New Data Center Firm Led By Industry Vets Helps Secure $11.6B Financing Deal For Stargate Project

Primary Digital Infrastructure, a data center firm launched last year, is emerging as the straw that stirs the drink of the world's largest AI data center project. 

Last week, a joint venture of Primary Digital Infrastructure, developer Crusoe and asset manager Blue Owl Capital announced it secured $11.6B in debt and equity to finance the second phase of the 1.2-gigawatt data center campus the partnership is building in Abilene, Texas.

The development, dubbed Project Ludicrous, is slated to be the largest artificial intelligence training cluster in the world. And it serves as the flagship campus for OpenAI and Oracle's Stargate venture.

Few data center development efforts have garnered as much attention as Stargate thanks to its White House unveiling by President Donald Trump. Pitched as a $500B investment in building AI data centers across the U.S., the initiative is led by OpenAI and Oracle, with backing from SoftBank and a range of major tech and investment players like Microsoft, Emirati sovereign wealth fund MGX and chipmaker Nvidia.

With more than a dozen tech firms, data center developers and institutional investors involved in financing either the Texas campus specifically or Stargate more broadly, the Abilene project embodies the enormous complexity of the dealmaking required to bring this scale of data center capacity to market at the speed AI hyperscalers like OpenAI demand.

The sheer number of stakeholders, the inexperience of many of the key parties in the data center sector, and the project’s unprecedented price tag have made the Stargate campus and projects like it difficult to finance and execute.

That's where Primary Digital came in. 

On the “Bronx Zoo” Yankees of the 1970s, slugger Reggie Jackson famously called himself “the straw that stirs the drink” — he rarely led the team in home runs or batting average, but he was a critical catalyst for the team’s success. Primary’s leadership describes the firm’s role similarly: While its capital contribution to the joint venture is comparatively small, it acts as a catalyst that can make unprecedented deals like Project Ludicrous a reality. 

“Primary essentially put the deal together,” John Sheputis, the company's co-founder and managing director, said in a Thursday interview with Bisnow after speaking at the DICE: National event in Leesburg.

“We met with the operator, the owner, and we know the tenants. There’s capital trying to get in, there's a developer who needs money, there's a tenant who needs a data center, and all of them know Primary.” 

Primary launched less than a year ago, but its founders are some of the most prominent names in the data center development ecosystem. Sheputis is a former managing director at GI Partners, and his co-founders are former Digital Realty CEO Bill Stein, former CyrusOne co-founder David Ferdman, and former DigitalBridge Managing Director Peter Hopper.

“This scale is going to require new ways of thinking and new approaches,” Sheputis said. “This team we’ve put together with myself and Peter and Dave and Bill is about helping that happen by attracting capital and capitalizing projects so we can build great things.” 

The first — and so far, only — Stargate data center campus in development is Project Ludicrous. The first two data centers, totaling 200 megawatts, are expected to come online in the coming months, with six more data centers now expected to be completed by the middle of 2026 to bring the campus’s total capacity to 1.2 gigawatts. 

OpenAI and Oracle, the two firms typically associated with Stargate, will be the end user and tenant, respectively, of the Abilene data centers. But the firms developing the Texas campus aren't household names — nor were they known quantities in the data center sector as recently as two years ago. 

Crusoe is a newcomer to hyperscale data center development. It launched in 2018 as a cryptocurrency miner that aimed to power data centers with waste natural gas that would otherwise have been flared off. Like many cryptominers, Crusoe eventually pivoted to AI, selling its fleet of small modular data centers earlier this year and signing leases at colocation facilities. While Crusoe began raising capital to develop its own data center footprint early last year, its leadership has said as recently as last week that they have no experience building anything close to the scale of what it has promised in Abilene. 

Crusoe first announced plans for an Abilene campus in June 2024, although no tenant was named at the time. The 900-acre site is secured through a ground lease with a separate data center developer called Lancium, which provides power infrastructure for the parcel as part of a larger development assemblage branded as the Lancium Clean Campus. The joint venture with Primary and Blue Owl — and $4B in financing for the project’s first phase — was announced four months later. 

New York-based Blue Owl Capital, also a relative newcomer to the data center landscape, has gone from an industry unknown to one of the most prolific backers of new data center construction in just two years. Last year, it invested alongside Blackstone in data center firm Park Place Technologies and acquired Stack owner IPI Partners for $1B. Blue Owl also entered into a $5B JV with AREP-owned PowerHouse and Chirisa to build data centers for AI cloud provider CoreWeave. 

Despite the slim track record of the companies bringing Project Ludicrous to market, the project’s $15B financing makes it the most expensive data center campus ever — at least for now. To put that price tag in context: Blackstone’s 2021 acquisition of QTS, one of the world’s largest data center firms, was a $10B deal.

“All this experience that we have is about getting these big transactions done,” Sheputis said. “A year ago, no one knew who Crusoe was, Primary had not been founded and at least within the data center world, no one really knew who Blue Owl was. Here we are a year later, and a grove of mesquite trees in Abilene, Texas, is now going to be home to the world's biggest GPU cluster.”

According to Sheputis, the combined track record of Primary’s principals made the firm particularly well-positioned to address the problems standing between each potential partner and a deal. 

For Blue Owl, Primary provided a trusted source of due diligence and experience structuring a deal with a risk profile they were comfortable with, Sheputis said.

For Crusoe, he said Primary provided the understanding of what was needed to secure a tenant and then capital, and it provided the credibility and connections to establish relationships with both.

Meanwhile, for Oracle and OpenAI — and for lender JPMorgan, who supplied $7.1B in debt for the project’s second phase — Sheputis said Primary’s leadership lent credibility that the JV could execute the project at the speed its end users demand. Newmark worked with the team to facilitate the construction loan. 

“It’s about getting the tenant and the developer and the capital provider and the lender to all understand,” he said. “And it has to happen fast.”

Stein, the former Digital Realty CEO who now serves as Primary's chief investment officer, said in a statement the company was “thrilled to be a small part of this massive effort.”

“Bottom line: Bringing these innovative and experienced companies together in a supportive way enables them to move at this ludicrous pace,” he said.

UPDATE, MAY 28, 1:05 P.M. ET: This story has been updated to mention Newmark's involvement in the deal and to add a statement from Primary's Bill Stein.