Welcome to West Texas, where we might not have a reliable municipal power grid, but we are apparently building a 5,000-acre, nuclear-powered mega-data center on Texas Tech land to feed the AI overlords. Project Matador is designed to generate up to 17 gigawatts of power—enough for 12 million homes—but instead of helping humans survive the summer, it’s being built exclusively for hyperscale computing. Because what says “Lubbock progress” quite like a giant radioactive sandbox for tech-bros?
Naturally, a project this absurd requires an equal amount of executive drama. Enter Toby Neugebauer, the recently fired CEO of Fermi America, the company building this digital monstrosity. According to SEC filings, Toby forgot that high-profile tech conferences aren’t Lubbock dive bars; he was booted from his position after getting “loud and belligerent” with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at an Nvidia conference, requiring actual security personnel to pull them apart. Texas Tech System Board Chairman Cody Campbell saw this public embarrassment and swiftly told Fermi to fire their toddler-in-chief or risk losing their lucrative 99-year ground lease.
Instead of taking his millions and slinking away into a comfortable retirement, Toby is throwing a multi-million-dollar tantrum. He’s currently waging a proxy war to force a cheap sale of the company to enrich himself, while Fermi management begs shareholders to reject his “self-interested and value-destructive agenda.” In a hilarious stroke of unhinged genius, Toby published an open letter nominating John Sellers to take over the company as a “compromise.” The punchline? Sellers is the literal business partner of Cody Campbell—the exact guy Toby claims engineered his firing. Toby admitted he didn’t give Sellers a heads-up about the nomination, and Double Eagle Energy immediately issued a corporate “new phone, who dis?” press release, stating they want absolutely nothing to do with Toby’s circus.
After all, why bother building a functional society when we can watch local oil barons and ousted tech executives weaponize nuclear-powered AI data centers to fight over who has the biggest sandbox?
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