Project Matador: The Biggest Billionaire Giveaway In Texas History
And the people of the Panhandle are going to pay for it.
You’ve heard me talk about how Texas Republicans have spent decades building an economy that works beautifully for billionaires and brutally for everyone else, giving away the tax base, promising water they don’t have, opening the floodgates to an industry that will consume more power than this state can produce, and fast-tracking nuclear facilities in communities that were never asked.
This is a pattern.
Project Matador is where the pattern goes to its logical extreme.
What they’re building.
About 12 miles northeast of Amarillo, on 7,570 acres of Texas Panhandle desert sitting on top of one of the most critically depleted aquifers on the planet, a company called Fermi America is constructing what it claims will be the largest data center campus on Earth.
They’re calling it the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.
Seriously. ⬇️
The project, named Project Matador, is being sold to the public as a visionary leap into America’s AI future. It’ll be a 17 gigawatt private energy campus powered primarily by NATURAL GAS, with nuclear reactors promised somewhere down the road, consuming BILLIONS of gallons of water the Texas Panhandle does not have, built on public university land handed over for 99 years, backstopped by tax abatements approved by local officials, and fronted by a cast of politically connected insiders who walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars before a single paying customer signed a lease.
This is the Texas Republican economic model in its purest form.
And the people of Carson County are going to be living with the consequences long after the insiders have cashed out.
Who built this? And the names you already know.
Let’s start with the people behind it, because this is not a story about anonymous corporations. These are specific people with specific political relationships who used those relationships to extract specific value from public assets.
Rick Perry is a co-founder of Fermi America. You know, dumbass Rick Perry. The man who famously forgot the name of the agency he later ran. When Fermi went public in October 2025, Perry’s 2.5% stake was worth approximately $540 million. He had been involved in the project for less than a year.
Toby Neugebauer was co-founder and CEO until he was fired “for cause” in April 2026. His father is former Republican Congressman Randy Neugebauer, whose district included the Amarillo area, where Project Matador is located. Toby’s background is in oil and gas private equity. He co-founded Quantum Energy Partners, which invested heavily in the Barnett Shale. At IPO, his 28% stake was worth approximately $6 billion.
Griffin Perry, Rick Perry’s son, runs Caddis Capital, which owns 9.3% of Fermi shares and is the company’s second-largest shareholder.
Trent Sisemore, former Amarillo mayor, serves as Fermi’s community liaison, based in an office above a local bank in Amarillo.
Brandon Creighton, Chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, has been the public face of institutional support for the project, reassuring the public even after the CEO was fired, even after the stock dropped 70% from its IPO high, that Texas Tech “remains firmly committed to the partnership.” This is the same hillbilly lawyer, previous State Senator, Brandon Creighton, whose university system recently implemented what critics have called one of the most extreme anti-speech policies ever imposed at a public university, prohibiting faculty and students from affirming that transgender people exist.
And threading through all of it is the Trump administration itself. In July 2025, Trump signed an executive order designating AI data centers at Department of Energy facilities as critical defense infrastructure, directly benefiting Fermi’s site, which sits adjacent to the Pantex nuclear weapons plant where the DOE stores dismantled nuclear warheads. According to Neugebauer’s own investor disclosures, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum personally intervened to help the project move forward.
A land swap involving nearly 30 regulatory agencies was completed in 45 days.
Fermi’s own community liaison said that the timeline “should take years.”
It didn’t, because these are not people who wait in line.
Public land. Private profit. 99 years.
The ground Project Matador sits on belongs to the Texas Tech University System, a public university, funded by Texas taxpayers.
Fermi America holds a 99-year ground lease on 5,855 acres of that land. The lease grants Fermi what the documents call “developmental sovereignty.” That means they get exclusive development, access, and improvement rights over the entire site for a century.
What did Texas Tech get in exchange? Research facilities. A scholarship fund. And the assurance that a corporation named after Enrico Fermi, the man who is responsible for the Fermi Paradox, would be a responsible steward of public land.
