About an hour's drive from Dallas lies the city of Abilene. Until recently, the surrounding landscape was home to coyotes and roadrunners. Today, it is the site of one of the world's largest artificial intelligence campuses. And its story has just taken quite a turn. Data center developer Crusoe originally built this massive campus for OpenAI and Oracle. But negotiations stalled. Financing faltered, OpenAI's needs changed, and ultimately both companies backed away from expanding the project. The site became available. But not for long.
Microsoft has signed an agreement with Crusoe to lease the roughly 700-megawatt campus. The property directly adjoins the flagship Stargate project, which OpenAI and Oracle have been building since the beginning of last year. Microsoft will now construct two new so-called "AI factory" buildings and its own power plant there.
Project Stargate
It is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects of the AI era in the United States. President Donald Trump announced it immediately after taking office as proof of America's confidence in the development of artificial intelligence. It was a project backed by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and Crusoe.
Crusoe has already completed two buildings for OpenAI and Oracle. Oracle is rapidly filling them with servers on which OpenAI trains and operates its products, including ChatGPT. Six more buildings for the original partners are nearing completion and should be finished by the end of this year.
As recently as March 2026, OpenAI confirmed that Abilene is its largest AI infrastructure campus in the United States. However, the company decided to expand its capacity elsewhere rather than here. Sachin Katti, OpenAI's head of compute infrastructure, explained it simply: they had intended to expand in Abilene, but ultimately chose other locations. OpenAI is reportedly developing more than half a dozen sites across the United States, including one with Oracle in Wisconsin.
Microsoft and OpenAI
This turn of events has another interesting dimension. Microsoft holds an approximately 27% stake in OpenAI and until recently was its exclusive cloud services provider. But the relationship between the two companies is taking on a different shape. They are increasingly building their own infrastructure in parallel, even though they share a site in Texas. So yes, Microsoft and OpenAI will literally be neighbors in Abilene. And competitors at the same time.
Microsoft has accelerated significantly in recent months. In a single quarter, it signed commitments to lease data center capacity worth around $50 billion. This marked a reversal from the situation a year ago, when the company halted or slowed down a number of projects. Now it is taking every available space that emerges.
A 900-megawatt power plant and the climate question
The new agreement with Crusoe also includes the construction of a gas-fired power plant with a capacity of 900 megawatts. That is significantly more than the existing 350-megawatt power plant, which Oracle describes as a backup source for its campus. The data centers primarily draw power from the regional grid, where wind farms play a major role. But operating AI at such a scale consumes enormous amounts of energy. And much of it still comes from fossil fuels. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, admitted as much during a visit to Abilene: "We are burning gas to operate this data center." With the hope that this will change over time.
Microsoft's entire campus, including the additional buildings, will reach a total capacity of 2.1 gigawatts. For comparison, the average coal-fired power plant produces around 500 megawatts. These figures speak for themselves.
Additional sources: theinformation.com and constructionreviewonline.com
