The man who may have just saved the City of London is back in his office in Texas recovering. “It has been a brutal month,” he reflects ruefully. Toby Neugebauer, 53, and his business partner — Rick Perry, former governor of the Lone Star state and US energy secretary in the first Trump administration — finally flew out of Heathrow last week after an exhausting marathon round of 110 meetings during three whirlwind trips to the UK.
The pair, alongside Perry’s son Griffin, are behind a frankly mind-bogglingly ambitious “smart electrons” energy and AI masterplan codenamed Project Matador. And they want London to be in on it from the beginning.
The trio hope to create America’s biggest AI data centre campus, covering an area bigger than 16 Hyde Parks, and powered by its own private solar, gas and nuclear electricity grid, on a site near Amarillo in the panhandle of northern Texas.
Trading in shares in their company, Fermi America, began in London last Thursday amid some of the gloomiest-ever headlines about the state of health of the stock exchange, the City’s “shop window” financial market.
Just the day before, a survey was published showing London falling to a humiliating 23rd place in the league table of venues for new listings of company shares — or IPOs as they are known in the financial world — behind the likes of Mexico, Oman and Singapore.
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The debilitating and prolonged IPO drought had threatened to kibosh London’s long-held claim to be one of the world’s pre-eminent financial centres. But the arrival of Fermi, a company valued at $13 billion on its first day of trading, has dramatically electrified the mood.
Fermi’s flotation was immediately followed by IPO plans from the canned tuna company Princes and the specialist lender Shawbrook. The timing is coincidence, of course, but others are expected to follow during the course of the autumn. The floodgates seem to have finally been opened.
From a business perspective, London is the best place to be in the world
The Fermi project, carried out in partnership with Texas Tech University, has “made in America” stamped all over it. The primary listing of the shares was on the US stock market Nasdaq. So why let the Brits get a slice of the action? Neugebauer, who is the firm’s president and CEO, explains: ”I still think, from a business and cultural perspective, London is the best place to be in the world, if you exclude the 900lb gorilla that is America.
“We are dependent on a global supply chain and being listed in London provides a transparency and insight into our business and adds to our global brand.
“It is also critical for investors in Europe to have exposure to US AI, because Europe has a major structural problem in this area.” Having got the shares away — they rose 19 per cent on their first day of trading on Nasdaq — two of the three founders, and another investor in Fermi, are all billionaires, at least on paper.
But despite the warm initial reception to the IPO, which came ahead of a warning from the Bank of England about the risk of a “sharp correction” in AI stocks, there can be no resting.
The company has not yet made a penny profit and the data centre for Fermi’s first customer has to be built and hooked up to the power network it is creating by April 1.
Neugebauer is not saying exactly who it is, but he has certainly narrowed down the field: “It is one of the biggest household names on the planet, one of the top five companies in the world.” He is in talks with four more corporations about becoming “customer number two”.
The day-one power order is for 350 megawatts. That is enough for more than a third of the power needs of a city the size of Dallas, or “Dallas at night”, as he puts it.
The April 1 hard deadline means “we have to be testing by January 1 — you can’t just plug in on day one and say ‘ta dah’ — so we have got a very busy 90 days”.
Neugebauer is the son of former congressman Randy Neugebauer, once described as “the most conservative member” of the House of Representatives, and is himself a major donor to politicians such as Texas Republican Ted Cruz. In 2022 he tried to launch “anti-woke” bank GloriFi, to compete with “liberal” Wall Street giants, but it closed after just three months.
Fermi may be named after Italian-born scientist Enrico Fermi, who led the team that built the first nuclear reactor in the US in 1942. But the ultimate glory might go to Neugebauer’s president, a man he clearly hugely admires.
“I absolutely see a nominal role for Donald Trump — unequivocally. We would like to honour a president who, whether you like him or not, is leading on AI and energy for the country. But the final decision rests with the university, which is going to be a place of learning for the next 100 years and they have to be comfortable with it.
“Cambridge isn’t going to name a building after David Cameron just because he helped them during his period in office.”
Neugebauer sees his mission as a race with China to supply the energy needed to power the AI revolution — with the Europeans not even at the starting line. He says: “The Chinese are building 22 nuclear reactors. They are not doing it to provide more air conditioning for the good people of China — it is to power AI.”
Even before the share listing propelled him to 831st place in the ranks of the Forbes global Billionaires List — his 28 per cent stake in Fermi makes him and his family nominally worth almost $5 billion — Neugebauer was a very wealthy man. He and his rancher’s daughter wife Melissa live in a spectacular $40 million six-bedroom mansion nicknamed the White House of Dallas. He is also a part-owner of Major League Soccer club Austin FC, and owns a 180-foot yacht named Purpose.
Life was not always so gilded. Neugebauer grew up in a Texas ravaged by the oil price bust of the Eighties when unemployment in the state soared to 25 per cent. Times were tough and he worked as a janitor in a high school cleaning toilets at one point before graduating from New York University and finding a job in investment banking back in Texas. He later co-founded his own private equity firm, Quantum Energy Partners.
After he married and settled down “it was clear my kids were going to have a very different life to me. We made it our mission to make sure our kids remained grounded and understood what the real world was like.” So in 2010 Toby, his wife and their two sons set off on a 110-day trip around the world, taking in Mumbai slums, Chinese orphanages and Tanzanian villages.
But for now making Fermi fly is his mission. The transatlantic flights and speed-date investor meetings may be shattering but “I get to do something really cool, build something really big with real purpose to it. What we’re doing matters.”
