Microsoft is taking over a data center construction project in Texas after OpenAI declined to pursue additional expansion there, putting the two companies next to each other at one of the U.S.’s largest AI computing complexes, Crusoe said Friday.
Crusoe said it is working with Microsoft to build two new “AI factory” buildings and an on-site power plant in Abilene, Texas. The new Microsoft work will sit next to where Crusoe has been building an even larger computing campus for OpenAI and Oracle, the companies involved in the flagship Stargate effort.
OpenAI’s Stargate project is associated with a broader push to scale artificial intelligence infrastructure. The scale of the campus helped prompt President Donald Trump to announce it publicly after his inauguration last year as part of a signal about AI investment, according to the AP report.
OpenAI said earlier this month it dropped plans to expand the Abilene project even further. Sachin Katti, OpenAI’s head of compute infrastructure, said in a post on X that OpenAI “considered expanding it further, but ultimately chose to put that additional capacity in other locations,” adding that OpenAI has “more than half a dozen sites under development” across the United States, including a project under development with Oracle in Wisconsin.
The Microsoft move comes as the companies’ relationship has shifted. Microsoft was once OpenAI’s exclusive cloud computing provider and still holds a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI, but the AP report said the two are increasingly pursuing AI development separately even while working on the same tract of land at Abilene.
Crusoe said the Microsoft facilities announced Friday will raise the total number of data center buildings at the campus to 10. The report said the buildings are expected to supply 2.1 gigawatts of computing capacity, a scale far larger than what the developers described when the site was initially planned as a cryptocurrency mining facility before the ChatGPT-driven AI boom.
Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe co-founder and CEO, said in a written statement that the new power plant attached to the Microsoft project will generate 900 megawatts to “continue building the industrial foundation for American AI — at a velocity the industry has never seen.” The report said that would be larger than the existing 350-megawatt, gas-fired power plant attached to the OpenAI-and-Oracle project.
Oracle previously described its on-site plant as a backup source of power while the data centers draw primarily from the regional electricity grid, which includes power supplied by nearby wind farms, the AP report said. The report also included remarks from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said while visiting Abilene last year that “We’re burning gas to run this data center,” and that “in the long trajectory of Stargate” the hope is to rely on many other power sources.
The AI infrastructure buildout is increasingly complicating how technology companies approach emissions goals, much of which come from burning gas, oil and coal, the report said, as large data centers look to secure steady electricity to support expanding AI computing capacity.