A new $95 million financing vehicle has closed to help Texas landowners and data centre developers clear one of the least visible but most consequential hurdles in the state’s AI build-out: the security deposits now required to even join the power queue.
Dynamix Capital Partners, working alongside Staubach Capital and Soda Springs, has finalised the SSSC Batch Zero Fund, a vehicle built specifically to finance deposits under the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ (ERCOT) new large-load interconnection process. The fund has deployed capital to support roughly 1.7 gigawatts of requested power capacity, including a 1.2GW site adjacent to Austin and a 480MW site near the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
It is a small transaction by the standards of the sums now moving through the AI infrastructure sector, but it points to something bigger. As ERCOT’s queue has swollen into the hundreds of gigawatts, largely driven by data centre demand, the grid operator has moved to impose financial discipline on speculative requests. That discipline comes with a price tag landowners were not necessarily prepared for, and private capital is starting to fill the gap.
A deposit deadline forces a new kind of deal
ERCOT introduced Batch Zero as the first phase of a redesigned large-load interconnection process, intended to sort genuine projects from speculative ones clogging a queue that has grown far faster than new generation can be built. Under the rules, landowners and project sponsors seeking power allocations had to post security deposits with their local utility by 10 July 2026, priced at $50 million per gigawatt of requested capacity.
Those deposits sit in a regulatory grey area. The rules governing whether and how they might eventually be refunded, under the Public Utility Commission of Texas’ rule 16TAC§25.194, are not expected to be formally adopted until September 2026, after the deposit deadline had already passed. That timing mismatch, and the ambiguity it created, is what Dynamix and its partners say they set out to underwrite.
“Our thesis centred on the ambiguity surrounding the refundability of these large deposits,” said Philip Wagley, founder of Soda Springs. “We set out to structure a financing package attuned to the pending regulation, positioning our fund to add distinctive value through rapid and tailored capital deployment as well as execution support.”
Jeff Staubach, founding partner of Staubach Capital, framed the timing pressure in similar terms. “Power allocations under the Batch Zero process are expected in April 2027, and many traditional lenders lacked the speed or ability to underwrite the bespoke collateral in this space ahead of the July 10th deadline,” he said. “Energy and infrastructure have proven to be the industry’s greatest bottleneck for America’s AI buildout, and this consortium saw a critical unmet need in that exact intersection.”
Why landowners, not just hyperscalers, need a balance sheet
Most of the reporting on Texas’s power crunch has understandably focused on the hyperscalers themselves: Meta’s nuclear offtake with Constellation, Google’s solar deal with TotalEnergies, or Vantage’s $25 billion Frontier campus in Shackelford County. What the Batch Zero fund highlights is a quieter, earlier stage of the pipeline: the landowners and site developers who have to prove financial seriousness before a hyperscaler ever signs a lease.
Andrejka Bernatova, managing partner of Dynamix Capital Partners, described this as a structural shift in what AI infrastructure demands of the capital markets around it. “The rapid buildout of AI infrastructure is creating entirely new capital requirements across the power ecosystem, and for landowners in particular,” she said. “The challenge is no longer just identifying sites or demand. It is securing the scalability and capital needed to move those projects forward. We believe the SSSC Batch Zero Fund addresses a real financing need within that story and helps support the role that Texas will play within it.”
Synergy Research Group has tracked a broader inland shift toward Texas and the Midwest, with Texas now accounting for a third of operational US hyperscale capacity, precisely the kind of demand that has pushed ERCOT’s queue past 200 gigawatts and made deposit-stage financing a genuine bottleneck rather than a formality.
A test case for future ERCOT batches
The Dynamix team supporting the fund’s formation included Nader Daylami, partner, and Philip Rajan, director, alongside Bernatova, with an unnamed large-scale investment platform anchoring the fund as institutional credit partner. Dynamix and its partners say they are positioned to support future ERCOT batches as the interconnection process continues in phases.
Capacity has separately been tracking net-new power deals between utilities, generators and hyperscalers, and the emergence of deposit-financing funds looks like a natural extension of that same pressure, moving one step further back in the pipeline from generation deals to the interconnection process itself.
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