Thursday, October 16, 2025

Horizon In The Permian -- CoreWeave And Nvidia-Backed Start-Up Poolside -- October 16, 2025

Locator: 49412HORIZON. 

Data points:

  • de novo / greenfield:
    • 2 GW
    • $10 billion
    • 4-million square feet of facility
    • 2,250 acres 

LDCs:

  • Horizon in the Permian: 2 GW; CoreWeave and Nvidia-backed start-up, Poolside; Mitchell ranch south of Fort Stockton; announced October 16, 2025; link here.
  • Meta's Richland Parish Data Center, Louisiana: link here. 
  • Stargate, link here. 
  • Utah Data Center, link here. Multiple US intel agencies; lead agent is the NSA, precise mission is classified. Footprint: 1.5 million square feet.
  • Texas Cryptologic Center, link here. Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX. Lead agent is the NSA. Two squadrons of the 70th Intel Wing: 543rd Support Squadron and 93rd Intelligence Squadron. About 700,000 square feet.
  • Meta: as of April 16, 2025, AI says the largest data center in the US is owned by Meta Platforms, located in Prineville, Oregon. Out in the middle of nowhere, northeast of Bend, Oregon.
  • Ten largest, link here, June 18, 2023, previously posted.

Announced today.

Link here.


From the linked article: 
  • 2 GW
  • west Texas

A Giant New AI Data Center Is Coming to the Epicenter of America’s Fracking Boom
CoreWeave and Poolside announce partnership 
for a data center built on a sprawling ranch in West Texas

By Bradley Olson

October 15, 2025 9:06 am ET
Co-founder and CTO of Poolside, Eiso Kant, a keynote speech at the VivaTech fair.

Eiso Kant, a co-founder of Poolside, called the ability to build data centers quickly a ‘bottleneck.’ 
Poolside, a Nvidia-backed AI startup is planning to build a massive data-center complex with CoreWeave that is capable of generating its own power on a site that is two-thirds the size of Central Park. 
Poolside and CoreWeave are joining to build a new data center in West Texas. 
The Horizon project aims to deliver a data center with two gigawatts of computing power, with CoreWeave as the anchor tenant. 
The data center will be built on over 500 acres of the Mitchell family’s ranch, with completion expected in the first quarter of 2027. 
Poolside is joining with the cloud-infrastructure provider on a plan to build a data center on more than 500 acres of land that sits on a sprawling ranch in West Texas. The site is owned by the Mitchell family, which has run oil-and-gas companies for decades in the state and is located in the heart of the fracking boom.

Poolside and CoreWeave aim to take advantage of natural gas produced in the Permian Basin, the epicenter of U.S. drilling activity. They are betting that the proximity to natural-gas resources could reduce costs and improve the long-term viability of the data center, as many planned facilities across the U.S. have been built without power generation capabilities.

The project, called Horizon, represents a new model for building and financing AI-related computing expansions. In the near term, Poolside will gain access to a cluster of Nvidia AI computing resources provided by CoreWeave beginning in December. It plans to work with the company longer term on the broader build-out of a data center with two gigawatts of computing firepower, the electric-generation capacity of the Hoover Dam.

Poolside is in the midst of a $2 billion fundraising round that would value the company at $14 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. It raised $500 million about a year ago at a $3 billion valuation. The coding-focused startup, which counts chip giant Nvidia among its investors, is one of several technology companies and incumbents seeking to build AI systems with humanlike intelligence.

The scarcity of computing resources is emerging as a central bottleneck in the multitrillion-dollar AI arms race, with OpenAI and other companies announcing a dizzying array of data-center deals as they seek to maintain an edge.

While many operators moved quickly to secure continued access to the chips needed to build and operate AI models, America doesn’t have enough data centers to accommodate the high demand for space. It is also far from certain whether many data centers will have sufficient power and water to operate without becoming a significant strain on local resources.

“It is not about your headline numbers of gigawatts. It’s about your ability to deliver data centers,” Eiso Kant, a co-founder of Poolside, said in an interview. The ability to build data centers quickly is “the real physical bottleneck in our industry,” he said.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has raced to build massive data centers in the Deep South. 
OpenAI recently announced a flurry of new data-center projects and said it envisions a need for more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity to meet the explosive demand for ChatGPT. Think Stargate.

The Ranch:

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