 on Tuesday [announced a credit support agreement](https://feeds.issuerdirect.com/news-release.html?newsid=5674092707179103&symbol=FRMI...](https://cdn.baxtel.com/data-center/amd-signs-credit-support-deal-for-fermi-s-222-mw-project-matador/logo/amd-signs-credit-support-deal-for-fermi-s-222-mw-project-matador-featured.jpg){kind=logo}
Fermi America on Tuesday announced a credit support agreement with chipmaker AMD backing the first phase of its Project Matador energy and AI campus in Carson County, Texas, a 222 MW build the company described as a key milestone toward securing
Staging and unloading of power generation equipment at Fermi America's Project Matador energy and data center campus. project financing.
The deal
The agreement supports the lease Fermi signed with AI cloud provider TensorWave on August 10, its first customer commitment at the campus. That lease covers 222 MW of total facility power and is expected to generate about $6.5 billion in contracted revenue over an initial 15-year term. Closing was pushed from September 30 to October 31 while guaranty discussions continued, Fermi said in a September 22 statement. Fermi and AMD also signed a partnership framework covering phases two and three, with potential expansion of up to 650 MW of gross power capacity.
"We are thrilled to partner with AMD as we advance development at Project Matador. Our strategic partnership establishes a framework for phases two and three," said Lee McIntire, Fermi's chief executive. "The pace of AI innovation is driving unprecedented demand for compute and the large-scale data center infrastructure needed to support it," said Mathew Hein, senior vice president and chief strategy officer of corporate development at AMD.
Fermi shares rose 11 percent following the announcement, Blockspace reported.
The lease behind it
Fermi subsidiary Fermi Campus 1 LLC will deliver the turnkey facility to TensorWave TEX1 LLC in phases beginning in the second half of 2027, the Amarillo Globe-News reported. Once fully delivered, the building is designed to house tens of thousands of AMD Instinct GPUs for training and inference. The lease also carries expansion rights for two additional data centers that would take the partnership past 650 MW, according to Foley and Lardner, which advised TensorWave on the transaction.
The AMD agreement addresses the guaranty piece of that puzzle.
Building the campus
Project Matador occupies about 5,800 acres leased from Texas Tech University near the Pantex plant outside Amarillo, within Baxtel's North Texas market. Fermi says more than $1.5 billion has gone into the buildout, and expects the campus to ramp toward 17 GW of behind-the-meter capacity, subject to signing binding customer agreements. Baxtel's power records for the HyperGrid campus show 200 MW under construction across two grid tranches due in early 2027, about 2.3 GW planned, including Siemens F-class turbines and a 1.3 GW combined-cycle block, and roughly 14.5 GW in land-bank capacity, including four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors and 6 GW of solar and battery storage. The first gas turbines reached Texas earlier this year.
The company has also managed boardroom turbulence. Co-founder Toby Neugebauer sued three Fermi directors in September, alleging a coordinated effort to take control, CoStar reported. Fermi's chief executive and finance chief both departed in April.
Why it matters
Chip suppliers are becoming credit partners in the AI buildout. Nvidia has taken equity stakes in its largest customers, and AMD is now putting its credit behind a developer's lease to anchor demand for its Instinct GPUs. For Fermi, the backing turns a speculative gigawatt-scale pitch into something lenders can underwrite, and it lands as Texas passes Virginia as the largest US data center market by tracked capacity.
The risk runs both ways. AMD's balance sheet is now tied to a campus that has yet to deliver its first megawatt. If Project Matador delivers, chip-vendor credit support becomes a financing template for the AI buildout. If it slips, AMD owns part of the delay.
