Fermi has signed a credit support agreement with AMD to underpin the construction of the first data center at its Project Matador campus in Carson County, Texas.

The deal with the chip firm will support the first deployment of 222MW of IT capacity at Project Matador. The companies have also signed an agreement “outlining a partnership and framework for future expansion of up to 650MW of gross power capacity.”

A credit support agreement is designed to mitigate the risk of investing in a business. Essentially, it means AMD is acting as a guarantor as Fermi seeks to secure financing for its initial data center build-out.

In August, Fermi signed a deal with AI cloud TensorWave to provide up to 650MW of data center space, with the first 222MW expected to come online in the second half of 2027.

AMD has an interest in ensuring this deal comes to fruition, as thousands of its Instinct GPUs will be deployed at the data center to run AI training and inference workloads.

Lee McIntire, Fermi CEO, said, "Our strategic partnership establishes a framework for phases two and three. We have the land, the permits, the water, the power equipment, and the fiber network that give us distinct performance advantages. Our focus remains on building out our planned campus with top-tier partners like AMD."

Fermi expects the contract with TensorWave to be worth up to $6.5 billion over 15 years.

"The pace of AI innovation is driving unprecedented demand for compute and the large-scale data center infrastructure needed to support it," said Mathew Hein, senior vice president and chief strategy officer of corporate development at AMD. "Our collaboration with Fermi is an important step in expanding the infrastructure capacity needed to bring next-generation AI solutions to market.

“Together, we are enabling customers to deploy AMD-powered AI infrastructure at scale and supporting our continued data center momentum."

Fermi has had a turbulent 2026. The company was founded in January 2025 by Rick Perry, former Texas governor and US energy secretary, and Toby Neugebauer, who was the firm’s first CEO, to deliver Project Matador, which at full build-out could offer a massive 17GW of data center space, with an adjoining energy campus. It is being built on land near Amarillo in Texas, which is owned by the Texas Tech University system.

Potentially spanning 18 million sq ft (1.67 million sqm), Fermi intends to utilize a combination of on-site energy sources, including natural gas, solar, wind energy, and nuclear energy. Last year, Fermi said that it had signed a non-binding letter of intent with an unnamed “investment grade-rated tenant” to be the first customer at the campus. But this potential customer later withdrew from the deal, a matter that led to a class action lawsuit and saw the firm’s share price plummet.

In April, Neuberger and Miles Everson, Fermi’s then CFO, departed the company. Nasdaq-listed Fermi’s value hit a new low on Monday, when its shares were trading at $3.43, a far cry from the $25 valuation it reached on its first day of trading a year ago. At the time of writing, Fermi’s shares are worth $3.72 each.