Inside the Start of Project Stargate—and the Startup Powering It

On the barren outskirts of Abilene, Texas, traffic had snarled to a crawl: It was shift-change time at Project Stargate, and as several hundred workers drove off the 800-acre site that contains the debut Stargate data center, plumes of dust from the red clay dirt followed the caravan of pickup trucks out of sight. Even without the oxidized haze, no one would’ve had their windows open. On this early evening in February, the thermometer hovered around 90 degrees.

Regardless of time or temperature, work here goes on 24/7, which is exactly as Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller wants it. “This was all trees and shrubs back in June last year. And since then we’ve had 1.2 million man hours worked on the site,” Lochmiller said. “There’s a lot of activity here.”

Off in the distance: a pair of H-shaped buildings, each partially completed—the actual $3.4 billion data center Crusoe has custom-designed for Oracle and OpenAI as part of Stargate, an initiative that will involve a $500 billion expansion in AI infrastructure that the companies announced with Donald Trump at the White House on the second day of his new administration. Lochmiller anticipates they’ll have the power at the site fully turned on by June, concluding in about a third of the time that many such projects can take. (His co-founder, Cully Cavness, has considered whether they might somehow qualify for a Guinness World Records entry.)