approach will combine to deliver the maximum amount of green energy at the lowest possible cost, while bringing significant benefits to the Abilene community.”
As DCD reported this month, Crusoe is pivoting from placing data center modules along oil pipelines to permanent data center buildings, and has come up with a design able to offer 100MW and host up to 100,000 GPUs.
Founded in 2018, the company first launched with a service to deliver containerized data centers to oil wells in the US, where they would harness natural gas that would otherwise be "flared off" and wasted.
Originally the company was using the energy for Bitcoin mining, but later extended its compute services to HPC and AI through its Crusoe Cloud offering. Crusoe’s move to more permanent hosting locations began late last year when the company announced a deal to locate a number of GPUs in atNorth's ICE02 data center in Iceland. The company has also partnered with Digital Realty.
In its most recent ESG report, published last month, Crusoe said it has around 200MW of deployed capacity; around a third of its Crusoe Cloud offering was powered by gas flare sites, while the remainder was powered by third-party data centers. The company is also planning to deploy 100MW of behind-the-meter capacity at a wind farm.
A recent report from The Information suggests Crusoe is about to sign a deal to lease the Abilene site to Oracle, which in turn will provide GPU capacity for Microsoft to be used by OpenAI.
A number of crypto firms are making major pivots into AI, both setting up their own GPU clouds and hosting hardware for providers (and in some cases both). Those making the switch include CoreWeave, Core Scientific, Northern Data, Hut 8, Earth Wind and Power, and Applied Digital.
