Lancium: The Landlord Who Patented the Switch

Where did Lancium come from?

From a wind farm and a courtroom's account of one. The most reliable history of Lancium's early years is the Federal Circuit's, written in January 2025 to decide who invented its method: Michael McNamara and Raymond Cline Jr. co-founded the company in November 2017; a patent application was filed in February 2018; by October 2018 Lancium “was operating 120 cryptocurrency miners at its facility in Texas”; by May 2019 it had software watching the wind farm, ERCOT's prices, and the price of bitcoin at once, which “eventually became known as Lancium Smart Response.”^[1] The fifth patent, U.S. 10,608,433, issued March 31, 2020: a method for adjusting a data center's consumption under a power-option agreement, ramping “in as little as five seconds,” and written, at that point, only for Bitcoin machines.^[2] Hanwha Solutions, which put in $100 million in 2021, dates the founding to 2017 and Houston; the company now gives its address as Shenandoah or The Woodlands.^[8][26][31]

The thing it invented, or patented, is the thing this site has spent a wing describing. On June 19, 2020, with Shell's MP2 Energy, Lancium announced that a mining host's site at Big Spring had become the first load-only Controllable Load Resource in ERCOT's history - a status that had existed since 2004 and had never before been given to something that only consumed. McNamara called it “a testament to our technical and IP leadership.”^[3] A year later the Texas Blockchain Council would define a large flexible load to ERCOT's task force as one that is a CLR or interruptible; the miners that filled the queue in 2022 were selling the flexibility Lancium had first registered.^[46] The story from the grid's side is on ERCOT and Bitcoin.

What did Lancium promise Fort Stockton and Abilene?

Bitcoin mines, and big ones. On September 15, 2021 it broke ground on its first Clean Campus at Fort Stockton in Pecos County: 25 megawatts by the first quarter of 2022, 325 by the end of the year, “hundreds of millions” of dollars and “dozens” of jobs.^[6] In a sponsored profile McNamara called it “one of the largest single Bitcoin mines ever built.”^[42] On December 21, 2021, three weeks after closing $150 million led by Hanwha, it announced Abilene with the city, Taylor County, and the development corporation: a $2.4 billion campus on about 800 acres, 200 megawatts growing past a gigawatt, 57 full-time jobs, “the largest project in Abilene and Taylor County history,” for “hosting Bitcoin mining and other energy-intensive applications.”^[7][10][11] On March 29, 2022 CleanSpark disclosed a hosting agreement for 200 megawatts at Abilene with an option to 500.^[12][13] On November 2 Fort Stockton qualified as a Controllable Load Resource; on November 3 Lancium broke ground at Abilene on more than a thousand acres.^[14][15]

Fort Stockton is still 25 megawatts. Every facilities directory that lists it in 2026 gives that figure against a plan of 300 to 325, names no tenant, and one notes there is “no evidence” the site draws carbon-free power.^[40][41] No CleanSpark machine was ever reported at Abilene, and by the time the first building went up there the tenant was not a miner. The Bitcoin campuses were the pitch that got the land, the interconnection, and the abatement. What got built on them was something else.

Who did Lancium sue, and who sued Lancium?

It sued the miners who did what it did. On August 14, 2020 Lancium filed against Layer1, the Peter Thiel-backed West Texas miner, in the Western District of Texas for infringing the '433 patent - “We will also aggressively defend this intellectual property” - and settled on March 5, 2021 with Layer1 taking a license and adopting Smart Response.^[4][5] On May 10, 2023 it sued U.S. Data Mining Group, which operated as US Bitcoin and ran about 730 megawatts across four Texas sites, in Waco on seven patents, seeking an injunction and enhanced damages; on January 12, 2024 it voluntarily dismissed the case, and the terms are not public.^[16][17] It was sued once, in Delaware in April 2021, by BearBox, whose founder Austin Storms claimed to have invented the method and shared it with Lancium at a conference. Lancium won at trial and the Federal Circuit affirmed on January 13, 2025 in an opinion that opens, “Lancium allegedly stole Austin Storms' thunder and patented it,” and concludes it did not.^[1]

Then the grid operator weighed in. At its April 7 and 8, 2025 meeting ERCOT's board received a disclosure from general counsel Chad Seely: Lancium was registered as a market participant in three capacities; an oil company had filed a rule change arguing the patents did not apply to ordinary CLR participation; and “Lancium's patents may be acting as a barrier to entry for increased CLR participation in the ERCOT market.” The resolution was a license, agreed in a February term sheet: non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, limited to the ERCOT region, covering every existing and future U.S. patent Lancium holds that a load would need to participate in ERCOT's markets, and releasing prior claims.^[26] The company that patented the switch gave Texas the right to use it for nothing. Whether it would have done so had the board not put the word “barrier” in a public document is not in the record.

How did a Bitcoin campus become Stargate?

