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Cedar Creek Data Center Cluster
Cedar Creek — an unincorporated community of 3,154 people in Bastrop County, 25 miles east of downtown Austin — is rapidly assembling a hyperscale data center cluster that did not exist 18 months ago. Three separate developers are building or planning campuses within a few miles of each other along FM 535 and the surrounding road network: EdgeConneX with at least $4.2 billion across three campus phases, Amazon Web Services with 1,300 acres acquired in May 2026, and BlackChamber Partners with Pacifico Energy on a 2,842-acre gas-powered campus where Anthropic is the reported anchor tenant. Combined disclosed and estimated investment across the three developers exceeds $9 billion.
The cluster is forming for the same reason every supernode forms: the simultaneous availability of land, power, permitting velocity, and network proximity. Cedar Creek sits on the eastern edge of Austin's grid infrastructure, adjacent to transmission corridors that can deliver hundreds of megawatts to a single campus. Bastrop County is unincorporated — no city zoning, no municipal permitting overlay — which compresses approval timelines. Land prices remain a fraction of urban Austin. And the cluster is five miles from SpaceX's Bastrop satellite manufacturing complex, 15 miles from Tesla's Giga Texas and the Terafab research fab, and 10 miles from Tesla's Dojo supercomputer at the Gigafactory — the same corridor that is producing the AI chips, AI satellites, and AI models that the data centers exist to run.
The Three Developers
| Developer | Site | Scale | Investment | Status (Sep 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EdgeConneX (Herndon, VA) | Campus 1: FM 535 & Wolf Lane (140 acres). Campus 2: 6682 FM 535 (~180 acres). Campus 3: 6543 FM 535 | Campus 1: four buildings, 2.8M sq ft, 240 MW. Campus 2: four buildings, 2.9M sq ft. Campus 3: two buildings, 1.15M sq ft. Total: up to 10 buildings across three campuses | Campus 1: ~$1.44B. Campus 2: ~$2.8B ($700M per building × 4). Campus 3: ~$1.4B ($700M × 2). Total: ~$5.6B+ disclosed | Campus 1 Building 1 (AUS02) nearing completion — 578K sq ft, $440M. CoreWeave confirmed as first tenant. Construction underway on additional buildings. Campus 2 and 3 filings active with TDLR, construction phased through 2029. EdgeConneX VP called it the company's "marquee campus" |
| Amazon Web Services (Amazon Data Services Inc.) | Off State Highway 21 West, Cedar Creek area. 1,300 acres (formerly Creekside master-planned community, purchased from CTX Capital Partners) | Not disclosed. 1,300 acres is comparable to AWS's largest domestic campuses. No TDLR filings for Cedar Creek as of Sep 2026 | Land acquisition closed May 1, 2026. Development plan and capital commitment not publicly disclosed | Land acquired. No construction filings. AWS has not commented on plans for the site. AWS is simultaneously filing multi-billion-dollar campuses across Texas (Boling/Wharton County $1.2B, Fort Stockton, Floydada) |
| BlackChamber Partners (Washington, DC) + Pacifico Energy (Dallas / San Juan Capistrano, CA) | 382 Earl Callahan Road, Cedar Creek. 2,842 acres on six parcels owned by Roger Wallace | 710 MW gas-fired electric generation facility (natural gas turbines) supporting 490 MW of data center capacity. BCG Cedar Creek Campus on a 304-acre portion of the site | $2.2B (per JETI application to Texas Comptroller). 25 permanent jobs, $6.2M annual payroll | Anthropic reported as anchor tenant (ABJ, Aug 2026 — not finalized). TCEQ stormwater permits filed Jul 2026 and challenged by neighboring landowners. Tax abatement requests filed then withdrawn (Aug 2026). Anthropic stated it would comply with Gov. Abbott's data center regulations. Construction targeted Q3 2026 start, completion 2028. Development not canceled per county officials |
EdgeConneX — The Campus That Started the Cluster
EdgeConneX's Cedar Creek presence began with a 140-acre campus at FM 535 and Wolf Lane, approved with a 10-year property tax abatement from Bastrop County commissioners in December 2024. The first building (AUS02) — a two-story, 578,000 square foot structure capable of pulling 96 megawatts — began construction in Q4 2024 and was scheduled for completion by June 2026. CoreWeave, the AI cloud company, was confirmed as the first tenant with a 75% tax abatement on facility improvements.
