Overview
Old Industrial Sites Arrive With Water, Rail and Grid Ties Already Permitted
A retired smelter, coal plant or paper mill leaves behind heavy-industrial zoning, rail spurs, road access, a grid interconnection and often water rights or a cooling reservoir. A new tenant on that land skips years of greenfield permitting and queue time.
In ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas), where large-load requests reached about 474.7 GW by June 2026, an existing interconnection is the scarcest asset on any site.
| Pattern | AI and fabs reuse retired industrial sites |
|---|---|
| Inherited assets | Zoning, rail, grid ties, water |
| Largest tract | Sandow Lakes, about 31,000 acres |
| Water case | Gibbons Creek Reservoir, Grimes County |
| Grid case | Riot Rockdale, 700 MW |
| Crypto-to-AI case | Galaxy Helios, Dickens County |
| Grid operator | ERCOT |
| Related law | SB 6 (2025) large-load rules |
| Site | Prior industry | Inherited platform | Current use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sandow Lakes (Milam, Lee) | Alcoa smelter and lignite power, 1950s to 2010s | About 31,000 acres, rail, cooling lakes, grid ties | Riot and Bitdeer data and mining sites, T1 solar cells, planned 1,200 MW gas plant |
| Gibbons Creek (Grimes) | Coal plant and lignite mine | Cooling reservoir and generation-era interconnection | SpaceX Terafab production fab |
| Giga Texas (Travis) | Sand and gravel quarry | About 2,100 acres near SH 130 and the Colorado River | Vehicles, Cortex compute, Terafab research fab |
| Amp Z Lufkin (Angelina) | Southland Paper newsprint mill | About 1,041 acres, rail, 55 MW interconnection | Project Lufkin data center campus |
| Permian Basin | Oil and gas production | Gas pipelines, produced-water handling, workforce | BTM gas campuses such as GW Ranch |
Sandow Lakes
The Former Alcoa Smelter Now Hosts Data Centers, Solar Cells and a Gas Plant
Alcoa's Rockdale smelter in Milam County was sited for local lignite and closed after US power prices made aluminum uneconomic. Xebec bought about 31,000 acres across Milam and Lee counties from Alcoa in 2021 for $240M, and Sandow Lakes Energy plans a 1,200 MW gas plant with Siemens turbines on part of the property, targeting 2028.
T1 Energy's G2_Austin solar cell factory in Rockdale is an $850M, 5 GW-a-year plant. Bitdeer runs a large Bitcoin mine at Rockdale. Riot Platforms bought 200 acres under its Rockdale site for $96M in January 2026 and signed its first data center lease with AMD: 25 MW of IT load, with options that could take AMD to 200 MW. Riot plans to convert the site's full 700 MW grid connection to data center use.
Gibbons Creek and Lufkin
A Coal Reservoir Supplies Terafab and a Paper Mill Tie Seeds Project Lufkin
SpaceX and Governor Abbott confirmed Terafab at the retired Gibbons Creek coal plant in Grimes County on Aug 6, 2026: a first phase of more than $16.8B and about 3,000 jobs, backed by a $30M Texas Enterprise Fund grant. SpaceX plans to draw industrial water from Gibbons Creek Reservoir instead of local groundwater. The Terafab research fab sits at Giga Texas, itself built on a former quarry.
The Southland Paper mill east of Lufkin made newsprint from southern pine from 1940 to 2007. Amp Z plans to grow the mill's 55 MW grid connection to 175 MW in 2026 and 1.1 GW in 2028, then add 1 GW of self-generation in 2029 for a 2.1 GW campus on about 1,041 acres.
Crypto to AI
Bitcoin Mines Built the Substations AI Campuses Now Use
Miners drawn to Texas wind and fast interconnection built substations, transmission ties and high-density cooling from 2018 onward. As AI demand crossed the gigawatt scale, those sites became data center campuses.
| Site | Mining origin | Conversion | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Galaxy Helios (Dickens County) | Argo Blockchain site, bought by Galaxy for about $65M in 2022 | CoreWeave lease, 800 MW; 1.6 GW ERCOT-approved, up to 3.5 GW potential | First 133 MW phase due 2026, rest through 2027 |
| Riot Rockdale (Milam County) | Bitcoin mine on the former Alcoa tract | AMD lease, 25 MW with options to 200 MW | Delivering in 2026 |
| Core Scientific Denton | Bitcoin mine, converted under 2024 city amendments | GPU colocation for CoreWeave | Operating |
| Soluna Project Kati | Wind-linked flexible-load site | 166 MW Bitcoin and AI/HPC | Kati 1 complete |
| Coleto Creek (Goliad County) | Vistra coal plant retiring 2027 | Repowering with up to 600 MW of gas | No data center tenant announced |
Untenanted Sites
Northeast Texas and the Panhandle Hold Retired Coal Sites Without AI Tenants
Northeast Texas holds the largest unclaimed coal-plant sites in the state: Big Brown in Freestone County (1,150 MW, retired 2018), Monticello in Titus County (retired 2018) and Pirkey near Hallsville (retired 2023). None has an announced AI tenant.
In the Panhandle, Xcel Energy converted the 1,018 MW Harrington Station in Potter County from coal to gas in 2025, keeping its interconnection in place. Tolk Station in Lamb County is scheduled to retire in 2032. Both sit near the Panhandle wind belt where Galaxy Helios operates.
Record
Dataset Record
- Sources
- Riot Platforms, SB Energy, ConnectCRE, KWHI, DatacenterDynamics, Introl, Denton Record-Chronicle, Victoria EDC, Power Engineering, Electrek, REBusinessOnline, ERCOT
- Last verified
- October 2026