Capital Realignment in the Permian Basin: Ward County, Texas Data Centers and Power Infrastructure
Comprehensive survey, the Cedarvale crypto-to-AI pivot, the Pyote bitcoin cluster, and the CPV Basin Ranch baseload buildout

Ward County's digital-infrastructure story is a single transaction writ large: Ionic Digital's 234 MW Cedarvale bitcoin mine converted overnight into an AI colocation asset under a 10-year, $2B triple-net lease with Nscale, which is hosting a $14B Microsoft compute contract (~104,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs). Everything else the report catalogs (Genesis Digital Assets' 300 MW Pyote mine, the Lonestar Taproot/Tarbush 100 MW shared bitcoin portfolio, and 1024 Capital's 150 MW behind-the-meter Monahans mining farm) remains pure-bitcoin and out of this tracker's project scope, archived here for county completeness. A parallel gas-generation boom (CPV's 1,350 MW TxEF-backed Basin Ranch plant, Vistra's 860 MW Permian Basin expansion, and three small reciprocating-engine projects) underwrites the county's rigid new AI load, while PUCT's tightening large-load interconnection rules and PBTISD's outsized property-tax windfall frame the regulatory and fiscal backdrop.

From flexible mining to rigid AI baseload

Ward County, in the Delaware sub-region of the Permian Basin, built its digital-infrastructure base on cheap Waha Hub gas and flexible, price-responsive cryptocurrency mining. The report's central argument is a structural pivot: AI colocation workloads are a Firm Load — continuous, non-interruptible, and incompatible with the curtailment behavior that made mining attractive to ERCOT — forcing a parallel build-out of dispatchable natural gas generation to guarantee the uptime AI clusters require.

Ward County asset directory

ProjectDeveloper / OwnerCapacityWorkloadTracker disposition
Ionic Digital CedarvaleIonic Digital Inc. → leased to Nscale Ward County, LLC234 MW (potential to 1.2 GW)AI colocation — Microsoft via Nscale, ~104,000 GB300 GPUsAdded as a tracker project (reported confidence)
Pyote Facility (PowerBridge Alpha Digital Campus)Genesis Digital Assets300 MW design / ~195 MW activeBitcoin self-miningArchive-only — pure bitcoin, no AI plans
Lonestar Taproot (Pyote site)Lonestar Dream Inc. / China Green Agriculture100 MW shared regional portfolio (with Tarbush, Pecos/Reeves)Self-mining + third-party hostingArchive-only — same Lonestar/Tarbush portfolio already archived from the Pecos and Reeves County reports
Monahans Gas Power Mining Farm1024 Capital / BitTribe150 MW planned (behind-the-meter gas)Bitcoin self-mining + hosting, ~45,000 ASICsArchive-only — pure bitcoin, no AI plans

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