Toby Neugebauer, chief executive officer of Fermi Inc., before ringing the closing bell during the company’s Oct. 1 IPO.<\/p>\n
Victor J. Blue\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n
Plenty of billionaires have been created by the artificial intelligence and data center booms\u2014and now, the real estate underneath the data centers is generating ten-figure fortunes, too.<\/p>\n
At least three new billionaires joined the three-comma club on Wednesday after Fermi America, an Amarillo, Texas-based real estate investment trust cofounded by former energy secretary and Texas governor Rick Perry, went public on the Nasdaq. The stock opened at $21 and closed 55% higher at $32.53 per share, valuing the nine-month-old firm at $19 billion, despite the fact that it has yet to generate any sales.<\/p>\n
The biggest winner is Toby Neugebauer, 54, the firm’s president and CEO and one of three cofounders alongside Perry and his son, Griffin Perry. The son of former Texas congressman Randy Neugebauer, he and his family own an estimated 28% stake worth $6 billion as of market close on Wednesday\u2014based on an analysis of a prospectus filed on October 1. A large chunk of that stake is held in trusts for his wife and two children.<\/p>\n
Griffin Perry, 42, is the next largest shareholder, with an estimated 11% stake, worth $2.3 billion. Unlike his father, who serves as a director at the firm, the younger Perry doesn\u2019t have a formal role at Fermi. Steven Meisel, 40, an investor in the company through his firm Pencross Energy, is worth $1.8 billion. Rick Perry himself, while not quite a billionaire, owns a stake worth some $540 million. In 2019, Forbes estimated then-energy secretary Perry\u2019s net worth at just $3 million<\/a>. A spokesperson for Fermi declined to comment.<\/p>\n Fermi, founded in January, hasn\u2019t made a dime\u2014in fact, it lost $6.4 million over its first six months of existence. That\u2019s not surprising given that it doesn\u2019t have any customers yet. In its prospectus, it stated it was \u201cactively targeting\u201d potential clients but didn\u2019t name any of them, instead citing Musk<\/a>\u2019s xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic as \u201cpotential hyperscaler tenants.\u201d The firm claims it signed a letter of intent in September for its first gigawatt of power with an unnamed \u201cinvestment grade tenant\u201d and pointed to recent data center leasing transactions in the market to estimate that it could generate $1.5 billion in revenues from a lease for 1 gigawatt of capacity. Still, it called these \u201cillustrative returns\u201d rather than projections of its future revenue.<\/p>\n The upstart will have to battle it out with more established data center operators, including giants like Coreweave<\/a>, which counts among its customers blue-chip firms such as Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI. Coreweave\u2019s stock has more than tripled since the firm went public in March, minting five billionaires and valuing the company at $60 billion.<\/p>\n But investors apparently like Fermi\u2019s business plan, which is centered on a 5,236-acre Amarillo, Texas site called \u201cProject Matador\u201d on which the company aims to eventually deliver as much as 11 gigawatts of energy from natural gas, nuclear and solar plants. Fermi claims it can bring 1.1 gigawatts of that online by the end of 2026 in conjunction with the local utility. All that power will theoretically flow to as-of-yet-undetermined data centers on the same site.<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe this rapid power delivery timeline is a critical differentiator that will allow Fermi to attract tenants that require near-term access to large-scale, reliable energy to power their AI data center compute needs,\u201d the prospectus reads. Fermi holds a 99-year lease to the land, which is owned by Texas Tech University.<\/p>\n While Fermi aims to power much of the center with nuclear energy, as well as some solar, it will initially rely on natural gas\u2014similar to other enormous data centers like Elon Musk\u2019s xAI \u201cColossus\u201d in Memphis, Tennessee.<\/a> In September, Fermi signed a letter of intent with Siemens Energy to purchase three gas turbines to generate 1.1 gigawatts for the site.<\/p>\n The deal also calls for Fermi and Siemens to collaborate on nuclear steam turbines and integrate them into the four Westinghouse nuclear reactors it plans to build on the site. Perry, 75, who served as U.S. energy secretary between 2017 and 2019 during president Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s first term, is a strong proponent of nuclear energy.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Chinese are building 22 nuclear reactors today. America has none,\u201d he says in a statement on Fermi\u2019s website. \u201cWe\u2019re behind\u2014and it\u2019s all hands on deck. We need to be doing everything in our power to win this race, because this is the race that really matters.\u201d<\/p>\n Fermi\u2019s cofounders believe Trump will help them win that race. The company named the Matador site the \u201cPresident Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus\u201d and Fermi\u2019s website features a clip of Trump signing executive orders. In a press release<\/a> announcing the Siemens deal, Perry held up Fermi\u2019s data center as an example of Trump\u2019s \u201cenergy dominance\u201d agenda.