AI Data Center West Texas: 2 GW Project Horizon

A 2-gigawatt AI data center campus is under construction in West Texas, drawing power directly from Permian Basin natural gas and bypassing the ERCOT grid entirely. Project Horizon, a joint venture between AI startup Poolside and cloud infrastructure provider CoreWeave, will occupy 568 acres at Longfellow Ranch — a site with an existing on-site gas plant originally built by Occidental Petroleum — making it one of the largest behind-the-meter energy infrastructure deployments in the US energy sector.

Project Horizon — Scale and Site

The Longfellow Ranch site has been operated by the Mitchell family as an oil and gas concern for decades. The 568-acre footprint is being developed in eight phases of 250 MW each, using a hybrid modular off-site construction model that allows multiple phases to be built in parallel rather than sequentially. Full 2 GW capacity — comparable to the output of the Hoover Dam — is targeted for completion in Q1 2027.

Phase 1 delivers 250 MW, with an option to expand to 500 MW. CoreWeave has taken a 15-year anchor lease on Phase 1 capacity, with Poolside receiving 40,000+ Nvidia GB300 NVL72 GPUs from December 2025 as part of a separate supply arrangement.

Behind-the-Meter Power — The Permian Basin Advantage

Project Horizon’s power architecture is a direct product of its Permian Basin location. Natural gas is sourced on-site, with an existing gas plant inherited from Occidental Petroleum providing the generation base. Electricity is produced using aero-derivative turbines equipped with SCR emissions controls. Battery storage handles load-balancing, and a grid interconnect provides redundancy — but the campus is designed to operate independently of ERCOT under normal conditions.

This matters in the context of Texas grid management. ERCOT has recently been granted new authority to curtail large power users — including data centers — during emergency conditions. A behind-the-meter architecture insulates operations from that constraint. The same approach is gaining traction across the broader AI infrastructure convergence playing out between hyperscalers and energy asset owners.

Air cooling is used throughout, avoiding the water consumption challenges that affect data center development in arid regions. Dual long-haul fibre routes — ultra-high-bandwidth, low-latency — serve the campus.

CoreWeave as Anchor Tenant

CoreWeave brings established infrastructure scale to Project Horizon. The company recently secured a $14.2 billion services deal with Meta Platforms running to 2031, and in 2024 acquired Core Scientific, adding 1.3 GW of existing capacity plus 1 GW+ expansion potential to its portfolio.

The 15-year lease structure at Phase 1 reflects the long-horizon capital requirements of data center infrastructure at this scale — and gives Poolside a committed compute base as it scales its AI code-automation and AGI research programmes. Poolside, founded in 2023 by Eiso Kant and Jason Warner and backed by Nvidia, is currently raising $2 billion in a round targeting a $14 billion valuation, having previously raised $500 million.

Construction Model and Cost

The hybrid modular build approach is central to the Horizon cost thesis. Industry standard for a 2 GW data center campus runs to approximately $16 billion, according to Poolside co-CEO Eiso Kant. The modular, parallelised construction model is expected to bring that figure down — though chip costs, quoted separately, add further capital requirements on top of civil build costs.

Off-site modular fabrication allows civil construction across multiple phases to proceed simultaneously rather than sequentially, compressing the overall development timeline. The same approach has been adopted in tank terminal and LNG facility construction — sectors where Permian Basin energy infrastructure investment has consistently driven construction innovation.

AI Data Centers and the US Energy Infrastructure Equation

Texas is the second-largest US data center market after Virginia, with advantages that include a deregulated energy market, strong fibre infrastructure, and large tracts of available land close to energy supply. Project Horizon represents the logical endpoint of a trend visible across the sector: compute developers seeking proximity to generation assets rather than relying on existing grid connections.

The pattern is consistent with broader convergence between AI infrastructure and energy operations — from the Aramco-Yokogawa autonomous control deployment at Fadhili to hyperscalers’ direct power procurement strategies. As Alphabet’s $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect Power illustrated, the separation between energy asset ownership and compute infrastructure is narrowing.

For the ai data center west texas market specifically, Project Horizon sets a new reference point on scale. A full Permian Basin gas-to-compute stack — from wellhead to GPU — is no longer hypothetical. Full project details are available via the Poolside announcement, with additional technical reporting from Data Center Dynamics.