Fermi Lands TensorWave, $6.5B Lease at Project Matador, Texas

Fermi has signed TensorWave to a binding 15-year lease at Project Matador in Carson County, Texas, the AI infrastructure company’s first anchor tenant commitment on the power campus. The deal carries roughly $6.5 billion in contracted revenue over the initial term, before either of two five-year renewal options, and sent Fermi’s stock up double digits on the announcement.

Why it matters

A signed anchor tenant is what turns a speculative powered-land play into a financeable project. Fermi has spent more than a year assembling generation, permits and acreage at Project Matador without a paying customer to underwrite it, and a prior high-profile tenant relationship collapsed late last year, hitting the stock hard. TensorWave’s lease gives lenders and equity partners a contracted revenue stream to underwrite against, the single document that converts land-banking and permitting work into a project that can actually be built. For developers chasing behind-the-meter power deals, the lesson is that nuclear-adjacent, gas-and-solar hybrid campuses can land hyperscale-scale AI tenants once the power is real, not just permitted.

The numbers

The lease, filed between Fermi subsidiary Fermi Campus 1 LLC and TensorWave TEX1, LLC, sets phase one at 222 megawatts of total facility power, delivered in stages beginning in the second half of 2027. Fermi holds expansion rights for TensorWave above 650 MW across three total phases, inside a campus Fermi has permitted toward 17 gigawatts, with roughly 6 GW already cleared under a Clean Air Permit. Fermi has put more than $1.5 billion into buildout so far on a site described as larger than half of Manhattan, powered by a private grid blending natural gas, nuclear, solar, battery storage and some state grid draw.

What’s next

TensorWave still needs to draw down its own financing to build out GPU capacity inside the leased shell, and Fermi’s broader buildout depends on continued execution of its gas and nuclear generation timeline, not just this one signed tenant. Watch whether Fermi names a second anchor tenant before the first phase delivers in 2027, the signal that would confirm hyperscale demand for national power-campus capacity extends past a single AI cloud provider.