West Texas Power Play: New Era's Bold Blueprint for an AI Oasis

MIDLAND, TX – December 11, 2025 – The vast, sun-baked plains of the Permian Basin, long the undisputed heartland of America's oil and gas empire, are becoming the unlikely stage for the next great resource boom. This time, the prize isn't crude oil, but computational power. Driving this transformation are companies like New Era Energy & Digital, Inc. (Nasdaq: NUAI), which is betting that the region’s energy abundance can fuel the voracious appetite of the artificial intelligence industry.

New Era, in a 50/50 joint venture with high-performance computing specialist Sharon AI, Inc., is laying the physical and commercial groundwork for its flagship project: the Texas Critical Data Centers (TCDC) campus. Sprawling across a planned 438-acre site near Odessa, the project is not just another data center; it’s a bid to create a multi-gigawatt AI-optimized ecosystem, translating the region's legacy of energy production into digital infrastructure dominance.

Laying the Groundwork in Oil Country

For investors and industry watchers tracking the path from prototype to profit, New Era’s recent announcements signal a critical shift from concept to concrete action. The company has moved beyond blueprints, with site clearing and soil sampling now underway. This foundational work is essential for the engineering of a campus designed to scale far beyond 1 gigawatt—a capacity that would place it among the largest data center developments in the world.

This progress underscores New Era's strategic position as a “pick-and-ax” developer. Rather than competing directly in the hyper-competitive AI model space, the company is focused on providing the indispensable infrastructure—powered land and powered shells—that hyperscale and enterprise AI operators desperately need. This model relies on turning land and energy into a turnkey solution for tech giants looking to accelerate deployment without the immense lead time of building from scratch.

The credibility of this venture is bolstered by its partnership with Sharon AI, Inc. Far from a silent partner, Sharon AI is an NVIDIA Cloud Partner with its own ambitions of going public via a SPAC merger. The company specializes in GPU compute infrastructure and is already deploying NVIDIA-architected clusters in Tier IV data centers in Australia, bringing crucial technical expertise in high-performance computing to the West Texas project.

De-Risking the Path to Gigawatts

Building a data center of this magnitude is a capital-intensive marathon fraught with potential pitfalls. New Era’s strategy appears laser-focused on methodically de-risking the project at every stage. A pivotal milestone is the company’s engagement with the City of Odessa to establish an Industrial District. This isn't just bureaucratic paperwork; it is the key that unlocks access to municipal water and wastewater services, a make-or-break logistical challenge for cooling facilities that will house tens of thousands of power-hungry, heat-generating GPUs.

Commercially, the project's viability hinges on securing a major anchor tenant. New Era has confirmed it is in advanced negotiations with a “leading hyperscaler” for a long-term, triple-net (NNN) lease on a powered-shell deployment. While the identity of the potential tenant remains confidential, securing a contract with one of the handful of global tech titans that dominate the cloud market would provide the financial validation and long-term recurring revenue needed to secure a Final Investment Decision (FID), which the company targets for the end of Q1 2026.

E. Will Gray II, CEO of New Era Energy & Digital, emphasized this systematic approach in a recent statement. “We are systematically de-risking the ground through disciplined engineering and early site work, and securing the long-term utilities that will anchor multi-gigawatt scalability,” he commented. “At the same time, we are encouraged by ongoing negotiations with leading hyperscalers which validate demand for our project and reinforce our position as a premier location at the forefront of the frontier tech landscape in West Texas.”

The Power and Data Backbone

The most significant advantage of the Permian Basin is also the biggest challenge for any data center: power. New Era’s plan sidesteps potential grid constraints by developing integrated, behind-the-meter power generation. The company has already signed a non-binding term sheet with Thunderhead Energy Solutions to construct a 250 MW natural gas-fired power island on-site. This initial phase, utilizing a hybrid of reciprocating engines and turbines, is slated to begin construction in 2025 and will serve as the energy backbone for the campus, with plans to scale power capacity in lockstep with data center build-out.

Equally critical is data connectivity. A gigawatt campus is useless if it’s an island. Addressing this, the TCDC joint venture has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with GlobeLink Holdings to build a 1,600-mile fiber optic network across Texas. This new digital backbone promises to deliver the high-capacity, low-latency connectivity essential for AI workloads, effectively connecting the Permian Basin to the global digital economy.

To accelerate construction and manage costs, New Era is also leaning on a modern supply chain strategy, working with multiple modular data-center manufacturers. This approach, which involves factory-built, pre-integrated modules, allows for faster, more repeatable deployment and can help mitigate the skilled labor constraints often seen in large-scale construction projects.

A Crowded Field and an Ambitious Timeline

New Era is not operating in a vacuum. The race to build AI infrastructure in Texas is heating up, with a staggering number of gigawatt-scale projects announced across the state. From Vantage’s 1.4 GW campus in Shackelford County to the colossal 11 GW project planned near Amarillo by the Texas University System, the competitive landscape is formidable. These projects are all vying for the same hyperscale tenants, supply chains, and labor pools.

Against this backdrop, New Era’s timeline is aggressive. With an FID targeted for early 2026, the company projects Phase I to be energized through 2027 and, crucially, expects to begin generating revenue at the start of construction, a common feature in developer-led projects where tenants begin paying fees during the build-out phase.

The success of the TCDC campus will ultimately depend on flawless execution across multiple complex fronts. Finalizing the anchor tenant lease remains the most critical near-term catalyst. From there, the challenge shifts to managing the intricate ballet of power plant construction, modular data hall delivery, and utility commissioning. While the vision is bold and the initial steps are promising, New Era Energy & Digital is embarking on a monumental undertaking where the potential rewards are matched only by the scale of the risks. The project's progress will be a key barometer for the Permian Basin's economic diversification and the broader, frantic build-out of America’s AI foundation.