Nvidia to Invest Up to $3 Billion in Blackstone-Backed Power Firm Behind Stargate

Nvidia has agreed to invest $2 billion into Lancium, the power infrastructure developer behind the OpenAI and Oracle AI campus in Texas, and has agreed to commit another $1 billion as the developer secures additional planned power, three people familiar with the transaction said. The deal values Lancium and its portfolio of land and power connections at around $10 billion in enterprise value, which includes the investment and its debt.

The $2 billion would give Nvidia a roughly 20% stake in the Blackstone-backed power developer. Nvidia’s stake could grow to around 30% with the additional $1 billion once more of Lancium’s campuses hit certain thresholds, including grid hookups, the people said. The deal is intended to help Nvidia secure multiple gigawatts of pending power rights for its chip customers’ data projects at a time when energy for AI data centers is becoming harder to come by.

Lancium is among a group of companies such as Cloverleaf Infrastructure and Crusoe that find land parcels for AI data centers near substations and transmission lines with available capacity. Such powered land developers are attracting interest from private equity firms and big tech companies. The Information earlier reported that Lancium was in talks with major tech companies including Nvidia for a minority stake sale that could fetch an enterprise value from $7 to $10 billion.

Lancium has already secured and is developing 4 gigawatts of power on the Texas grid that it has contracted to other customers. Additionally, it has powered land under development in Texas that could draw as much as 15 gigawatts of electricity that it is waiting to receive the right to connect.

A wrinkle came Monday, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a pause in new data center grid connections until projects can go through further reviews. It’s unclear how these new reviews impact the timing of Lancium’s next campuses, but its 15 gigawatts are considered well-positioned for approval because the utility American Electric Power has already completed required studies to energize lines to its campuses.

The 4 gigawatts of power that Lancium has already contracted includes the 1.2 gigawatts for the Oracle and Open AI campus at Abilene that’s part of OpenAI’s Stargate computing rollout. It also includes 900 megawatts for a new data center that Lancium partner Crusoe is building for Microsoft in Abilene, a gigawatt that QTS Data Centers recently contracted for in Turkey, Tex. and another gigawatt that Crusoe is building in Childress, Tex.

Lancium is laying the groundwork to develop even more powered land by 2035 that could benefit from yet another proposed high-voltage transmission network in Texas, The Information has previously reported.

The capital should help it expand the business as it eyes a potential initial public offering in 2027, two of the people said. If it decides to go forward with a public listing, it would follow a string of data center and infrastructure developers such as Switch and CyrusOne to consider an IPO.

The Nvidia investment in Lancium is only an equity stake and does not include credit guarantees for data center construction and leases, according to the people. However, Nvidia has been considering credit guarantees for other projects—including a massive proposed 10 gigawatt project in Ohio that involves OpenAI and SoftBank.

In recent months, Nvidia has been ramping up the pace and scale of its investing. In the quarter ending in April, it poured $18.6 billion into private companies and infrastructure funds, more than it invested in the entire year prior. This year alone, Nvidia has written separate $2 billion checks into cloud providers CoreWeave and Nebius, networking firms Lumentum and Coherent, and semiconductor company Marvell.