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(Bloomberg) — Fermaca Global has lined up banks to help kickstart an ambitious $3.7 billion plan to build data infrastructure and a fertilizer plant in the northern Mexican state of Durango. 

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The plan includes a $2.7 billion Digital City project, which the Mexico City-based company will fund initially with $100 million of its own and investors’ cash, to deploy 2,000 km (about 1,243 miles) of dark fiber extending from Texas to central Mexico.

As a next step, Fermaca will contract between $200 million and $250 million in debt over the next 60 to 90 days. “There have already been initial conversations and there is a term sheet agreed with banks,” the company’s commercial head Octavio Berrón told Bloomberg in an interview on Monday. He said three to five domestic and international banks are involved but declined to name them.

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The dark fiber network will be built simultaneously in four tranches and will be ready in 15 to 18 months: Texas-La Laguna, La Laguna-Aguascalientes, Aguascalientes-Guadalajara and Guadalajara-Querétaro using three, inch-and-a-half-wide conduits, according to Fermaca Network’s CEO Daniel Elguea.

Elguea said Fermaca has closed contracts for the next 20 to 25 years but declined to name specific customers. He cited Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, large US and national carriers, telecom companies, streamers, television and phone service firms as potential clients.

Fermaca also plans to build a 160-km long extension from a natural gas pipeline it already operates, which starts in the Permian basin in Texas and ends in Aguascalientes, to meet the energy demands of a power plant that will feed the data center in Durango.

Berrón said an agreement is already in place for an independent oil and natural gas producer in the US to fuel the power plant but declined to name the company, citing confidentiality agreements. This partner will also power the fertilizer plant.

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Elguea said the transportation of natural gas to Durango will be offset with carbon capture credits. He said the company has additional technology in place to cut environmental impact from the data center, including water recycling.

Fermaca has yet to iron out a preliminary deal with the government of the state of Durango to supply the Digital City with water from a local dam for the first 25 years of operation of the data center. The facility is expected to have a processing capacity of 250-megawatts and be fully operational in 2028. 

Unlike a competing data center in Querétaro that is currently struggling with energy supply issues, Fermaca’s Durango data center will be capable of handling the needs of new technologies, such as “artificial intelligence, cloud growth and data mining,” Elguea said. 

All of these activities produce a lot of heat, which Fermaca can address with air flow and liquid cooling systems, according to Elguea. The company is also exploring other more extreme immersion cooling options. 

Fermaca is investing another $1 billion in the construction of a granular urea plant in Durango, part of a government initiative to cut its dependence on fertilizer imports. Mexico buys around 3 million tons of fertilizer annually, and Fermaca’s plant is expected to produce close to 20% of those needs once it is fully operational.

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