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Houston-area company specializing in creating clean campuses announces new data center project

Crusoe Energy Systems announced its plans to build the 200 MW data center at the Lancium Clean Campus outside Abilene, Texas. Photo via lancium.com

A California AI infrastructure company has announced it's building a 200 megawatt data center in Texas and will work with The Woodlands-based Lancium, a decarbonization-focused energy technology company.

Crusoe Energy Systems LLC announced its plans to build the 200 MW data center at the Lancium Clean Campus outside Abilene, Texas. The two companies will work to bring the data center online in the coming months, reports Lancium in a news release. Once completed, the first phase will enable AI workloads at scale across 1.2 gigawatts of power capacity.

“Lancium’s mission to decarbonize compute for the most energy-intensive workloads and this scale and type of data center is game-changing,” Michael McNamara, co-founder and CEO of Lancium, says in the release. “Our energy management expertise, the integration of incremental storage and solar generation resources behind-the-meter at the campus, and Crusoe’s design approach will combine to deliver the maximum amount of green energy at the lowest possible cost, while bringing significant benefits to the Abilene community.”

Lancium's role will include "land acquisition, power interconnect, site engineering, renewables interconnect, and power orchestration," per the release. Crusoe will own and develop the data center, which is expected to go online in 2025.

“Data centers are rapidly evolving to support modern AI workloads, requiring new levels of high density rack space, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and unprecedented overall energy demands. We’ve designed this data center to enable the largest clusters of GPUs in the world to drive new breakthroughs in AI,” adds Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe’s co-founder and CEO. “Given its leadership in renewable energy and plans for the site, working with Lancium in Abilene presents a unique opportunity to sustainably power the future of AI and we’re thrilled to have the support of the city in this ambitious endeavor.”

According to the release, the project will feature direct-to-chip liquid cooling or rear-door heat exchangers and will be flexible enough to include air cooling. Once completed, each building within the data center will be able to operate up to 100,000 GPUs on a single integrated network fabric, according to the companies.

Lancium has raised $150 million since its founding in 2017, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Hanwha Solutions and SBI Group.

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A View From HETI

Ten climatetech startups were named most-promising at this annual Rice Alliance Energy Tech Venture Forum. Photo courtesy Rice Alliance.

Investors at the Rice Alliance Energy Tech Venture Forum have named the 10 most-promising startups among the group of 100 clean tech companies participating in the event.

The 22nd annual event was held yesterday, Sept. 18, at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business and was part of the second Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week.

The most-promising startups will receive $7,000 in in-kind legal services from Baker Botts.

The 10 most-promising companies included:

  • Houston-based Xplorobot, which has developed laser gas imaging technology for the first handheld methane detection device approved by the EPA as an alternative test method
  • Seattle-based Badwater Alchemy, a desalination company that uses nano materials to purify saline water at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods
  • San Francisco-based Ammobia, which is developing a clean ammonia production process
  • Illinois-based Celadyne Technologies, which is building hydrogen for industrial decarbonization with durable and efficient fuel cells and electrolyzers
  • Massachusetts-based MacroCycle Technologies, which converts plastic waste in the form of bottles, food trays and polyester textiles into virgin-grade mPET resin
  • Yorkshire, England-based AtoMe, a global developer of zero-carbon fertiliser products
  • Colorado-based Advanced Thermovoltaic Systems (ATS) Energy, a renewable energy semiconductor manufacturing company
  • North Carolina-based Lukera Energy, which is converting waste methane into high-value fuel
  • Midland, Texas-based AI Driller, a company that uses AI and machine learning to enable remote operations and provide historical drilling data for survey management, anti-collision monitoring and iob reporting
  • New York-based Fast Metals Inc., which has developed a chemical process to extract valuable metals from complex toxic mine tailings that is capable of producing iron, aluminum, scandium, titanium and other rare earth elements using industrial waste and waste CO2 as inputs

Arculus Solutions won the People's Choice Award. The New Jersey-based company retrofits natural gas pipelines for safe hydrogen transportation. It also won Track A: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, Buildings, Water, & Other Energy Solutions at the Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition during CERAWeek earlier this year.

The 100 energy technology ventures selected to participate in the forum were named earlier this year. See the full list here.

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