More than 70 projects are being tracked across Central Texas, with Williamson County emerging as the epicenter of a multibillion-dollar digital infrastructure rush driven by AI demand, Samsung’s semiconductor investment, and a race for power.
The Scale of What’s Coming
Williamson County is at the center of one of the most significant data center buildouts in the United States. What started as a handful of projects near Samsung’s Taylor semiconductor fabrication plant has become a full-scale infrastructure rush.
According to a March 2026 Propmodo analysis using Cushman & Wakefield data, the Austin–San Antonio data center corridor now has 7,823 megawatts of planned capacity compared to just 1,154 megawatts currently operating. More than 70 projects are being tracked between Temple and San Antonio, with Williamson County capturing a disproportionate share due to its power infrastructure, fiber connectivity, and available land. Of the 615 megawatts under construction in the corridor, 96 percent is already pre-leased, a remarkable indicator of demand.
A Texas A&M Real Estate Research Center analysis found that between 2023 and 2024, Central Texas experienced a drastic increase in data center construction, totaling 463.5 megawatts of potential demand under development. That report specifically cited marquee projects in Williamson County as having reshaped regional land markets. Texas overall has 408 data centers listed statewide, second most in the nation, with the Austin market at 46 and climbing fast.
Why Williamson County?
The county’s emergence as a data center magnet is not accidental. Several converging factors make it one of the most attractive locations in the country for digital infrastructure investment.
Samsung’s Oncor Effect. The single biggest catalyst has been Samsung Austin Semiconductor’s $17 billion fabrication plant in Taylor. That project brought Oncor Electric Delivery Co.—now the fifth-largest electric utility in the nation—into eastern Williamson County with major transmission infrastructure. The power capacity Oncor built to serve Samsung effectively opened the door for data centers that need reliable, large-scale electricity access.
Fiber Density. Both Taylor and Georgetown sit on dense regional fiber corridors, with multiple Tier 1 and regional network operators providing diverse paths. Blueprint Data Centers has noted that its two WilCo campuses can be linked with low-latency connections, allowing customers to distribute workloads across sites without leaving the metro.
Land Availability and Pricing. Nationally, powered land in data center markets trades at premiums of 1.6x to 2.5x over conventional industrial parcels, and materially higher in power-constrained markets. Williamson County still offers comparatively affordable land with proximity to Austin’s tech ecosystem. Communities like Hutto, Jarrell, and parts of unincorporated WilCo that were once considered secondary industrial nodes are now prime targets for developers evaluating sites based on substation access and utility responsiveness.
Pro-Business Environment. The Williamson County Economic Development Partnership actively recruits data center operators, highlighting the county’s high-capacity power grids, multiple fiber-optic networks, low incidence of natural disasters, and growing cybersecurity ecosystem. Cities like Hutto, Taylor, and Round Rock have approved significant tax incentive packages to attract projects.
ERCOT Market Structure. Texas’s deregulated power market, managed by ERCOT, gives developers more flexibility in securing power agreements than heavily regulated states. While ERCOT’s large-load queue has swelled to hundreds of gigawatts of proposed demand, developers with firm utility commitments and defined energization schedules, like those in WilCo, hold a significant competitive advantage.
Confirmed & Proposed Projects
Hutto: The Emerging Megasite
Hutto has quietly become one of the most consequential data center locations in Texas. The city, about 30 miles northeast of downtown Austin, with a population of around 31,000, has taken aggressive steps to entice development along the U.S. 79 corridor, which some site selection experts rank among the most desirable stretches in the country for data center development.
Skybox / Prologis Campus. The largest project in the county is the Skybox Datacenters and Prologis Inc. campus on 159 acres of the Hutto Megasite. The project is well underway and could eventually include nearly 4 million square feet of data center space across several buildings, with at least $10 billion in capital expenditures. The campus is designed to deliver roughly 600 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about 450,000 homes. The developers secured a development agreement with the city in May 2024 and a Chapter 312 tax abatement shortly after. Skybox is also in the planning stages for a second campus of approximately 140 acres just to the west, and in late 2025 requested a zoning change from Round Rock to expand into that city as well. Two Samsung suppliers are reportedly looking at about 70 acres of the megasite for their own operations.