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one understands the global energy race better than Donald Trump,” he said in the statement. Toby Neugebauer was just as congratulatory: \u201cI want to thank President Trump for his strong leadership and action in clearing the path for companies like ours to help America win this race.\u201d<\/p>\n Here are the three billionaires, plus one high-profile centimillionaire, from Fermi\u2019s listing on Wednesday:<\/p>\n Toby Neugebauer & family<\/p>\n Stake in Fermi America: $6 billion<\/p>\n Neugebauer was already in his 30s when his father Randy went to Washington to serve as the representative for Texas\u2019 19th congressional district in 2003. The NYU alum cofounded Houston-based energy private equity firm Quantum Energy Partners in 1998 and ran it until 2014, investing in the prolific Barnett shale gas formation in Texas. He then cofounded and chaired merchant bank Crestmoor Advisors and worked as a partner at Dallas-based investment firms Dorado Capital Partners and Banzai Capital Group before launching Fermi.<\/p>\n Neugebauer was also the CEO and executive chairman of GloriFi, a short-lived \u201canti-woke\u201d fintech startup that he launched in January 2021. In November 2021, GloriFi raised $55 million from a roster of Republican billionaires and businesspeople, including biotech investor and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy<\/a>, hedge fund titan Ken Griffin<\/a>, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale<\/a> and Peter Thiel<\/a>‘s Founders Fund. But the firm shut down a year later and filed for bankruptcy in February 2023. Neugebauer is suing his former partner<\/a> and his billionaire backers, claiming they sabotaged his startup. (The defendants denied the allegations, and the lawsuit has been stayed in connection with the bankruptcy but remains ongoing.)<\/p>\n Besides his stake in Fermi, Neugebauer is also a part-owner of Major League Soccer\u2019s Austin FC, has a 180-foot yacht named Purpose and owns a 16,000-square-foot estate nicknamed the \u201cWhite House of Dallas\u201d for being a replica of the presidential mansion.<\/p>\n Griffin Perry<\/p>\n Stake in Fermi America: $2.3 billion<\/p>\n Another political heir who stayed in the private sector, Perry became president of Caddis Energy, an oil and gas investment company, in 2012, then cofounded Grey Rock Investment Partners\u2014which also focused on an energy portfolio\u2014just a year later. Today, the firm manages over $1 billion. In a departure from GOP orthodoxy, Grey Rock says on its website that it looks for opportunities to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and \u201cintegrate environmental, social, and governance (\u201cESG\u201d) considerations into all of our business decisions.\u201d Perry also serves on the board of publicly traded fossil fuel exploration and production company Granite Ridge Resources and owns shares worth about $6 million.<\/p>\n Steven Meisel<\/p>\n Stake in Fermi America: $1.8 billion<\/p>\n Meisel is a cofounder and managing partner of Dallas-based private equity firm FG1 Capital, which invests in real estate, small businesses and public stocks in Texas and surrounding states. Before joining FG1, the New Orleans native was co-CEO of Discovery Midstream Partners, where he led the development of an oil & gas pipeline project in Colorado that was sold to energy firm Williams Companies for $1.2 billion in 2018. Meisel is also a senior advisor for the Canadian Pension Plan’s sustainable energies group and serves on the board of Denver-based energy infrastructure firm Tallgrass Energy. A former investment banker, Meisel also serves on the board of Baylor Scott & White Dallas Foundation, which raises money for the largest non-profit health system in Texas.<\/p>\n Rick Perry<\/p>\n Stake in Fermi America: $540 million<\/p>\n A career politician who rose from Texas legislator to governor of the second-largest state, Perry is probably best known nationally for two unsuccessful runs for president. In 2016, the most recent, he filed a financial disclosure declaring assets worth between $900,000 and $2.2 million, per an analysis from government watchdog OpenSecrets<\/a>. After Donald Trump won, he made Perry his energy secretary. That didn\u2019t swell his bank account much either, and the former Texas governor left the administration that same year to join the board of Energy Transfer, a $59 billion (market capitalization) natural gas pipeline company cofounded by billionaire Kelcy Warren<\/a>. He now owns 188,254 shares of Energy Transfer, worth over $3 million at Wednesday\u2019s close, plus a 6,600-square-foot home in rural Round Top, Texas and a 2.5% stake in Fermi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Toby Neugebauer, chief executive officer of Fermi Inc., before ringing the closing bell during the company’s Oct. 1…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[62,45,49,48,9564,88346,92924,4740,303,92922,92925,92923,3277],"class_list":["post-184559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-ai","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-data-centers","tag-fermi","tag-griffin-perry","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear-energy","tag-rick-perry","tag-steven-meisel","tag-toby-neugebauer","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}