Texas Tech Athletics has announced a 15-year naming rights partnership to rebrand the former Jones AT&T Football Stadium. Starting this year, the Red Raiders will play their home games at “Galaxy Stadium.”
According to a release Friday morning, the agreement with Galaxy will “create a new revenue stream,” with Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals for student-athletes through branding campaigns.
The reported $75 million agreement “will integrate Galaxy into the Texas Tech Athletics experience as the official data center and digital assets partner of the athletics department,” according to the university’s statement.
Galaxy is the data center developer and cryptocurrency company behind the Helios data center campus in Dickens County, about 60 miles east of Lubbock.
This more than 2,200-acre campus, originally built as a bitcoin mining facility with an 180-megawatt approved power capacity in 2022, now has an approved capacity of 1.6 gigawatts of power, which Galaxy says has the potential to continue scaling up. Galaxy this month completed the first phase of its own 15-year agreement with AI cloud computing company CoreWeave, one of several neocloud tech companies navigating a recent stock freefall, losing more than 36% of its stock value over the last month from rising competition and concerns about the AI industry.
This comes as more West Texans are pushing back against the growth of data centers in their communities out of concern for the potential impacts on wider energy and water supply, as well as housing and infrastructure near the facilities.
Read more: Lubbock citizens and city officials talk large-scale data center policy
Phase 2 of Galaxy’s Helios expansion plan has been reported at $3.5 billion. In March, a spokesperson for Galaxy told EverythingLubbock that water consumption for Helios’ closed-loop cooling system is “around 25,000 gallons per day” and that the company expects the reliance on groundwater for this facility to decrease as technology expands.
The new deal between Texas Tech and Galaxy is just the latest in the university’s push to join in on new tech development, large-scale data, and AI. In February, a $25 million deal was announced with tech company NVIDIA, purchasing AI infrastructure hardware to “accelerate innovation” and serve as “a significant revenue generator for the TTU System.”
Since joining Texas Tech in November last year, Chancellor Brandon Creighton has touted the university as the place that will train the workforce for these high-tech companies. In May, he appeared on a panel at the stadium hosted by the Texas Tribune along with the Lubbock Economic Development Alliance, Lubbock Chamber of Commerce, and a representative from Google to discuss data center policies, economic impact, and infrastructure needs.
“It's not just a one-hour AI credential that we'll be adding to a marketing degree or teaching a student how to use Claude or an app on their phone. It is working with world-class, best-in-class engineers from the private sector that are shaping the future of these economies that we will all send students into the workforce to benefit from,” Creighton told listeners at the panel discussion. “In our participation and our adaptability or work ethic, what we bring to the table will foster a better climate in all respects for these projects.”
According to Friday’s announcement from Texas Tech Athletics, that expansion is already in motion with Galaxy’s Helios data center, where the university says graduates are already working, and “that pipeline will only grow as Galaxy's footprint in Texas expands.”
As far as the stadium is concerned, the local icon has borne the name of Texas Tech’s third president, Clifford B. Jones, since 1947. It was called the Jones SBC Stadium until the mid-2000s, when a deal was made with AT&T.
The University said additional details will be released in the future about plans to honor the original stadium namesake.