Through a tenant who built for someone else. On July 18, 2024 Crusoe, the Denver company that had begun in flared-gas Bitcoin mining and moved to AI, announced a 200-megawatt data center on the Abilene Clean Campus, expandable to 1.2 gigawatts, with construction begun in June; Lancium's role, in its own words, was land, interconnection, site engineering, renewables, and power orchestration.^[18] In October Crusoe, Blue Owl Capital, and Primary Digital Infrastructure funded the first two buildings, 206 megawatts and 998,000 square feet, for $3.4 billion.^[19] In November Blackstone took an equity stake of more than $500 million, and Bloomberg reported that Lancium intended five gigawatts at five West Texas sites by 2028.^[20] On January 21, 2025 OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX announced Stargate at the White House; its first site was Abilene.^[21] In March Crusoe expanded to eight buildings, about 4 million square feet, and 1.2 gigawatts; in May the joint venture reached $15 billion.^[25][27] Lancium closed $600 million of debt with Santander in October 2025, describing Abilene as “the inaugural site of Stargate.”^[28] By April 2026 three of the eight buildings were running and more than 8,500 workers were on the site.^[30]

The scale then multiplied. On July 13, 2026 QTS and Lancium announced a campus of up to eleven buildings and a gigawatt of grid connection near Turkey in Hall County, more than $10 billion; on July 15 Crusoe and Lancium announced a gigawatt at Childress on 270 acres Lancium owns, with Crusoe also building an adjacent 900 megawatts at Abilene.^[31][32]Both interconnections had been approved under ERCOT's process before Batch Zero.^[34] On August 24 Lancium announced an Nvidia investment it did not size - The Information put it at up to $3 billion for about a fifth of the company at about a $10 billion valuation, with Blackstone holding about half - and described itself as a Blackstone portfolio company with 4 gigawatts leased and operating and a pipeline past 15.^[38][35]

What is Lancium's record with the state?

Present at the large-load debates, absent from the Bitcoin ones. No Lancium witness appears on the March 2023 list for SB 1751, the brake on the miners, when Riot and US Bitcoin testified against it.^[43] McNamara did testify - “on,” neither for nor against - on SB 6, the 2025 large-load law, before Senate Business & Commerce on February 27, 2025, listed from Shenandoah alongside Crusoe and the Texas Blockchain Council.^[22] On April 9, 2026 he sat on the second panel of the House State Affairs Committee's interim hearing on data centers, SB 6's implementation, and Batch Zero; Inside Climate News quoted him the next day on water: “We have a water shortage, but it's a water shortage driven by shortages of engineering and money. We can fix all of those.”^[29][30] When the Governor paused new large-load energizations on August 3, 2026 pending an audit, Lancium endorsed it within a week: “Large computing load can be an asset to the grid rather than a burden on it.”^[37][36] That is the sentence the company was founded on, and the one the state has now made a condition of connection.

The honest counterweight: the promise, the patents, and the town

Three things. First, the promise. Lancium told Fort Stockton 325 megawatts and delivered 25; told Abilene a Bitcoin campus and delivered none; signed a 200-megawatt Bitcoin tenant whose machines never came. The campus that was built is six times the size of the one announced and pays taxes on a fraction of its value: an abatement reported at 80% for the county over ten years and 85% for the city, amended in February 2025 over residents' objections, with the school district alone taking nothing.^{[6][40][12][23][24]} Second, the patents, which cut both ways. The Federal Circuit found Lancium invented what it claims; ERCOT's counsel found the claims may have kept other loads from doing what Lancium taught them to do; the license that resolved it is free, perpetual, and covers the whole region, and no other company in this wing has given the grid anything comparable.^[1][26] Third, the town. Abilene's water is not the problem the opposition said it would be - the campus draws about 20 gallons a minute against an allocation of 500 - but its rents have doubled and tripled, residents have protested “backroom data center deals,” and the county judge's defense in September 2026 was that abatements are unpopular and “the only way you're going to have any authority.”^[30][39][45] In Childress the rents doubled on the announcement and a workers' camp is planned.^[33]Lancium is private, has never published revenue, and has about eighty employees by an analyst's count; the two firms that own most of it are the largest private-equity manager and the largest chipmaker in the world.^[44][35]

The fair reading is that Lancium was right about the grid and wrong about the tenant - that a mine really can be a resource, and that the resource was worth more to a company that does not mine - and that Texas got the idea for free, in a license, and is paying for the campuses in abatements.

Where does Lancium stand today?

As of September 30, 2026: 1.2 gigawatts interconnected at Abilene with three of eight buildings running and 900 more megawatts adjacent; a gigawatt each at Childress and in Hall County, approved before the pause and not yet built; 25 megawatts at Fort Stockton; Blackstone and Nvidia as owners; a free license in ERCOT's hands; and a Governor's audit due December 10 that asks every large load the question Lancium says it answered in 2020.^{[30][32][31][40][38][26][37]}The companies that still mine are on Riot Platforms and Texas, MARA Holdings and Texas, and Bitdeer and Texas; the ones that stopped are on Core Scientific and Texas and Cipher and Texas; the grid is on ERCOT and Bitcoin; the pivot is on the Texas miners' AI pivot. This page is the landlord who patented the switch, and what he built once he owned the land.