New Era Energy Locks 207 MW Gas PPA With Vistra for Its Texas AI Campus

New Era Energy & Digital (Nasdaq: NUAI) said on September 21, 2026 that its subsidiary TCDC PowerCo LLC signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Luminant ET Services, a Vistra Corp. affiliate, for a minimum of 200 MW and up to 207 MW of electricity. The power covers Phase 1 of New Era’s Texas Critical Data Center (TCDC), a 493-acre site in the Permian Basin near Midland, Texas, planned to scale to 1.4 GW over time. Power is expected to flow from Vistra’s adjacent 1,180 MW natural gas plant in Odessa starting in the third quarter of 2027.

What is known

The deal was disclosed in a company press release distributed through GlobeNewswire and confirmed in New Era’s 8-K filing with the SEC — both filed on September 21. The PPA has an initial 20-year term with automatic one-year renewals. Rather than a straightforward power sale, the companies also signed a development framework agreement: once delivery begins, Vistra takes a 5% non-voting equity interest in the powered portion of Phase 1, a right of first refusal on future TCDC expansion, and a right of first offer on other New Era projects. CEO Charlie Nelson called locking in firm, contracted power under New Era’s own name “an incredible milestone” that “materially reduces Phase 1 development risk.” Vistra SVP Claudia Morrow framed it as a long-term power arrangement with a framework for further build-out at the site. Financial media reported New Era’s stock jumped on the announcement, but no dollar value for the PPA itself was disclosed in either the press release or the SEC filing — this is a capacity and term agreement, not a priced contract as far as public documents show.

What it means for a power buyer

The structure is a template worth watching rather than a one-off: an operator without New Era’s balance sheet, or without a plant literally next door, has fewer options to source firm gas capacity at this scale on a 20-year horizon. Grid connections for hyperscale loads in ERCOT and other constrained US markets increasingly run through direct deals with a generator sitting behind the same fence line, not through the wholesale interconnection queue. Commercial power in deregulated ERCOT currently runs around 8.7 cents/kWh, per our energy index, with large industrial contracts closer to 6.6–7 cents when buyers take on real-time price exposure — the kind of spread that makes a fixed, co-located gas PPA attractive for a load this size even before accounting for interconnection queue delays. For context on how a project of this scale compares with facilities already tracked in our US data center directory, TCDC’s 1.4 GW long-term target would rank among the largest single-site campuses in the country, though only Phase 1’s capacity is contracted so far.

What we don’t know yet

Neither the press release nor the SEC filing discloses the price per MWh or the total contract value, so any per-MW cost estimate would be a guess — we are not making one. It is also not yet public how much of TCDC’s 493 acres or 1.4 GW long-term target is covered by tenant commitments versus speculative build, or which company (or companies) will occupy the data halls once power arrives in Q3 2027. New Era has not disclosed the customer base for TCDC’s compute capacity.