New Era Helium and Sharon AI have finalized the formation of a 50/50 joint venture to fund, develop, and construct a 250MW natural gas-powered data center in the Permian Basin, West Texas, US.
The joint venture is named Texas Critical Data Center. The company is currently negotiating with New Era Helium for a long-term gas supply agreement, which is expected to be finalized in the next 30 days.
The supply agreement will be at a mutually agreed-upon fixed cost for five years plus three five-year options for 20 years.
Will Gray II, CEO of New Era Helium, commented: “The creation of Texas Critical Data Centers reflects our goal of building innovative energy infrastructure to support the growing needs of the AI/HPC-driven digital world."
New Era will provide the energy infrastructure required to power the project, including designing and constructing a gas-fired power plant, carbon capture and storage (CCS), and associated pipeline works.
The joint venture's next task is finalizing the site where the data center will be constructed, which is expected to be completed in Q1 2025.
The initial agreement, signed in November, selected Pecos Slope Field in New Mexico, owned and operated by New Era Helium, as the site for the data center. However, after the companies secured additional electricity capacity, expanding the proposed capacity of the data center from an initial 90MW to 250MW, the joint venture identified multiple sites in the Permian Basin that would provide access to New Era’s natural gas while situating the data center near existing fiber optic cable and associated infrastructure.
Founded this year, Sharon AI is a high-performance computing company that focuses on AI cloud GPU compute infrastructure. The company has Nvidia L40S, H100, and AMD MI3000X GPUs at Equinix and NextDC data centers and custom-built Modular Data Centers (MDCs).
New Era Helium is an exploration and production company that sources helium produced in association with the production of natural gas reserves in the US. The company was made public earlier this month following a merger with Roth CH. The new company began trading on the Nasdaq on December 9, 2024.
