Fermi secures AI tenant for Texas data center, stock surges over 19%

Fermi Inc. announced a binding 15-year lease with TensorWave for a 222 MW facility at its Project Matador campus in Carson County, Texas, expected to generate roughly $6.5 billion in contracted revenue, sending Fermi shares up 19.4% in post-market trading. The deal, which includes expansion rights to over 650 MW, validates Fermi's troubled project after a collapsed Amazon deal and positions TensorWave as an AI compute tenant using AMD Instinct GPUs.

Via nyctourism.com Fermi secures AI tenant for Texas data center, stock surges over 19% A $6.5 billion lease with TensorWave validates the company's troubled Project Matador after a rough stretch that included a collapsed Amazon deal. Fermi Inc. just landed the kind of deal that turns a turnaround story into a growth story. The Texas-based power and data center developer announced a binding 15-year lease with TensorWave for a 222 MW facility at its Project Matador campus in Carson County, Texas, a deal expected to generate roughly $6.5 billion in contracted revenue. The stock responded accordingly. Fermi shares jumped about 19.4% in post-market trading, with some after-hours prints showing gains as high as 35%. For a company that had been nursing wounds from a collapsed agreement with Amazon, the timing could hardly have been better. What the deal actually looks like TensorWave, which builds AI cloud infrastructure around AMD Instinct GPUs, will be the anchor tenant at Project Matador’s first phase. The facility is designed to house tens of thousands of AMD’s high-performance GPUs, creating what amounts to a purpose-built AI compute factory in the Texas Panhandle. Phase 1 delivery is targeted for the second half of 2027. But the agreement also includes expansion rights that could push total capacity past 650 MW across multiple phases, meaning TensorWave could grow substantially within the Matador footprint over the lease’s 15-year term. Fermi has already sunk more than $1.5 billion into Project Matador, a sprawling campus spanning roughly 7,570 acres with ambitions of eventually reaching 17 GW of total capacity. The land is leased from the Texas Tech University System, and the broader vision involves a mix of natural gas, renewable energy, and potentially nuclear power generation. Why investors were so relieved Context matters here. Fermi’s stock had been under significant pressure after a high-profile potential deal with Amazon fell apart. For a company whose entire thesis rests on converting massive land and power assets into occupied data center space, losing a marquee customer was not exactly confidence-inspiring. There is also a validation element for Fermi’s unusual model. Most data center developers either generate power or host compute, not both. Fermi is trying to vertically integrate the two, building private power infrastructure alongside the data halls that consume it. The AI power hunger driving these deals AMD’s Instinct GPU lineup, which TensorWave’s infrastructure is built around, positions the tenant as an alternative to the Nvidia-dominated AI compute market. For customers seeking GPU capacity without competing for scarce Nvidia allocations, TensorWave offers a different path. Fermi still has a long road from one binding lease to a fully built-out 17 GW campus. But after months of skepticism, the company has something it did not have before: a paying customer and $6.5 billion in contracted revenue to show the next one. Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/ .