🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

The canceled expansion is a hiccup in a project of unprecedented scale and cost

• The Abilene site serves as the flagship U.S. campus for Stargate, an AI infrastructure effort that started as a plan for one $100 billion, 5-gigawatt data center 1.
• Financing for the Abilene campus totals $15 billion, which makes it the most expensive data center campus ever financed 2.
• Crusoe is developing the site after leaving crypto-mining to build and run AI data centers, with no track record at gigawatt-scale construction 2.
• The project is still scaling up since the first phase went live in September 2025, after Oracle began shipping the first Nvidia GB200 racks (server systems built around Nvidia’s GB200 AI chips) in June 2025 3.

Nvidia’s new role as kingmaker signals a shift in the AI supply chain

• Nvidia now does more than supply components since it also lines up partners across the stack.
• Nvidia paid Crusoe a $150 million deposit and helped court Meta as a potential tenant, aiming to keep the expanded facility filled with its chips instead of rival AMD’s 4.
• OpenAI canceled the expansion for technical strategy rather than financial strain, after infrastructure engineers settled on 1-2 gigawatt sites as a performance “sweet spot” for training clusters 1.
• Meta’s quick interest suggests multi-gigawatt sites with secured power have become scarce assets, which raises competition among tech giants for access 4.