Weeks after former Texas Gov. and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry and his billionaire partner Toby Neugebauer experienced a loss of a prospective major investor in their effort to build world’s largest private energy grid and AI campus at Amarillo, Texas, they are busy pushing ahead with the project.
They call their company Fermi and the project the “Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus” just about 3 hours west of Oklahoma City in the Texas Panhandle. While they announced the project last summer with big publicity, they also suffered a setback in December when an unnamed company pulled out of an investment deal. The stock price in Fermi collapsed as one report claimed it was Amazon that pulled out as an anchor tenant, something that neither Amazon nor Fermi would confirm.
But the deal apparently didn’t leave Perry and his supporters too far in the dumps. Politico recently reported the company still has a multibillion-dollar valuation for a simple reason, said Timm Schneider, founder of the energy consulting firm Schneider Capital Group.
“They check a lot of buzzwords,” Schneider said. “AI, data centers, nuclear energy, power. This is the kind of project that attracts a wide band of interest right now. But there have been some market concerns around the financing and timing of these mega-projects.”
Politico also reported Fermi had help raising cash with the aid of firms linked to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and Fermi is partnered with a nuclear fuel company backed by Trump’s two eldest sons. Fermi is purchasing reactors from Westinghouse, the nuclear giant that entered a “strategic partnership” with the Trump administration in October. Fermi’s model even aligns with Trump’s vision for off-grid power and computing campuses.
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