Blackstone has reportedly invested $500 million into Texan data center firm Lancium.
Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that Blackstone recently closed the equity stake in Lancium.
Lancium aims to build five data center campuses across West Texas totaling 5GW. The new investment will help bring the sites online by 2028.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. advised Lancium on the transaction.
Representatives for Blackstone, Lancium, and Goldman Sachs declined to comment to the publication.
Launched in 2017 as a cryptomining firm, Lancium aimed to colocate data centers at renewable sites, such as wind farms, and use excess capacity to power crypto and HPC hardware.
Lancium currently operates one campus around Fort Stockton. It broke ground on the site in September 2021; totaling 110 acres, the site offers 325MW of capacity – much of which is dedicated to mining.
The company currently has a large campus in development in Abilene due to launch next year. When given the go-ahead in 2021, Project Artemis was described as a "renewable energy power data center campus" to be built on around 800 acres of land along Spinks and Summerhill roads in Taylor County. Able to offer 200MW, it reportedly has the potential to reach 1GW by 2025, and could eventually total 2GW. Ground was originally set to break in Q1 2022.
Crusoe Energy, another crypto company pivoting to AI data centers, is set to build two buildings totaling 200MW at Lancium’s “Clean Campus” in Abilene. The site is planned to be leased to Oracle, who will then rent it to Microsoft, for use by OpenAI.
Crusoe is developing the site through a $3.4 billion joint venture with Blue Owl Capital and Primary Digital. According to DevelopAbilene, Lancium is leasing approximately 90 acres to Crusoe, which will develop 998,000 sq ft (92,715 sqm) of data center space.
On its website, Lancium lists plans for another Clean Campus in Childress that will total more than 1GW across 3,000 acres, with the potential to add another gigawatt.
It also lists additional projects in development potentially totaling 2,500 acres and 3.9GW of capacity. A 2022 presentation suggests up to eight campuses.
As well as QTS and AirTrunk, Blackstone has myriad data center investments, including in Vnet, Lumina CloudInfra, Copeland, Park Place Technologies, and Winthrop Technologies, alongside joint ventures with COPT, Digital Realty, and others.
The alternative investment management company's data center portfolio totals around $70 billion, with another $100bn in its prospective pipeline.
