Microsoft Takes 900MW Crusoe Campus in Abilene

Microsoft will use a new 900-megawatt AI data centre campus in Abilene, Texas, on land next to the Stargate site built for Oracle and OpenAI, after those two companies decided not to expand there. The developer, Crusoe, announced the campus on 27 March 2026, saying it would support “large scale AI workloads for Microsoft”. Bloomberg had reported three days earlier that Microsoft would rent the capacity Oracle and OpenAI had passed over.

Update, 2 November 2026: this article has been rewritten. The original version did not name the site or developer, presented the deal as Microsoft buying the capacity outright and treated 900MW as computing capacity. Crusoe’s announcement shows Microsoft is a tenant of a Crusoe-built campus, and that 900MW is the on-site power plant; the two buildings are designed for 336MW of IT load each. Speculative estimates of emissions and training capacity have been removed. As of early November, the first building was still due to be energised in mid-2027.

What Crusoe is building for Microsoft in Abilene

According to Crusoe, the new campus has two buildings, each designed to deliver 336MW of “critical IT load”, the power available to servers and networking equipment, for a total of 672MW. It will have its own 900MW power plant “behind the meter”, meaning it generates its own electricity on site rather than drawing all of it from the grid, paired with medium-voltage battery storage. Crusoe says the buildings will use closed-loop liquid cooling that does not rely on evaporating water, a point that matters in dry West Texas.

Land clearing had begun by the time of the announcement, and Crusoe said it expects the first building to be energised in mid-2027. Together with its existing Abilene campus, which it says will reach 1.2 gigawatts when its second phase is completed at the end of 2026, the whole site is projected to reach about 2.1GW. Crusoe did not disclose the cost or length of the lease, and Microsoft did not publish its own announcement beyond a statement in Crusoe’s release from Noelle Walsh, president of Microsoft’s Cloud Operations and Innovation group, who said the company is “focused on ensuring access to reliable and responsible infrastructure at scale”.

Why Oracle and OpenAI stepped back from the Abilene expansion

The existing Abilene campus is the first site of Stargate, the AI infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, with Oracle leasing the buildings and OpenAI using the computing power. In early March, Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI had dropped plans for an expansion of about 600MW near the site after talks broke down over financing and OpenAI’s changing forecasts of how much capacity it needed, as we reported in Oracle and OpenAI drop a 600MW Abilene expansion. OpenAI has since been spreading its computing across several suppliers and sites, and in October it named a new head of compute and Stargate, which we covered in our report on the leadership change.

For Crusoe, Microsoft’s arrival meant the land and power planning around Abilene found another large tenant quickly. That reflects how scarce sites with both land and large power supplies have become: developers are increasingly building their own generation rather than waiting years for grid connections. Crusoe has since raised $700m from Neuberger Berman to buy gas generators for its AI factories.

Microsoft, data centre power and carbon targets

The scale of this one campus puts the wider energy debate in context. The International Energy Agency estimates in its Energy and AI report that data centres used about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, about 1.5% of global consumption, and that this will more than double to around 945TWh by 2030, with AI the main driver. A campus with 672MW of IT load running near capacity would use several terawatt-hours a year on its own.

That sits awkwardly with Microsoft’s pledge, made in January 2020, to be carbon negative by 2030. Crusoe has not said what fuel the Abilene plant will burn, although its other power financing has been for gas generators. If the plant runs largely on gas, Microsoft will need to rely more heavily on carbon removal and clean-energy purchases elsewhere to meet its target, a challenge the company has acknowledged in its sustainability reporting as AI demand rises.

The deal shows three things about the AI build-out in 2026. First, power is now the main constraint: Crusoe’s headline figure is the size of its power plant, not the number of chips. Second, capacity planned for one AI company can move quickly to another when plans change, so a lab stepping back from a site no longer leaves it idle. Microsoft, which has spent heavily on its own data centres while also leasing from specialists, gains capacity without building it. Third, building private power plants next to data centres moves decisions about emissions and local air quality away from grid planners and towards companies, which puts more weight on disclosure. The useful questions for the next year are what fuel the plant uses, whether the mid-2027 target holds and how Microsoft accounts for the campus’s emissions against its 2030 goal. The broader US policy push for data centres to supply their own power, discussed in our report on the White House’s position, makes this model likely to spread.