(Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is co-leading financing for a Texas project to build private power campuses for artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
The New York banking giant is working with real estate advisory Newmark Group Inc. to raise both equity and credit for the project building modular natural gas-fired generation serving a cluster of south Dallas data centers, according to developer GridFree AI. Newmark has also been tapped as the exclusive marketer and advisor for the data hub, called South Dallas One.<\/p>\n
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The aim in this initial round is to raise \u201chundreds of millions of dollars\u201d with more rounds as the first project is scaled up, according to Philip Krim, chief executive officer of Montauk Capital, which incubated GridFree AI.<\/p>\n
Goldman declined to comment.<\/p>\n
The US power system, which is based on Thomas Edison\u2019s 19th century grid, is struggling to meet the electricity needs of the modern economy. Aging infrastructure is being strained by extreme weather and unprecedented demand growth. Consumers are faced with a double whammy of rising power bills and a greater threat of blackouts in large parts of the US.<\/p>\n
\u201cEdison\u2019s grid was not built for the scale and size of these data centers,\u201d said Krim. \u201cWe ended up saying, \u2018Let\u2019s start a company for energy experts to build a data center \u2014 knowing how energy-dense and energy\u2014hungry data centers are \u2014 to scale up the AI buildout.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
GridFree AI was formed about a year ago with Ralph Alexander as CEO. Alexander, a nuclear engineer, previously served as the top executive at Talen Energy Corp., where he led the development of a data center campus next to the independent power producer\u2019s Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Amazon Web Services bought that campus early last year, which was expanded this year into a 1.92 gigawatt supply contract with Talen. This co-location deal quickly became the major flash point in making sure tech giants pay for their fair share of power plants and grid infrastructure without shifting those costs to other consumers.<\/p>\n
\u201cSouth Dallas One represents the future of AI-ready infrastructure: fast to deploy, resilient by design, and insulated from the grid constraints holding back the industry,\u201d Alexander said in an statement.<\/p>\n
With land for two of the three sites secured, GridFree said initial power can be brought online in less than 24 months from the lease being signed, significantly faster than waiting to connect to the Texas grid. Each site will have about 1.5 gigawatts of power with structures to house data centers. The plan is to build 100-megawatt modules \u00a0\u2014 10 gas turbines providing around-the-clock power and two for back-up \u2014 so they can be quickly plugged into projects, Krim said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is co-leading financing for a Texas project to build private power campuses…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6909,5304,47834,47835,47833,47836,47832,47830,47831,27,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-106047","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-bloomberg","9":"tag-data-centers","10":"tag-goldman-sachs-group-inc","11":"tag-grid-infrastructure","12":"tag-gridfree-ai","13":"tag-initial-power","14":"tag-newmark-group-inc","15":"tag-philip-krim","16":"tag-ralph-alexander","17":"tag-texas","18":"tag-texas-headlines","19":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}