The actual terms of the deal were subject to a review by Ken Paxton’s Office to determine what Texas Tech was legally required to disclose, meaning even the public university’s own community couldn’t fully see what was traded away on their behalf. The Amarillo Tribune filed a public records request and received partial documents. The full picture remains partially obscured.
Texas Republicans have spent years telling you that public universities should run more like businesses, that government should get out of the way of the private sector, and that public assets exist to serve economic growth. What that philosophy looks like in practice is a public university handing a for-profit corporation a 99-year lease on thousands of acres of taxpayer-owned land, with terms partially hidden from the public, to benefit founders who were already worth billions.
This is the conversion of a public asset into private wealth.
The tax abatements, because of course.
As I’ve written before, tax abatements are how Texas Republicans tell corporations and their billionaire buddies, “You don’t have to pay your share. The people who already live here will cover the difference.”
Project Matador is no exception.
Carson County approved a 10-year property tax abatement for Fermi, designating the site a “reinvestment zone.” The Panhandle Independent School District approved its own abatement. A Foreign Trade Zone application is pending for federal tariff relief.
The abatement structure is worth understanding in detail, because local officials presented it as a win. Instead of normal property taxes, Fermi pays Carson County $3 per square foot of improvements and between $2,500 and $2,750 per megawatt of generation capacity. The county projects that this will generate $800 million over time.
That sounds like a lot until you understand what’s being given up to get there.
The property is 100% tax abated for each phase, meaning the full taxable value of what’s being built pays nothing into the county’s general tax base during the abatement period. Each phase runs for 10 years. There are up to 15 phases. They can run concurrently. In theory, this abatement structure extends across the entire multi-decade buildout.
The $800 million figure assumes the project is fully built out. As of today, the stock is down 70% from its IPO high. The CEO was fired. No anchor tenant has signed a binding lease. Texas Tech is renegotiating lease milestones because Fermi is behind schedule.
And there is one more detail that doesn’t show up in the press releases.
There is no penalty clause if Fermi exceeds its water usage limits. The community agreed to deliver water. Nobody agreed on what happens if Fermi takes more than it promised.
The water.
I’ve written about Texas water before. I wrote about how Corpus Christi is careening toward a water emergency because Republican leadership spent decades prioritizing industrial expansion over water infrastructure. I wrote about how they promised water they didn’t have to attract investment, but they couldn’t sustain it.
What’s happening in the Panhandle is the same story, playing out faster.
Project Matador sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the world, stretching from South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle and supplying irrigation for farms that produce roughly 20% of the country’s agricultural output. It is also one of the most rapidly depleting aquifers on the planet.
The Texas State Water Plan projects that the Ogallala will decline by 52% before 2060. In some parts of the Texas Panhandle, the actual depth of available water has already dropped by more than 300 feet over the last 50 years. The region has been on conservation plans since the 1970s.
Fermi’s own hydrologist acknowledged at a Carson County meeting that the saturated thickness at the Project Matador site is less than 20 feet. He said, and I want you to read this carefully: “We’re not getting the water there. That’s one of the reasons that site was available, it was not an irrigatable place, because there wasn’t enough water to flow to wells there.”
The site was chosen, in part, because the water beneath it was already nearly gone.
So where is the water coming from?
From Amarillo’s municipal supply. The city signed a 20-year water agreement, with two 10-year renewal options, to deliver 2.5 million gallons per day to Project Matador, at twice the rate charged to Amarillo residents and businesses. There is a non-binding memo attached to that agreement that anticipates scaling to 10 million gallons per day if Fermi funds the infrastructure required. Full buildout water projections run to 13 million gallons per day, with annual usage of up to 2 billion gallons.
Talk to the farmers and ranchers who’ve worked this land for generations.
