Fermi announced its first binding anchor lease on 10 August: 222MW at Project Matador in Carson County, Texas, to GPU cloud operator TensorWave, worth roughly $6.5bn across an initial 15-year term with two five-year renewals.
Read the capacity number carefully
The signed commitment is 222MW — one building. The widely quoted 650MW+ figure is expansion rights across two further buildings, not contracted capacity. Headlines rendering the deal as "up to 650MW" describe an option, not a lease.
What goes inside
The companies say the site will host tens of thousands of next-generation AMD Instinct GPUs, with service beginning in the second half of 2027. That makes it one of the larger single deployments announced outside the Nvidia supply chain.
The campus behind it
Matador is Fermi's behind-the-meter megacampus in the Texas Panhandle: 17GW planned, roughly 6GW permitted, more than $1.5bn invested so far, with the Texas Tech University System as a support partner. Until this lease, all of that was speculative capacity with no contracted revenue against it.
Handle the release with care
The wire distribution carries an explicit correction notice — an unfinalised version went out first, so only the corrected figures should be used. Fermi's own newsroom had not posted the release at the time of checking; it appeared on the investor site. The site is permitted, not built, and the tenant is contracted to a building that does not exist yet.
Behind the meter
Matador's premise is generating its own power rather than queuing for grid interconnection — the constraint holding up most large campuses in Texas and elsewhere. A binding 15-year lease is the first external validation that a tenant will underwrite that model, and the first contracted revenue against the $1.5bn already spent.