New Era Energy & Digital (NASDAQ:NUAI) said on Thursday it has made key engineering, commercial and regulatory advances at its Texas Critical Data Centers campus, a 50/50 joint venture with Sharon AI and the company’s flagship AI-focused data center and power project in the Permian Basin.
The planned 438-acre site in Ector County near Odessa is being prepared to support more than 1 gigawatt of capacity, with early-stage development now underway.
In a statement, New Era said soil sampling is in progress, site clearing has begun, and earthwork is starting this week.
Drone documentation is scheduled to provide verifiable construction updates, while civil planning and interconnection studies continue to support the site’s potential multi-gigawatt scale.
Regulatory work is also progressing, with the company engaging specialized counsel to establish an Industrial District with the City of Odessa. The designation would secure access to municipal water and wastewater services and reduce utility-availability risk for future phases of development.
On the commercial side, New Era said it is in negotiations with a leading hyperscaler on a long-term triple-net lease for a powered-shell deployment. Discussions with additional prospective tenants are advancing, and the company is working with several modular data-center manufacturers to manage costs, mitigate labor constraints and ensure repeatable build-outs.
“We are systematically de-risking the ground through disciplined engineering and early site work, and securing the long-term utilities that will anchor multi-gigawatt scalability,” CEO E Will Gray II said.
Gray added that the company is not only reducing physical and technical risks but also creating a structured financial roadmap for the project, giving investors “a clear line of sight from planning to execution to ARR.”
With engineering, site work and commercial talks advancing in parallel, New Era said it expects to reach a final investment decision by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Phase I of the project is slated to be energized from the first through fourth quarters of 2027.
Revenue is expected to begin at the start of construction, consistent with typical developer economics, while annual recurring revenue projections will be finalized once tenant sizing and commercial structures are set.