Fermi signs 650MW data center lease with TensorWave at Project Matador

Fermi America has signed a binding lease agreement with TensorWave for up to 650MW of data center capacity at its Project Matador site in Texas, giving the company its first announced binding customer agreement for the large-scale campus.

The deal covers an initial 222MW of capacity starting in the second half of 2027 and includes expansion rights for two additional data centers, bringing the total potential capacity to 650MW, according to Fermi. The company said the 15-year lease is expected to generate approximately $6.5 billion in total contracted revenue.

Once complete, the facility is set to support the deployment of "tens of thousands" of next-generation AMD Instinct GPUs for training and inferencing workloads. TensorWave is an AI cloud company that exclusively offers access to AMD GPUs through its platform. In May 2025, the company raised $100 million in a Series A funding round.

"A lease of this size and this term is a tremendous vote of confidence in Fermi", said Marius Haas, chairman of the Board of Directors of Fermi America. "In delivering this first binding agreement, we've now fulfilled the most important objective we shared with the market in May. The committed partner ecosystem of developers, guarantors, and financing providers are all industry-leading companies, and TensorWave is exactly the kind of anchor customer our project was designed for. I am incredibly proud of our team for executing the site buildout to date, and for delivering this agreement and advancing others that we expect to announce soon."

Project Matador is a 17GW data center and energy campus near Amarillo in Texas on land owned by the Texas Tech University system. Fermi was founded in January 2025 by former Texas governor and energy secretary Rick Perry and Toby Neugebauer. The campus was first announced with planned 11GW of capacity, before Fermi increased that figure to 17GW in March 2026.

If realized, the campus would cover 18 million sq ft (1.67 million sqm) and use a mix of on-site energy sources including natural gas, solar, wind energy, and nuclear energy. This week, Fermi said Project Matador is "well underway", with approximately 6GW of the planned 17GW already permitted and more than $1.5bn invested in the buildout to date. First power is targeted for 2026.

The agreement follows an earlier setback for Fermi. Last year, the company said it had signed a non-binding letter of intent with an unnamed "investment grade-rated tenant" to become the first customer at the campus, but that company later withdrew from the deal. The matter led to a class action lawsuit.

Fermi currently has no data centers in operation and little experience in the sector within its executive team. Even so, the company raised $682m in an October IPO that valued the business at $15 billion.

In April, Neugebauer, Fermi’s CEO and co-founder, and Miles Everson, the company’s CFO, left the company. Both remain on Fermi’s board.

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