Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is entering the AI and data center race with a new startup, betting on rural West Texas and the failed railroad-turned-oil giant to build enough power to light 7 million homes.
Schmidt's new Volt Data & Energy takes a one-stop-shop approach to the land, power and water needs of hyperscaler data center campuses. Mr. Bolt partnered with the Texas Pacific Land Company. Texas Pacific Land Co., a little-known oil and gas company with a long history and a $20 billion market cap, offers 882,000 acres of West Texas land, an area larger than Rhode Island, that happens to have easy access to natural gas and renewable energy resources. Oh, and the company happens to have its own water services business for oil and gas, which could also help with thirsty data centers.
“The main constraint on scaling AI is energy. If we want to keep America competitive, we have to solve this problem. Bolt was created to address this challenge,” Schmidt said in an email interview. luck. “We realized that by combining my technical expertise with TPL's unparalleled access to land, abundant water, and low-cost energy, we could build the infrastructure needed to meet virtually limitless computing demands.”
By literally co-authoring a book on AI.The age of AI: and the future of humanity In 2021, one year before the launch of ChatGPT — Schmidt sees the era of AI and advanced robotics as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” He believes data center campus developers like Bolt are needed to compete with China in the global AI race.
“Our platform starts with West Texas' abundant natural gas, but is designed to transition to renewable and clean energy, with future plans also including nuclear power,” Schmidt said. “By integrating land, power plants, and data centers, we can create a scalable and resilient infrastructure that can meet growing global computing demands. Our goal is to ensure that AI is developed responsibly to support U.S. competitiveness and provide technology that benefits humanity while minimizing climate impact.”
Schmidt, 70, was Google's CEO for 10 years from 2001 to 2011, then executive chairman of Google until 2017, then Alphabet, and a technical advisor until 2020. However, he has been busy ever since. He is currently CEO of aerospace manufacturer Relatively Space and co-founder of the nonprofit organization that hosts the AI+ Expo for National Competitiveness.
Schmidt is Bolt's chairman and co-founded it with investors Todd Meister and Texas Pacific Land major investor Alan Tessler. To date, Bolt has raised $150 million in initial capital and TPL has contributed $50 million in investment, including priority rights to supply critical water resources to new data center projects.
“We felt like we wanted to capture more of the value chain than just land leases and water contracts, and that's actually why we invested in Bolt,” said Ty Glover, CEO of Texas Pacific Land. luck. “When you think about who you want to partner with in a field where you are not an expert, there is no one better suited than a giant in that industry like Eric Schmidt.”
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West Texas as the center of AI
To understand how Texas Pacific Land came to own such vast tracts of land, it helps to look back over 150 years of history.
This legacy dates back to 1871, when federal charters were granted to build a national railroad from Texas to California. At the time, railroad companies received federal land grants in exchange for building railroad tracks.
The railroad failed for various financial reasons, which resulted in the creation of the Texas Pacific Land Trust to manage the railroad's land. When the Texas oil boom took root in the Permian Basin more than a century ago, the acreage became extremely valuable.
Texas Pacific has been publicly traded for almost 100 years, existing as a quack trust collecting oil and gas royalties until 2021, when a feud between investors transformed the trust into a more active company.
“It's exciting to go from a failed railroad to a gorilla in oil and gas and now into the AI space. This is a new frontier for us and for West Texas,” Glover said.
As traditional data center regions like Virginia become saturated with facilities, outlying areas like West Texas with a looser regulatory environment and smaller population will become more attractive, Glover said.
“Our hope is to get the project into full swing within the next few years,” he said. “The beauty of TPL is that you can really scale this. One owner can build multiple multi-giga data center campuses. As in other industries, scale is very important here.”
Schmidt said Bolt plans to start with one major customer and grow from there. He dropped the names of many powerful anchors, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Palantir, and even the White House's new AI Genesis mission.
Bolt is taking a bespoke approach similar to that of Fermi, a Texas-based AI power startup backed by former U.S. Energy Secretary and Texas Governor Rick Perry. Fermi launched its IPO in October before starting to collect proceeds, and its market capitalization quickly soared to $16 billion, but its value has since fallen to $5 billion by the end of 2025. But Bolt remains private and is not counting on public investor interest in the AI boom.
Schmidt said the plan is to start with natural gas-fired power and expand to 1 gigawatt of capacity, then build more campuses as generation sources expand to include wind, solar, battery storage and eventually nuclear power. The goal is to expand the Pacific Land area of Texas to 10 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power about 7 million homes.
“We are taking a different approach than the traditional data center model of leasing space and purchasing power from the grid. By vertically integrating energy ownership and advanced data infrastructure, we can design a platform that is both efficient and resilient,” Schmidt said.
