OpenAI Passed on This Project. Microsoft Didn't.

Microsoft is building its own AI campus in Abilene, Texas, right next door to OpenAI. The two projects share a developer, a grid connection, and almost nothing else.

Crusoe, the AI factory company developing both sites, announced Friday it is constructing two new data center buildings and a dedicated 900-megawatt gas-fired power plant for Microsoft in Abilene — a project OpenAI declined to take over AP News. The new campus sits adjacent to Crusoe's existing Abilene complex, where two buildings are already complete and six more are due to be finished by the end of this year for OpenAI and Oracle AP News. Once both phases are complete, the full Abilene site will reach approximately 2.1 gigawatts of total projected capacity — a number that would have been science fiction a decade ago and is now the baseline for frontier AI infrastructure.

The Microsoft plant will be larger than the 350-megawatt gas-fired plant Crusoe built for the OpenAI-Oracle project next door. Both are attached to data centers that primarily draw from the ERCOT grid — the Texas network that is currently fielding requests totaling more than 200 gigawatts and expects to have new capacity available no earlier than 2033 KLTV. ERCOT's vice president of interconnection and grid analysis said it plainly: based on current history, anything new gets built by 2033. That's the queue. Microsoft skipped it.

How you skip the ERCOT queue is not complicated in concept: you build your own power plant. The on-site gas generation means Microsoft's new campus does not need to wait for ERCOT to expand transmission infrastructure or for new substations to come online. It draws from the grid when convenient and runs its own generation the rest of the time.

Microsoft was once OpenAI's exclusive cloud computing provider and still holds a roughly 27% stake in the ChatGPT maker AP News, but the two are now redirecting their expansion elsewhere. "We considered expanding it further, but ultimately chose to put that additional capacity in other locations," said Sachin Katti, OpenAI's head of compute infrastructure, in a post on X. One of those locations is Wisconsin, where OpenAI is building with Oracle. The Stargate project — Trump-announced at the White House in January — already has two buildings complete and six more under construction. It is not small. It is simply not growing here.

The two projects on the same tract of Texas scrubland tell a story about how the AI infrastructure boom is actually being built: not as a single coordinated effort but as parallel bets by companies that once described themselves as partners. They are competitors for the same power, the same land, and the same construction crews.

The Abilene site has a past, too. Crusoe originally designed it for cryptocurrency mining. The pivot to AI data centers came after the ChatGPT moment made it obvious that compute demand wasn't a crypto cycle — it was a step change. The first two Crusoe buildings were constructed and energized in under one year, which Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller called a record GlobeNewswire. The first of the two new Microsoft buildings is expected to be energized in mid-2027 GlobeNewswire. The speed is real. So is what it's built on: natural gas, West Texas wind, and an interconnection queue that stretches to 2033.

The ERCOT numbers are stark: large load requests could reach 33 gigawatts in 2026 alone, with projections exceeding 200 gigawatts by 2030 KLTV. Texas lawmakers have moved to require large developers to help pay for grid upgrades — Senate Bill 6 — but the timeline for physical infrastructure hasn't changed. Build your own plant, or wait. That's the choice. Microsoft chose to build.