The New Energy War: How Nvidia, CoreWeave and a 2‑Gigawatt Texas Data Farm Have Suddenly Become Washington's Problem

When Poolside and CoreWeave announced plans this month for Project Horizon — a two‑gigawatt AI campus in West Texas that begins with a 250‑megawatt first phase coming online in late 2026 — the story read like a tech industry fairy tale: a scrappy startup, an ambitious campus and a warehouse full of the world’s most powerful chips.

Read closer and it reads like a political problem set. CoreWeave will supply Poolside with a cluster of Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems — more than 40,000 GPUs — and serve as anchor tenant and operations partner. “To compete at the frontier you need to be vertically integrated from dirt to intelligence,” Poolside co‑CEO Eiso Kant said.

CoreWeave’s CEO Michael Intrator framed the deal as building “the performance layer that will define how AI research becomes real‑world capability.”

The real world, however, is where energy grids, regulators and voters live. Two gigawatts is not a metaphor; it is the equivalent of powering roughly 1.5 million homes and it is being sited in the heart of America’s fracking patch. The political calculus is immediate: local leaders salivate over jobs and tax revenue, utilities worry about capacity and environmentalists warn about the climate and water‑use impacts of another industrial boom riding on cheap fossil fuel.

That collision will force state energy commissions, county permitting boards and Washington agencies into a new set of battles over who wins the AI dividend and who pays the bill. The Texas campus is only the most visible node in a broader, rapidly centralizing infrastructure spree. OpenAI’s buildout plans — reportedly up to 10 gigawatts using Nvidia hardware — and a cascade of multibillion‑dollar deals have turned data centers and power into strategic assets. Nvidia’s own move to invest heavily alongside customers — a $100 billion figure floated in coverage — has analysts comparing it to dot‑com era circular financing, a charge that Nvidia’s defenders counter with a different historical analogy: lock‑in through software and hardware ecosystems.

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The political consequence is the same: concentrated power, intertwined corporate interests and a state apparatus that will have to pick sides. Wall Street is already picking. BlackRock and consortiums are pouring tens of billions into data‑center portfolios, while asset managers and hedge funds trade stakes in companies like CoreWeave and Core Scientific. That deal, an all‑stock merger giving CoreWeave control of Core Scientific and promising cost synergies, has prompted a shareholder fight: Two Seas Capital says the transaction undervalues Core Scientific; the board has urged shareholders to approve it.

At the same time, big holders such as Magnetar have been selling stock, and short‑term market moves are becoming a form of political theatre — a sign that the transformation of physical infrastructure is also a speculative mania. This matters because the stakes are not just corporate. Policy decisions about electricity siting, water permits, local tax incentives and even national security reviews will determine whether the gains from frontier AI are diffuse or concentrated in a handful of companies and regions.

Lawmakers in both parties are suddenly negotiating tax breaks and transmission siting rules with the same intensity they once reserved for factories. Regulators must decide whether to treat GPU‑heavy campuses like heavy industry or like utilities, while antitrust enforcers will soon be asked to judge whether a single firm’s control of chips, cloud services and data farms undermines competition.

The West Texas debate will not be settled in a press release. It will be settled in county hearings, investor proxy fights and Washington corridors where tech ambition meets the limits of power and politics. The question for voters and elected officials is blunt: who gets the power, and who pays for it?