Crusoe Plans $1B Texas AI Data Center Expansion, Pursues Nuclear Power

Crusoe, a privately held AI infrastructure provider, is moving forward with an estimated $1 billion expansion of its Goodnight campus in the Texas Panhandle, adding two large data-center buildings while separately advancing plans to power future facilities with small modular nuclear reactors. The dual-track strategy reflects the company's response to surging electricity demand from artificial intelligence workloads and its effort to secure reliable, low-carbon power for long-term growth.

State filings submitted to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation show that the two single-story buildings near Claude, Texas, will each span roughly 805,000 square feet and contain multiple data halls. The documents, filed by Crusoe affiliate GN DC1 LLC, indicate that construction on Building 3 began May 25 with completion targeted for Aug. 1, while Building 4 started June 15 and is scheduled to finish in March 2027. Each building carries an estimated construction cost of $500 million, though such estimates and timelines can shift as projects progress.

The new buildings extend a campus expected to comprise at least six structures. Earlier state records list two facilities of approximately 485,000 square feet and two other 805,000-square-foot buildings at the same address. An Armstrong County tax-abatement agreement describes a first phase that may contain four buildings consuming as much as 530 megawatts, with each building planned to house four 25-megawatt data halls. Google has separately said it is developing a data-center campus in Armstrong County as part of a $40 billion investment in Texas cloud and AI infrastructure through 2027, and research firm Cleanview has reported that Google confirmed it is working with Crusoe on the Goodnight development. The latest state filings do not identify a tenant for the new buildings.

The Texas expansion underscores the scale of Crusoe's near-term power requirements. The company has applied to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for permits covering the Goodnight site, including greenhouse-gas and other air emissions. The state's public notice states that the proposed facility would generate electricity and emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and greenhouse gases, highlighting the environmental scrutiny that comes with large-scale data-center development.

Against that backdrop, Crusoe on Thursday announced a partnership with Aalo Atomics aimed at eventually supplying some of its data centers with modular nuclear plants. The companies plan to begin with a Crusoe Spark modular data center running Crusoe's cloud service at Idaho National Laboratory in 2027, powered by Aalo's first electricity-generating reactor as a proof of concept. Crusoe and Aalo then intend to install 50-megawatt Aalo Pod plants at Crusoe data centers by the end of 2029. Neither company disclosed financial terms, firm purchase commitments, proposed commercial sites or customers, and they did not say the reactors would be used at Goodnight.

Aalo's standard Pod design calls for five 10-megawatt sodium-cooled reactors sharing power-generation equipment. The Austin-based company says factory-built modules would allow operators to add capacity in increments as data-center demand grows. Aalo reached a preliminary technical milestone in early July when its test reactor achieved zero-power criticality at Idaho National Laboratory, meaning it sustained a controlled nuclear chain reaction but did not generate commercial electricity. The Department of Energy said Aalo was the fourth advanced-reactor developer in its pilot program to reach criticality by the July 4 deadline. Aalo is now working on a separate 10-megawatt reactor intended to generate electricity and supply the Crusoe modular data center in 2027.

Reaching criticality reduces some technical risk but is not equivalent to receiving approval for commercial deployment. Aalo remains in pre-application discussions with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its Idaho nuclear project, according to the agency's project page. For Crusoe, the nuclear partnership represents a longer-term bet on a power source that could complement its expanding data-center portfolio, though significant regulatory and commercial hurdles remain before such reactors can be deployed at scale.