Oracle-Abandoned Abilene Data Center Finds Next Tenant: Microsoft and Meta in Talks to Take Over ~600MW Capacity

According to 1M AI News monitoring, Microsoft is in deep negotiations with AI data center developer Crusoe, planning to lease several hundred megawatts of data center capacity at the Abilene AI Park in Texas. Meta is also in talks with the park. Earlier, Oracle's decision to abandon the expansion of the park sparked concerns among investors about a cooling demand for AI data centers last week, but the entries of Microsoft and Meta provide evidence to the contrary.

The Abilene Park is developed by the startup Crusoe, valued at over $10 billion. Oracle currently leases 8 park buildings to host OpenAI's compute cluster (part of the Stargate project), which is expected to reach about 1.2GW upon completion, accommodating around 400,000 NVIDIA chips. The construction cost of each building is about $1.4 billion (excluding chips), with 2 buildings already completed. The park has the potential to expand to about 2GW, but OpenAI has declined to lease additional capacity (preferring to deploy NVIDIA's next-generation Rubin chips at other locations to avoid mixing different generations of hardware at the same facility). Oracle then tried to find other customers for the expansion, but negotiations collapsed over the weekend.

NVIDIA had previously paid Crusoe a $150 million deposit in an attempt to salvage the project. The scale under discussion by Microsoft and Meta is around 600MW, to be rolled out in phases. JPMorgan Chase has committed to provide over $9 billion in loans for the construction of the Abilene Park. For Microsoft, the park will support its rapidly growing Azure AI cloud business, including renting cloud servers to OpenAI.