Texas oil and gas company Diamondback Energy is looking to partner with data center operators to locate their facilities in the Permian Basin.

In its Q4 earnings call, Diamondback president Kaes Van’t Hof said the company is poised to be a “premier partner” for data centers seeking cheap land and access to natural gas.

He also said the company is looking to partner with independent power producers to “build a large, behind-the-meter gas power plant in the basin, using Diamondback gas."

The power produced would feed a large-scale hyperscale customer, according to Hof. “We're still confidentially discussing it with the hyperscalers,” he said.

The company operates 65,000 acres in the Permian Basin, one of the US’s major oil and gas-producing regions. According to its latest earnings report, it produced about 107.25 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas from the Permian Basin in Q4, or around 1.17 Bcf per day.

Natural gas producers are increasingly targeting the data center sector as a crucial customer going forward. Texas, in particular, is becoming a hub for behind-the-meter gas-powered data centers, with several notable deals signed in the past 12 months.

For example, last month, CloudBurst, a US data center developer, signed a ten-year supply agreement with midstream gas company Energy Transfer to provide its debut Texas data center with behind-the-meter power. According to the partners, the gas supply has the capacity to generate 1.2GW of direct power.

Large-scale multinational oil and gas firms have also begun to target the data center market. Last month, Chevron partnered with Engine No. 1 to develop and scale natural gas-powered power plants to serve co-located data centers in the Southeast, Midwest, and West of the US. The two companies will collaborate with GE Vernova to develop up to 4GW of gas generation.

Before this, ExxonMobil revealed it was planning to develop a 1.5GW natural gas-fired power plant dedicated to the data center sector.