Colovore (Project Raptor). California-based Colovore, which specializes in liquid-cooled, high-density colocation for AI and high-performance computing, won approval from Hutto City Council in December 2024 for a 180,000-square-foot data center and 13,000-square-foot office complex on 30 acres known as the Ironwood Tract at 2351 Innovation Blvd. The $500 million project sits within a one-million-square-foot industrial park developed by Velocis, Ironwood Realty Partners, and MBK Industrial Properties. Construction was expected to begin in early 2026. Colovore’s client base includes prominent AI companies such as Cerebras, Lambda Cloud, and Cirrascale.
Taylor: Samsung’s Neighbor
Blueprint Data Centers. Taylor City Council unanimously approved Blueprint’s data center campus in July 2024 on a 52-acre parcel at 1601 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The company expects to invest up to $1 billion over the next ten years across three construction phases, ultimately reaching 135,000 square feet and 60 megawatts of capacity. Blueprint already had letters of intent from tenants for full capacity and a power agreement with Oncor for an initial 30 megawatts. The Taylor City Council and Economic Development Corporation approved a 50 percent property tax rebate for 10 years on each of the three phases, plus a 50 percent rebate on local sales-and-use tax on construction materials.
The project has not been without controversy. When the land was originally transferred to a nonprofit in 1999, a deed restriction required it to be held for future use as parkland. Taylor residents filed a lawsuit against Blueprint’s parent company, but Judge Ryan Lawson of the 395th District Court dismissed all claims and denied an injunction request in October 2024.
Georgetown: Growing the Digital Backbone
Blueprint Data Centers (Georgetown). Blueprint’s sister facility in Georgetown represents a $160 million investment off Westinghouse Road, spanning approximately 45,000 square feet across 10 acres with up to 25 megawatts of power capacity. The Georgetown City Council approved zoning and incentives in September 2024. The first phase is expected to be operational by late 2026, with full completion by early 2027. Together with the Taylor campus, Blueprint’s two WilCo sites form a cohesive greater Austin-area platform designed for high-density AI, semiconductor-adjacent, cloud, and enterprise workloads with liquid cooling-ready designs.
Round Rock: The Established HubRound Rock has the most mature data center ecosystem in Williamson County, with multiple operational facilities and several more in the pipeline.
Sabey Data Centers (SDC Austin). Sabey redeveloped the former Sears call center at 1300 Louis Henna Boulevard, completing its first 213,000-square-foot building in fall 2024. The campus is designed for an eventual 84 megawatts and 430,000 square feet. Sabey invested approximately $185 million in property improvements and has already attracted two large liquid-cooling deployments, including the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Horizon supercomputer—which will be NSF’s largest academic supercomputer for open research, expected to deliver 10x performance improvement over the current Frontera system. Construction on Building B, a three-story facility delivering 54 megawatts, began in mid-2025 with an expected opening in Q3 2027. The city reports Sabey’s facility uses roughly the same amount of water annually as about 15 single-family homes while generating approximately $800,000 per year in city property taxes.
Switch (The Rock). Las Vegas-based Switch purchased land from Dell Technologies adjacent to Dell’s global headquarters and received approval to develop more than 1.5 million square feet of Tier-5 data center space. The city rezoned 36.76 acres for the initial phase in 2021 and an additional 32.48 acres in 2023. Switch is constructing a facility at 300 Dell Way and has plans for a third data center at 600 Louis Henna Blvd, though no permits had been submitted for the latter as of late 2025. The company committed to investing at least $80 million by the end of 2026 as part of its economic agreement with the city.
Skybox (Proposed). A proposed rezoning of approximately 29.69 acres near East Old Settlers Boulevard and A.W. Grimes Boulevard would allow Skybox to build a data center adjacent to the Chandler Creek neighborhood. The proposal, which includes a data center, electric substation, and open space, passed its first reading in late 2025 and was expected to return to Council for a second vote. The PUD would require a closed-loop cooling system. Some residents have raised concerns about noise, water, and energy consumption.
Amazon (PUD Approved). A planned unit development near CR 172 and SH 45 allows for a future data center, although no construction plans have been submitted to the city. This remains a placeholder in Round Rock’s data center pipeline.
