Five Point Infrastructure’s new PowerBridge venture to build North American gigawatt-scale data center campuses

Five Point Infrastructure is taking advantage of the ongoing data center landrush by forming and funding a new PowerBridge venture.

With an equity commitment of up to $1 billion, PowerBridge is focused on developing, building, and managing gigawatt-scale data center campuses, associated power infrastructure, and fiber network connectivity throughout North America.

The formation of PowerBridge builds on Five Point’s powered land strategy, developing significant digital infrastructure projects that require abundant and reliable power and related infrastructure.

Through the affiliate company LandBridge, a land management business, PowerBridge will immediately gain access to more than 275,000 surface acres for infrastructure development and direct access to low-cost natural gas due to LandBridge’s strategic positioning adjacent to the Waha Gas market hub. The platform will also benefit from its relationship with Five Point-backed WaterBridge, a pioneer of water management and the largest pure-play, privately held midstream water management company in the Delaware Basin, in addressing the cooling water needs of data centers and new power generation.

PowerBridge is led by CEO Alex Hernandez, an executive with extensive data center experience.

Before founding PowerBridge, Hernandez was the founder and CEO of Cumulus Data and Talen Energy Corp, one of the largest competitive power companies in North America with ~15 GW of power generation assets. Cumulus Data was sold to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in May 2024.

One of the main milestones Hernandez and the Cumulus teams achieved was the development of a gigawatt-scale data center campus directly connected to wholesale power generation assets, without a grid connection. The 1 GW Cumulus data center campus was directly linked to Talen Energy’s 2.6 GW Susquehanna Nuclear Power Plant in Berwick, PA.

Today, AWS is deploying approximately $12 billion of capital into this digital giga-campus by constructing 17 data center buildings (~960 MW in aggregate). The team that developed this campus has been reassembled to execute similar digital giga-campus deployments within PowerBridge.

Hernandez currently serves on the Board of Directors of ERCOT, which manages the flow of electric power to 27 million Texas customers and 90 percent of the state’s electric load.

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