One farmer explains that if the aquifer drops enough to dry up irrigation wells, cotton production in the Panhandle falls from 2,000–4,000 pounds per acre to roughly 250 pounds per acre. That’s the end of agriculture in the region. Multigenerational farms become unsellable. Families who didn’t sign up for any of this get to watch their land become worthless while a corporation that got a 99-year lease on public land and a 10-year tax abatement drains the water table.
And water in West Texas evaporates. In the Panhandle summer, that means constant refilling from a system that’s already running out. The water doesn’t cycle back to the ecosystem. It leaves permanently because it’ll be 110° outside.
Kendra Seight, who is organizing the ground-level resistance to Project Matador through the Panhandle First Coalition, said it directly:
The Texas Republicans who approved this project, who handed out the abatements, who fast-tracked the land deal, who signed the water agreements, they knew what the Ogallala looked like. They’ve known for decades. They watched Corpus Christi happen. They approved this anyway.
“Clean” natural gas. The lie they keep selling.
Fermi America has received what TCEQ calls the nation’s second-largest clean air permit for 6 gigawatts of natural-gas combustion. Two weeks after receiving it, they filed for an additional 5 gigawatts. That’s 11 gigawatts of natural gas, before a single nuclear reactor is licensed, permitted, or built.
Their press releases call it “clean natural gas.”
“Clean natural gas” is not really a thing, it’s just cleaner than coal. It’s still fossil fuels. This is a marketing term used by the fossil fuel industry to rebrand methane gas, creating a false perception that it does not contribute significantly to global warming.
At 50% of a 17-gigawatt buildout, the natural gas component alone would generate tens of millions of tons of CO₂ annually. That’s before accounting for methane leakage from the natural gas infrastructure itself, methane being roughly 80 times more potent than CO₂ over 20 years.
Fermi keeps requesting additional natural gas permits while the nuclear future remains speculative and timelines keep slipping.
The TCEQ, the state agency that approved these permits, is an appointed board. Appointed by Greg Abbott (who else?). The same governor who vetoed a $60 million summer lunch program for food-insecure children presided over more than $1 billion in annual tax breaks for data centers.
Over 279 community members submitted comments to TCEQ opposing the permits. Sixty-three requested a contested case hearing. TCEQ is not required to grant them.
The nuclear promise.
Fermi has submitted a Combined Operating License application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, the first such application accepted for review in more than 15 years. The NRC has selected the project for an accelerated environmental review pilot program that promises to cut review time by roughly 50%.
Even on an accelerated timeline, the first reactor wouldn’t come online until approximately 2031. Nuclear construction is slated to begin in 2027 if the NRC approves the license, financing holds, the project has tenants by then, and the company survives its current leadership crisis.
The AP1000 design has a track record worth checking out. The only AP1000s built in the United States to date were at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, which came in approximately $17 billion over budget and years behind schedule. The Union of Concerned Scientists has raised specific concerns about the AP1000’s containment strength and redundancy compared to currently operating reactors.
And there’s a detail about nuclear waste that doesn’t appear in Fermi’s marketing materials. They have no finalized plan for where the spent fuel rods go. The rods will cool on-site temporarily. After that, Fermi is “working on agreements” to transport waste to Nevada. The community is being asked to host the waste indefinitely while that gets figured out, on top of an aquifer, next to a nuclear weapons facility.
The IPO, the collapse, and who already got paid.
In October 2025, Fermi America went public on the Nasdaq and London Stock Exchange at a valuation of roughly $12 billion. The company had existed for less than a year. It had zero revenue. It had zero signed tenants. It had permits and promises, a 99-year lease on public land, and a project named after the sitting president.
It raised $746 million from public investors.
At that moment, Rick Perry’s stake was worth $540 million. Toby Neugebauer’s stake was worth $6 billion. The money was real. The revenue was not.
Here’s the timeline of what happened next:
November 2025: Fermi announces a $150 million funding agreement with an unnamed “investment-grade tenant.” Neugebauer tells Business Insider the tenant is Amazon. Fermi then denies this.
