Sign up to see the future, today
Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech
Donald Trump’s bid to cash in on the AI data center boom seems to have sprung a leak before it even left the harbor.
The company, Fermi America — the “master developer” of the “President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus” — is apparently flailing wildly as it tries to nail down fundamentals like steady revenue and cooling infrastructure. According to Axios, the Trump-branded firm has yet to even secure a commercial tenant, which is more or less a prerequisite for running a data center company in the age of the AI boom.
That’s not even the half of it, though. According to a form filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission last week, Fermi America’s CEO Toby Neugebauer abruptly stepped down from his roles, leaving the COO and a board member to pick up the pieces. Days later, Fermi’s CFO Miles Everson joined him.
Speaking to Axios a day before the announcement, Neugebauer didn’t even mention his imminent departure — though he did note that things weren’t going well. Specifically, he admitted that he may have “misunderstood where the supply chain is” at when it comes to the complex array of cooling equipment used to run data centers (Neugebauer has little experience overseeing computing infrastructure — according to his LinkedIn profile, he’s spent the past 28 years working in venture capital.)
“I will accept that as a failure,” Neugebauer said during the interview.
The departing CEO even pushed to scrap the company and sell it for parts, a proposal which the company’s remaining executives rejected.
“Given recent changes in leadership… the company firmly believes a sale is not in the best interest of its continued momentum on Project Matador, ability to serve potential tenants and long-term value creation for shareholders,” Fermi said in a statement, reported by Reuters.
Project Matador is the official name for Fermi’s planned 17-gigawatt data center in Texas, which as we noted is hurting for “potential tenants” in a major way. Shareholders are also feeling the pain, with the company’s stock price plummeting by around 71 percent over the past six months.
Neugebauer was probably right to get the jitters: over 2025, Fermi disclosed a full-year loss of nearly $500 million, with nary a crumb of incoming revenue. If there were ever a time to cut your losses, this seems to be it.
All told, it could be a canary in the coal mine for the data center industry. If the president of the United States can’t get his pet data center up and running, what does that say for everybody else?
More on data centers: Data Centers Causing Huge Temperature Spikes for Miles Around Them, Study Suggests
