Crusoe is building data centers where power is abundant and cheap

Crusoe Energy is a seven-year-old startup in the right place at the right time. As large companies race to build AI data centers, Crusoe has found a way to power them by building where the energy is instead of following the crowd to the to the most popular locations.

That's why when Oracle approached the company about helping build one of its Stargate project data centers, they chose Abilene, Texas. It’s far from the center of the tech world, but it has one thing going for it — an underused supply of wind power.

Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller was interviewed recently at the Madrona IA Summit 2025 where he talked about the scale of these modern data centers, and how they just don’t compare to the prior generations in terms of energy requirements.

“There's about 1.2 gigawatts of power that powers the Abilene site,” Lochmiller said. “I'm from Denver, and Denver runs on a little bit less than 1.2 gigawatts, so it's about the power of Denver to power this data center.”

By comparison, Northern Virginia — home to the world’s highest concentration of data centers, including Amazon’s — had about 5.5 gigawatts of total capacity in 2024, according to a 2025 JLL report cited by Lochmiller. His point? The power demands of new AI data centers dwarf those of traditional facilities, even as Northern Virginia’s capacity continues to grow with ongoing construction.

Abilene’s untapped power

It’s worth noting that the second-densest concentration of data centers in the U.S. is in Dallas, so the question is why Abilene, Texas? Abilene is a fraction of the size, but it offers much cheaper land and a huge supply of untapped energy. It’s a combination anyone building an enormous data center complex would want.

He recognizes that power is going to be a limiting factor (along with water for cooling), and saw a huge supply in West Texas with little demand. “Abilene was not a data center market before we put a shovel in the ground,” he said. “Now the world knows about Abilene, but what brought us there is that it’s actually an area of Texas where there's abundant wind energy. It’s one of the most consistently windy areas in the country.”

There were also a considerable number of wind turbine farms that were losing money because power prices were going negative. “AI needs a lot of energy. They have a lot of energy, and it made sense for us, instead of trying to build the next data center in Northern Virginia, to focus the demand for compute to areas where we can access low cost energy,” Lochmiller said.

Still, it's worth noting that the data center complex does not get all of its energy from renewables like wind. It also relies on on-site gas turbines to ensure 24/7 reliability at the site, according to the company.

Taking a similar approach in Wyoming

Crusoe is also involved in a massive data center project in Wyoming. But instead of wind energy, the company is tapping into their large supply of natural gas. They plan to build a data center complex, even larger than the one in Texas to take advantage of that energy abundance.

“We've announced a project that we're doing in Wyoming that has initially 1.8 gigawatts of power, and will scale to 10 gigawatts of power,” he said. That’s the equivalent of approximately two New York Cities worth of power. “That’s a ton of power,” Lochmiller said with a laugh.

His company seems to have solved the power puzzle. Unlike some firms buying or building their own power plants, Crusoe is betting on places where cheap energy already exists. Whether that strategy will work over the long haul remains to be seen, but it’s a smart approach for now.

Featured photo courtesy of Crusoe Energy.