December 2025: The tenant terminates the agreement. No money was spent.
February 2026: Construction is paused while Fermi waits for its air permit. The workforce on-site shrinks. Rumors of layoffs circulate in local media.
February 25, 2026: TCEQ grants the air permit.
April 17, 2026: Toby Neugebauer is terminated “for cause” by the board. The CFO resigns simultaneously. The stock drops more than 20% in a single day.
May 2026: Neugebauer, who still controls approximately 40% of outstanding shares through family holdings, attempts to call a special shareholder meeting to reconstitute the board. The board cancels the meeting, citing authority under the company’s bylaws. A proxy war is underway.
As of today, the stock is down more than 70% from its October IPO high. No anchor tenant has signed a binding lease. Texas Tech is in discussions to extend lease milestones. The company reported a net loss of $188.7 million in Q1 2026.
The insiders’ paper wealth from the IPO is already banked.
The $746 million in public investor capital has already been deployed to equipment and operations.
The 99-year lease on public land, the air permits, the water agreements, the tax abatements, those all remain intact regardless of what happens to Fermi’s stock price, regardless of who wins the boardroom fight, regardless of whether a single data center ever opens on that site.
If Project Matador collapses tomorrow, Rick Perry still made $540 million. Toby Neugebauer, even fired, still has hundreds of millions in equity. The founders captured the upside of a pre-revenue company going public at a $12 billion valuation.
Carson County has a 100% tax abatement locked in for a project that may never fully materialize. Amarillo has a 20-year water commitment with no enforcement mechanism. The Ogallala Aquifer has 3 million square feet of land cleared on its banks, ready for development.
This is the Texas Republican model working exactly as designed.
They knew and did it anyway.
This is a story about the political system in Texas, designed to produce exactly these outcomes and to have been producing them consistently across the state for decades.
In Abilene, residents are paying $3,000 a month in rent while the corporations driving that cost get an 85% tax abatement. In Corpus Christi, a city is careening toward evacuation because Republican leadership spent 20 years prioritizing industrial water contracts over the water supply that residents depend on. In Lockhart, a community got a nuclear facility placed in its backyard through a fast-tracked federal deregulation program.
In the Texas Panhandle, they’re getting all of it at once.
Greg Abbott approved the policy environment that made this possible. Texas Republicans built the regulatory infrastructure that fast-tracked it. Local officials signed the abatements and the water agreements because they were told, as local officials across this state are always told, that if they didn’t say yes, the project would go somewhere else.
As if that would be the worst outcome.
As if watching a billion-dollar corporation drain your aquifer, foul your air, and lock your public university’s land into a 99-year lease was the price of progress.
And the people of the Texas Panhandle didn’t vote for it. They weren’t asked. They showed up at public meetings, submitted 279 comments, requested contested case hearings, drove for hours, and built cross-ideological coalitions with people they disagreed with on almost everything else because they understood that what was being done to their community was not inevitable.
It was a choice. Made by Texas Republicans. With specific financial interests. Protected by specific political relationships.
And those people should be named and held accountable every single time.
What You Can Do
The fight isn’t over. There are still active permit proceedings, active regulatory decisions, and an election calendar that matters.
File public comments with TCEQ on Fermi’s pending 5 GW natural gas permit application. The Panhandle First Coalition has made this as simple as possible.
Contact your Texas state representative and ask them what they are doing to protect the Ogallala Aquifer from unregulated industrial extraction.
Ask your state legislators why data centers receive more than $1 billion in annual tax abatements in a state where 22.5% of children experience food insecurity.
Share this story.
This article is part of an ongoing series on data centers, water rights, and corporate power in Texas. Previous pieces:
May 15, 2026: Last day to apply to vote by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 18, 2026: First day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 22, 2026: Last day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 26, 2026: Last day to receive ballot by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 26, 2026: Election day! (Democratic primary runoff elections)
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These guys are going to get richer, and leave us with all the consequences. This deal is rotten.