TPL, Bolt Team Up to Develop West Texas Data Centers
Funds totaling $150 million seed this partnership.
Bolt Data & Energy Inc., led by former Google CEO & Chairman Eric Schmidt, and Texas Pacific Land Corp. are teaming up on a $150 million strategic agreement to develop and enable large-scale data center campuses and supporting infrastructure across TPL land in West Texas. TPL is one of the Lone Star State’s largest landowners with approximately 882,000 acres, much of it in the Permian Basin.
As part of the agreement, Bolt raised $150 million of capital, out of which TPL invested $50 million. Furthermore, TPL will receive an equity interest, warrants and a right of first refusal to supply water to Bolt-affiliated projects and related infrastructure.
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Bolt is currently pursuing commercial partnerships and anchor customers to develop large-scale centers on TPL land. The companies did not release details about any upcoming projects.
Bolt is a data and energy infrastructure company co-founded by Schmidt, who serves as its chairman. The firm is building an energy and integrated artificial intelligence infrastructure platform that combines abundant energy production, large-scale GPU computing and scalable land expansion opportunities. Schmidt said in a prepared statement the partnership with TPL will help Bolt provide reliable power as it aims to shorten the time between demand and delivery of data centers at scale.
Bringing credibility
Curt Holcomb, managing director with JLL’s global Data Center Solutions practice team, told Commercial Property Executive this type of partnership is what the utility companies want to see to ensure that the investments they will make in infrastructure will pay off in the near future.
“The electric utilities are buried by requests for enormous amounts of electrical capacity. They are looking for groups that have land, capital and know-how to turn their proposed developments into reality,” Holcomb said.
Holcomb noted the data center development market is very active and that level of activity can come with a significant number of inexperienced developers who don’t have sound business plans.
“Partnerships similar to the one announced by TPL and Schmidt’s Bolt Data & Energy bring immediate credibility to the market,” he shared.
Texas has already become a stronghold for data center development. In August, Vantage Data Centers unveiled plans for Frontier, a $25 billion, 1.4-gigawatt data center campus outside Abilene, Texas. At full build-out, the development will include 10 facilities totaling 3.7 million square feet.
The area is also home to another data center project currently underway, a 1.2-gigawatt campus developed by Crusoe in partnership with Blue Owl and Primary Digital Infrastructure.
Energy powering data center growth
Schmidt noted that power production will be part of Bolt’s focus to be a reliable provider, including natural gas, renewable and ultimately, nuclear energy.
In October, the Trump administration announced it was investing at least $80 billion in a strategic partnership with Westinghouse Electric Co., Brookfield Asset Management and Cameco Corp. to build nuclear reactors across the U.S. to help meet the rising power demand driven by AI. Data center experts welcomed the news but told CPE at the time significant expansion of nuclear projects is still years away even with the federal government vowing to ease regulatory constraints and speed licensing reviews.
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