HOUSTON: Blackstone Inc has invested more than US$500mil in Lancium Inc, which is building more than 5GW of data centres in West Texas with an eye on supplying the booming energy demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company closed the equity stake in recent weeks in a transaction supporting Lancium’s plans to build five facilities in wind and solar-rich areas of the state, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the deal isn’t public.

Blackstone’s investment covers Houston-based Lancium’s capital needs to bring the sites online by about 2028, the people said.

Creative solutions are being considered to take advantage of zero-carbon resources, including potentially building solar and battery storage on site, they said.

In Texas, one GW is typically enough to power 200,000 homes. Goldman Sachs Group Inc advised Lancium on the transaction, one of the people said.

Representatives for Blackstone, Lancium and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

The first campus in Abilene is slated to come online next year with the development being led by a US$3.4bil joint venture formed last month with Blue Owl Capital, Crusoe Energy Systems and Primary Digital Infrastructure.

Amid the race to support the data centre boom needed to deploy AI, power grids are being strained by ageing infrastructure, extreme weather and soaring demand.

Lancium sits at the intersection of data centres and the transition to clean energy, which includes building substations and making other transmission upgrades to access the grid.

Globally, at least US$1 trillion of spending is needed for data centres, electricity supplies and communications networks, an analysis by Bloomberg News showed.

AI is a pivot for Lancium, which was more focused on supplying energy to crypto currency miners when it announced in 2021 that it had won approval for the Abilene project. 

 - Bloomberg