Fermi America's CEO Toby Neugebauer abruptly stepped down last Friday, sending the company's already battered stock tumbling another 75% over the past six months. The AI data center firm, co-founded by former Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry, went public last October with a grand vision: building the world's largest AI data center campus in the Texas Panhandle, officially named the "President Donald Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus."
The project's scale is staggering. It's planned to cover an area roughly half the size of Manhattan and draw a peak power of 17 gigawatts—three times the electricity consumption of New York City. The power mix is supposed to come from local natural gas, nuclear, and solar sources.
But the megaproject is now stuck on two fundamental problems. First, there's no publicly announced anchor tenant—the kind of major cloud provider (known in the industry as a hyperscaler) that typically commits to massive capacity upfront. Second, the cooling system design, which is supposed to be led by that tenant, can't be finalized without one.
Neugebauer admitted the supply chain was a "bigger bottleneck than anticipated" during a March 30 earnings call. He told Axios, "I may have misunderstood the supply chain. That's a failure." An estimate from independent market intelligence firm Cleanview suggests that even if an anchor tenant signed this month, the first buildings wouldn't come online until May 2027—about a year behind the original schedule. Fermi has already confirmed in recent SEC filings that it won't meet its initial target of bringing 1.1 GW online by the end of 2026.
Investors aren't waiting around. A class-action lawsuit was filed after a tenant pulled out last December.
Internal Cracks Are Showing
Co-founder Griffin Perry (Rick Perry's son) disclosed on April 15 that he sold about 11 million shares, roughly 15% of his stake. And back in March, Politico reported that Neugebauer had a heated confrontation with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick during a meeting.
This kind of high-stakes, high-profile infrastructure gamble is becoming a hallmark of the AI boom, where the race for compute power is pushing companies to make massive bets. It's a landscape where even established players are making dramatic moves, like Meta reportedly developing an AI clone of its own CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to stay ahead. Meanwhile, the pressure to deliver is immense, as seen when Anthropic had to pull its most advanced Claude Mythos model over safety concerns, a decision that drew immediate attention from the White House.