Sharon AI and New Era Helium have acquired land outside Odessa in Texas for a natural gas-powered data center.
The two companies this week announced they have signed a letter of intent (LOI) with Grow Odessa to acquire a 200-acre site in Ector County in West Texas for the development of a 250MW AI/HPC data center that will be powered via natural gas from New Era.
The companies said the site is near fiber optic networks, two natural gas transmission lines, and CO2 pipeline infrastructure. The CO2 infrastructure will reportedly enable Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) through enhanced oil recovery.
The initial phase of the project is projected to go online by late 2026. The joint venture, Texas Critical Data Centers (TCDC), expects to finalize a natural gas supply contract with New Era Helium in Q2 2025.
“We are very excited to be developing large-scale data center infrastructure in the US with our partners at New Era Helium, who bring considerable energy infrastructure experience to the joint venture,” said Wolf Schubert, CEO of Sharon AI.
Will Gray, CEO of New Era Helium, added: “With the initial site now identified, TCDC is poised to execute on its planned power strategy for the behind-the-meter data center campus. New Era Helium is pleased to be working with GROW Odessa and will work towards the necessary due diligence in order to close on the planned site in a timely manner.”
Founded last year, Sharon AI is a high-performance computing company focused on AI cloud GPU compute infrastructure. The company has Nvidia L40S, H100, and AMD MI3000X GPUs at Equinix and NextDC data centers as well as custom-built Modular Data Centers (MDCs).
Sharon and New Era announced a joint venture to develop a natural gas data center in November that was finalized last month.
The initial agreement selected Pecos Slope Field in New Mexico, owned and operated by New Era Helium, as the site for the proposed data center.
However, after the companies expanded the planned capacity of the data center from an initial 90MW to 250MW, the joint venture instead identified multiple sites in the Permian Basin that could provide access to New Era’s natural gas while situating the data center near existing fiber optic cable and associated infrastructure.
Russell Tippin, president of economic development corporation Grow Odessa (formerly the Odessa Industrial Development Corporation), said: “Ector County and the Odessa area are the perfect fit for this net-zero energy data center project and we are proud that Sharon AI has chosen Ector County for this exciting new project. We are looking forward to working with Sharon AI and New Era Helium, Inc. along with the team at the Odessa Development Corporation to move this project to the finish line.”
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. New Era went public last year after a merger with Roth Capital's Roth CH Acquisition V special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
Sharon AI announced a business combination agreement with the Roth CH Acquisition Co. SPAC last month to “create a leading specialized AI/HPC infrastructure platform.”
Terms and further details weren’t shared.
Enhanced oil recovery, also called tertiary recovery, is the extraction of crude oil from an oil field that cannot be extracted otherwise. One method for recovery is via CO2 injection, which captures CO2 in the ground and forces the remaining oil to where it can be recovered. Its sustainability merits are questionable, given the extracted oil will release more CO2.
