# Fermi nuclear power firm appoints new CEO Lee McIntire to lead Project Matador AI campus

> Fermi, the nuclear power company co-founded by former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, has a new chief executive in Lee McIntire, who previously ran the engineering giant CH2M Hill and TerraPower, the reactor startup backed by Bill Gates. He is being brought in to steer Project Matador, an ambitious data center campus in Texas that aims to run on nuclear power built specifically to feed AI workloads. The appointment lands a few months after Fermi ousted co-founder Toby Neugebauer, and investors clearly liked the news, sending the stock up 23 percent. The company has also lined up its first binding customer, TensorWave, to take capacity at the site. The story is a neat illustration of where the AI boom is really being felt, which is in power. Training and running large models needs enormous, steady electricity, and a wave of companies is now betting that purpose-built nuclear generation is the way to supply it, turning an energy problem into a data center business.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Thursday, August 13, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Fermi, the nuclear power company co-founded by former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, has a new chief executive in Lee McIntire, who previously ran the engineering giant CH2M Hill and TerraPower, the reactor startup backed by Bill Gates. He is being brought in to steer Project Matador, an ambitious data center campus in Texas that aims to run on nuclear power built specifically to feed AI workloads. The appointment lands a few months after Fermi ousted co-founder Toby Neugebauer, and investors clearly liked the news, sending the stock up 23 percent. The company has also lined up its first binding customer, TensorWave, to take capacity at the site. The story is a neat illustration of where the AI boom is really being felt, which is in power. Training and running large models needs enormous, steady electricity, and a wave of companies is now betting that purpose-built nuclear generation is the way to supply it, turning an energy problem into a data center business.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/ai-nuclear-power-firm-fermi-finally-has-a-new-ceo/)

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