West Texas Cowboys Are Cashing In on the AI Land Rush
Russia Bans Diesel Exports Amid Heavy Ukraine Attacks On Refineries Colombia's declining natural gas production,… What I Cover My focus spans the global energy landscape and the technologies reshaping it, specifically focusing on oil and gas, renewables, and tech-driven market… Forty miles outside Abilene, in the highlands between Taylor and Nolan counties, 421 wind turbines have spun since 2006.Horse Hollowwas the largest wind farm on earth when it went up…nearly 47,000 acres of cattle country and mesquite scrub, leased from ranch families who mostly kept running cattle underneath the blades.
West Texas doing what West Texas does best…selling the wind nobody else wanted.
Twenty years later, the same stretch of the state is selling something else nobody has enough of…land with power still attached to it.
On the edge of Abilene, in what used to be a mesquite thicket somebody once eyed for a crypto mine, OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank have built the flagship of a$500 billionnationwide AI buildout called Stargate.
And Microsoft broke ground on another massive project right next door.
Between the two campuses, they are likely to consume roughly2.1 gigawatts, more power than most American cities pull at peak, on ground that was mesquite shrubland six years ago.
It took twenty years of cheap land and paid-down power lines to set this up, not the two years everyone's been watching.
The power behind it holds up better in some places than others.
And this corridor has already lived through one boom and bust…it might be worth asking if it's signing up for a second.
Twenty years of cheap land, then five years of something else For most of the 2000s and 2010s, land in this stretch of West Texas stayed exactly what it looked like… grazing country.
Wind developers leased tens of thousands of acres in the mid-2000s for pennies against what irrigated cropland or suburban fringe land was fetching elsewhere, because turbines don't need good soil.
That arrangement held for the better part of two decades.
| Product | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Brent Crude | $102.14/bbl | +0.34% |
| WTI Crude | $96.90/bbl | +0.21% |
| EN590 Diesel | $846/MT | +0.18% |
| Jet Fuel A-1 | $1090/MT | +0.55% |
| Mazut M100 | $450/MT | -0.15% |
| Bitumen 60/70 | $470/MT | +0.08% |
| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
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