EdgeConneX then expanded to a second campus on a 180-acre property at 6682 FM 535, with four buildings of 730,000 square feet each at $700 million per building — a $2.8 billion campus that EdgeConneX VP Evan Pierce described as the company's "marquee campus" and potentially "one of the largest data center campuses in the United States, if not the globe." TDLR filings for the first two buildings (EDCAUS11 and EDCAUS12) were submitted in June 2026 with construction running through December 2028. Two additional buildings (EDCAUS13 and EDCAUS14) were filed in August 2026 for September 2026 through March 2029.
In late August 2026, filings appeared for two more buildings at a third site (6543 FM 535) — EDCAUS31 and EDCAUS32, each 577,000 square feet at $700 million, construction October 2026 through December 2028. Combined, EdgeConneX now has filings for up to 10 data center buildings across three Cedar Creek campuses representing more than $5.6 billion in disclosed investment. No tenants beyond CoreWeave have been publicly identified.
AWS — 1,300 Acres, No Filings
Amazon Data Services closed on more than 1,300 acres near Cedar Creek on May 1, 2026. The land, located off State Highway 21 West approximately seven miles south of EdgeConneX's campuses, was previously owned by CTX Capital Partners and earmarked for a master-planned residential community called Creekside. Amazon has not filed construction permits, disclosed development plans, or commented on the acquisition. At 1,300 acres, the site is comparable in scale to AWS's largest domestic campus proposals and exceeds the footprint of any single data center development currently under construction in Texas.
AWS is simultaneously building data center capacity across multiple Texas locations — a $1.2 billion four-building campus in Boling (Wharton County, southwest of Houston), filings in Fort Stockton and Floydada, and existing operations in San Antonio. The Cedar Creek acquisition positions AWS with land banked in the fastest-growing data center corridor in Central Texas, adjacent to hyperscale infrastructure from EdgeConneX and the proposed BlackChamber/Anthropic campus, without committing to a public development timeline.
BlackChamber / Pacifico Energy / Anthropic — Co-Located Power and Compute
The third major development takes a structurally different approach from EdgeConneX and AWS: instead of connecting to the existing grid, BlackChamber Partners and Pacifico Energy are building a dedicated 710 MW natural gas power plant on the same 2,842-acre site as the data center campus. The power plant delivers 490 MW of redundant capacity to the data center — enough to power a city of 100,000 — with the gas turbines and the compute load co-located on a single property at 382 Earl Callahan Road.
Anthropic is reported as the anchor tenant. The Austin Business Journal reported in August 2026 that Anthropic has been working with BlackChamber and Pacifico on the Cedar Creek project, though no agreement has been finalized. Anthropic separately signed a $9 billion data center lease (potentially scaling to $16 billion) in Milam County northeast of Austin, and stated it would comply with Governor Abbott's August 2026 data center audit and permitting pause.
The developers filed a JETI (Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act) application with the Texas Comptroller listing a $2.2 billion investment, 25 permanent jobs, and $6.2 million in annual payroll. Property tax abatement requests to Bastrop County and Bastrop ISD were filed and then withdrawn in August 2026 — per reporting, at Anthropic's direction, with a stated desire to work with local officials and the community. TCEQ stormwater construction permits filed in mid-July were challenged by neighboring landowners. County officials stated the development has not been canceled and permitting review continues.