Community Concerns
The data center surge has generated significant community debate across Williamson County and Central Texas more broadly. The core tensions revolve around water, power, jobs, and land use.
ERCOT projects Texas energy demand will rise 71% by 2031, driven largely by data center growth. Texas data centers used nearly 22 million megawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, 4.6% of the state’s total consumption.
Water. Water consumption is the most emotionally charged issue, particularly given Texas’s recurring drought conditions. However, newer facilities in WilCo are increasingly required to use closed-loop cooling systems that reuse water internally and require only small amounts of periodic makeup water. Round Rock’s monitoring of the Sabey facility found annual water usage comparable to about 15 single-family homes. Still, the sheer number of proposed projects raises aggregate concerns.
Power Grid Strain. ERCOT has projected that Texas will need to more than double its 2024 grid capacity by 2031. Blueprint Data Centers has positioned its projects as offering near-term executable power in a market where many proposed projects may not materialize on schedule.
Jobs. Data centers are capital-intensive but not labor-intensive. Blueprint’s Taylor campus is expected to create between 20 and 30 permanent jobs despite a $1 billion investment. Sabey’s Round Rock campus projects about 20 jobs over five years. Supporters emphasize the significant construction employment during buildout and the outsized property tax contributions relative to service demands. Critics note that similarly sized commercial developments would generate far more permanent employment.
Property Taxes and Revenue. The fiscal argument for data centers is strong on paper. Round Rock reports that Sabey’s facility increased the taxable value of its site to approximately $210 million, generating roughly $800,000 per year in city property taxes alone, compared to about $21,000 that 15 single-family homes with equivalent water usage would contribute. However, many projects receive significant tax abatements that reduce near-term revenue.
“The county is not involved in the approval process for data centers.”
— Connie Odom, Director of Communications, Williamson County Commissioners
Governance. A notable structural issue is that Williamson County itself has limited authority over data center approvals. That authority rests with the individual cities that annex and zone the land, creating a patchwork of policies and incentive structures across the county’s municipalities.
Market Context
Williamson County’s data center surge is part of a statewide and national phenomenon driven by artificial intelligence demand. Colliers now classifies Austin as a secondary U.S. data center market, with 645 megawatts of market size, 120 megawatts of annual absorption, and a 0.6 percent vacancy rate. The projected market size is 3,250 megawatts. Nationally, Jones Lang LaSalle reports data center vacancy rates at a record low of 2.3 percent, with virtually zero vacancy in Texas.
Investment bank UBS estimated $375 billion was spent globally on AI infrastructure in 2025, with projections of $500 billion in 2026 and $3 trillion by 2028. Texas is capturing an outsized share of this investment, leading the nation in commercial construction spending at nearly $90 billion annually, more than double any other state.
The competitive landscape extends well beyond WilCo. Major Texas data center projects include the Stargate Project in Abilene (a $500 billion nationwide AI venture involving OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle), Vantage’s 1.4 GW Frontier campus in Shackelford County, the 2 GW Tract Caldwell County Park between Austin and San Antonio, and Fermi America’s proposed 11 GW campus near Amarillo. Against this backdrop, Williamson County’s advantages are its proximity to Austin’s tech talent, established power and fiber infrastructure, and the head start created by Samsung’s investment in Taylor.
Outlook
Williamson County is positioned to become one of the most concentrated data center corridors in the United States over the next several years. The combination of firm power commitments, fiber density, available land, a pro-business regulatory environment, and proximity to Austin’s technology ecosystem creates a compelling case for continued investment.
The key constraints will be power delivery timelines, water availability, and community acceptance. As one Blueprint executive noted, in Texas today, megawatts on a slide deck mean little if they cannot be energized on schedule. The projects that are furthest along, Skybox/Prologis in Hutto, Sabey and Switch in Round Rock, hold a significant advantage precisely because they secured power access before the queue became overwhelming.
For residents, landowners, policymakers, and investors across Williamson County, the data center boom represents both a generational economic opportunity and a fundamental test of how fast-growing communities manage the infrastructure demands of the AI era.
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