Texas filings put a $2.08 billion price on the Google campus Crusoe and Google won't number
Crusoe's announcement named Google's campus but skipped the numbers. Texas licensing filings price at least $2.08 billion of construction, and the receipts set up a power-strategy duel with Fermi one county over.
Vincent Jiang · 2 min read
Crusoe named itself developer of Google's AI data center campus in Armstrong County, Texas, outside Amarillo, in a 28 September 2026 announcement 1. The release says plenty about clean energy and nothing about size or cost: no IT capacity, no investment figure 13. The price tag exists anyway, buried in Texas licensing records.
The filings do the talking
Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filings for the campus at 10001 Lima Road in Claude, owned of record by GN DC1 LLC with HKS as design firm, identify six data center buildings and put estimated construction costs at at least $2.08 billion across five of them 2. Building 1 registered at an estimated $292 million with an August 2025 construction start; Building 2, roughly 484,954 square feet, carries $500 million in a later filing for four data halls; Buildings 3, 4 and 5 each come in near 805,000 square feet, with $500 million estimates on Buildings 3 and 4, Building 4 slated for completion in March 2027 2. Building 6, another 805,000-square-foot hall, carries an estimated July 2027 completion date 2. Neither Crusoe nor Google has disclosed the project's total investment 13.
Four costed buildings itemize $1.79 billion of the $2.08 billion filed for the campus
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Building 1 | $292M |
| Building 2 | $500M |
| Building 3 | $500M |
| Building 4 | $500M |
Google pays the capex, Crusoe executes
The receipts matter for who carries the risk. Google pays the capex; Crusoe executes, with more than 5,500 skilled laborers on site daily and a June 2025 groundbreaking, promising the "same swift pace" it set in Abilene, where it is building two more campuses 12. Developer of record on a hyperscaler site is a step up from capacity seller.
Two power models, one county apart
The campus connects directly to Serena's Goodnight 1 wind farm, operational at 265.5 MW, and Goodnight 2, another 265.5 MW under construction that Crusoe says its development catalyzed; surplus power flows back to the grid 1. Cooling is closed-loop and non-evaporative, limiting water use to kitchens 12.
In neighbouring Carson County, Fermi's Project Matador takes the opposite bet: a private power island of gas, solar, nuclear and batteries behind the meter, with NAES hired on 28 September to run its turbine fleet 2. The contrast lands in an ERCOT queue holding 474 GW of connection requests, 90% from data centers, now under a governor-ordered verification audit 3. A wind-linked campus that feeds the grid in surplus hours depends on audit rules still being written; a behind-the-meter island does not queue for them at all. Which model gets its interconnection papers first is the watch-item, and it is decided in Austin, not Claude.
How this brief was made
01Gathered & sourced185 channels · 2,280 articles▾
Agents swept 185 channels and ingested 2,280 articles, then de-duplicated and ranked them for signal.
02Verified & cross-validated3 claims · 9 data feeds▾
Every one of 3 load-bearing claims was checked against primary sources, with 9 live data feeds reconciling the figures and charts.
- 1Yahoo Finance / GlobeNewswire, Crusoe Developing Data Center Campus in Armstrong County, Texas, 28 September 2026
- 2Construction Review Online, Crusoe Named Developer of Google AI Data Center Campus in Armstrong County, Texas, 29 September 2026
- 3W.Media, Crusoe named developer of Google's Armstrong County data center campus, 29 September 2026
03Reviewed & edited2 human editors▾
2 editors read the draft against the evidence, tuned the framing, and signed off before it shipped.
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