Vantage Plans $25B, 10-Building Data Center Campus In Central Texas
Everything is supposed to be bigger in Texas, and Vantage Data Centers plans to take that adage to heart for its largest-ever campus.
The company will invest more than $25B to develop a 1.4-gigawatt data center campus in rural Shackelford County, Texas. Vantage’s Frontier campus, as it will be known, will consist of 10 data centers totaling 3.7M SF on 1,200 acres.
The campus will accommodate ultra-high-density racks, allowing it to meet the evolving needs of artificial intelligence advancements, according to a press release from the company.
The launch of the Frontier campus will be a “watershed moment” for Vantage, Dana Adams, the company’s president of North America, said.
“Texas has become a critical and strategic market for AI providers,” Adams said in a statement. “This investment in Texas will be a significant economic growth driver for the area as we rapidly deploy the digital infrastructure needed to support AI applications.”
Between construction and ongoing operations, Vantage said the Frontier campus will employ more than 5,000 workers. That is nearly double the entire population of the county, located around 150 miles west of Dallas, according to the Census Bureau.
Construction of the campus is already underway, with the first building expected to be delivered during the second half of next year. The campus will be designed to preserve community resources, including a closed-loop chiller system that could save billions of gallons of water annually.
As the AI-driven demand for data centers grows, most investment in the sector is going toward new development rather than existing assets as the industry works to deliver what could be $7T in new buildout by the end of the decade.
Vantage operates data centers on five continents and has more campuses on the way. The company announced plans to enter the Nevada market last month with a $3B investment in a 224-megawatt data center campus near Reno. Earlier this summer, Vantage obtained a $735M loan from a trio of banks to refinance three adjoining data centers near Phoenix.
The $500B Stargate venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle has gotten off to a slow start. The partnership scaled back its plans for 2025 after struggling to close deals. The companies initially committed to a $100B investment in infrastructure but have since revised that to building just one small data center by the end of 2025.
OpenAI has a pair of data centers planned in Texas. One is a 1.2 GW data center campus being built 150 miles west of Dallas-Fort Worth, while the second is a data center around 50 miles north of the Metroplex that OpenAI agreed to use in March.
