Fermi has selected NAES Corporation, the largest independent power plant operator in the United States, to operate and maintain the natural gas generation fleet at Project Matador in Carson County, Texas. With more than 45 years of experience operating power facilities, NAES brings the people, systems and operating expertise needed to help prepare the campus for first power.
The partnership comes as several major pieces of Project Matador are beginning to converge. Fermi’s first Siemens Energy SGT6-5000F natural gas turbines have arrived on site, EPC partners are in place, and the company has signed its first customer. Fermi also recently selected CBRE to operate and maintain its first data center at the campus. Together, these milestones represent another step in building not only the physical infrastructure behind Project Matador, but the operational platform required to support it.
Under the agreement, Fermi will retain ownership and control of its generation assets while NAES will establish operating and maintenance procedures, implement work-management systems and prepare the plants for service. As generation units come online, NAES will provide trained crews to operate the facilities, oversee maintenance programs and support site safety and environmental compliance. The partnership will also bring the NAES Enterprise Reliability Program to Project Matador, including operator training, asset-risk reviews, maintenance planning and real-time reliability monitoring.
For Project Matador, reliability is fundamental. The campus is being developed around a private, behind-the-meter power model designed to provide the scale and redundancy required by hyperscale AI and advanced computing. Bringing an experienced power plant operator into the project before the first natural gas units enter service allows those operating systems, procedures and teams to be established alongside construction rather than after it.
As Project Matador continues to take shape in the Texas Panhandle, each milestone is moving the project closer to the same objective: delivering large-scale, reliable power on the timeline next-generation AI infrastructure demands. This is where AI gets power.
