Husch Blackwell’s energy and real estate teams assisted Crusoe in reaching financial close in the second phase of a $15 billion joint venture with Blue Owl Capital and Primary Digital Infrastructure to fund the 1.2-gigawatt AI data center in Abilene, Texas.
Under the terms of the joint venture, Crusoe in combination with funds managed by Blue Owl’s Real Assets platform along with Primary Digital Infrastructure will jointly sponsor the construction of six new buildings, which will bring the center to eight buildings upon completion. Construction of the first phase, comprising two buildings and more than 200 megawatts, began in June 2024 and is expected to be energized in the first half of 2025. Construction of the second phase, consisting of the six additional buildings and a total of 1.2 gigawatts, began in March 2025, and is expected to be energized in mid-2026.
Husch Blackwell served as local counsel to Crusoe, advising on the regulatory structure of the sale of private access energy to the data center tenants as well as with local permitting related to the construction of the six new buildings.
The eight buildings are designed for industry-leading scale. They will each operate up to 50,000 NVIDIA GB200 NVL72s on a single integrated network fabric, advancing the frontier of data center design for AI training and inference workloads. The buildings will also feature direct-to-chip liquid cooling via zero-water evaporation cooling systems that continuously recirculate water through a closed loop system. The availability of abundant, low-cost wind energy in Abilene factored heavily into site selection.
The Husch Blackwell team was led by partners Carrie Collier-Brown and Nikelle Meade and also included attorneys Alaina Zermeno, Holly Heinrich, Will Gunnell, Dakota Parish, and paralegal Lucy Yanock.
For further information, please refer to the May 21, 2025, Crusoe news release.