Why Cedar Creek — The Supernode Logic
Cedar Creek is forming as a supernode — the term Inside the Singularity uses for a geographic cluster where the binding constraints for a specific industry simultaneously relax, producing a critical density of facilities that then attracts more of the same. The binding constraints for hyperscale data centers are:
| Constraint | How Cedar Creek Solves It |
|---|---|
| Power | Eastern edge of Austin's grid infrastructure with access to high-voltage transmission corridors. ERCOT deregulated market allows direct power procurement. BlackChamber/Pacifico are building dedicated on-site gas generation (710 MW) rather than relying on the grid — a behind-the-meter model that bypasses grid interconnection queues entirely |
| Land | Formerly agricultural and residential land available in parcels of hundreds to thousands of acres at rural pricing. AWS acquired 1,300 acres. BlackChamber/Pacifico controls 2,842 acres. EdgeConneX assembled 500+ acres across three campuses. Total developer-controlled acreage in the Cedar Creek area now exceeds 5,000 acres |
| Permitting | Unincorporated Bastrop County — no municipal zoning, no city council approval required. County commissioners handle tax abatements. TDLR handles state construction licensing. TCEQ handles environmental permits. Permitting timeline measured in months, not years. Note: Gov. Abbott's August 2026 audit order introduced a state-level pause of uncertain duration |
| Network proximity | 25 miles from downtown Austin's fiber backbone and interconnection points. Adjacent to SpaceX Bastrop (Starlink/Starmind manufacturing — same FM 1209 corridor). 15 miles from Giga Texas (Tesla Dojo supercomputer, Terafab research fab). Network latency to Austin's IX points measured in sub-milliseconds |
| Water | This is the constraint that is not relaxed. Bastrop County's groundwater is supplied by the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. Community opposition to the data center cluster centers on water consumption — evaporative cooling at 490+ MW scale draws millions of gallons per day. The BlackChamber/Pacifico project faces active TCEQ permit challenges from neighboring landowners on stormwater and groundwater grounds |
The supernode logic explains why the developers are clustering rather than dispersing. Each campus that connects to grid infrastructure or builds transmission capacity reduces the marginal cost for the next one. Each tax abatement approved by the county establishes the precedent for the next. Each TDLR filing demonstrates the permitting pathway. And each construction crew, logistics vendor, and power engineer who relocates to serve one campus becomes available to the others. The cluster is self-reinforcing — which is what makes it a supernode rather than a coincidence.
The AI-Industrial Adjacency
Cedar Creek's data center cluster does not exist in isolation. It sits inside the same eastern Bastrop County corridor that SpaceX is building into the largest satellite manufacturing complex in the world:
| Facility | Distance from Cedar Creek Cluster | Function |
|---|---|---|
| SpaceX Bastrop | ~5 miles NW | Starlink terminal manufacturing (15,000/day). Starmind AI satellite factory (11M sq ft planned). Solar cell factory (1.1M sq ft). RF chip packaging facility. The hardware that moves compute from terrestrial data centers to orbit |
| Tesla Giga Texas | ~15 miles NW | Tesla Dojo AI supercomputer (south side of Gigafactory). Terafab Advanced Technology Fabrication (North Campus, ground broken Apr 2026). Vehicle, battery, and Optimus robot production. The compute and chip R&D that the data centers exist to scale |
The convergence is causal, not adjacent. The same constraints that made eastern Bastrop County attractive for data centers — available land, grid access, permitting velocity, Austin labor pool proximity — made it attractive for satellite manufacturing and chip fabrication. SpaceX's Bastrop complex and the Cedar Creek data center cluster draw from the same power infrastructure, the same construction labor, and the same logistics corridors. And the Starmind program closes the loop: the terrestrial data centers in Cedar Creek exist because AI compute demand exceeds available power and land. SpaceX's answer to that same constraint is to move the compute to orbit, powered by solar arrays manufactured five miles away. The data centers and the satellite factory are two solutions to the same binding constraint — and they are being built in the same corridor because the constraint is the same.
Investment Summary
| Developer | Disclosed / Estimated Investment | Acreage | Known Tenants |
|---|---|---|---|
| EdgeConneX (three campuses) | $5.6B+ (10 buildings filed) | 500+ acres combined | CoreWeave (confirmed, Building 1) |
| BlackChamber / Pacifico Energy | $2.2B (JETI filing) | 2,842 acres | Anthropic (reported, not finalized) |
| Amazon Web Services | Not disclosed (land acquired) | 1,300 acres | AWS (owner-operator) |
| Total | $7.8B+ disclosed, $9B+ estimated | 4,600+ acres | CoreWeave, Anthropic (reported), AWS |
A community of 3,154 people is absorbing more than $9 billion in data center investment across 4,600+ acres. The cluster is less than two years old — EdgeConneX's first filing was July 2025. The binding constraints are power delivery and water supply. The accelerant is the same one driving every AI-industrial cluster in Texas: the demand for compute is growing faster than the grid can deliver it, and the developers who can solve the power constraint at site scale — by building their own generation, as BlackChamber/Pacifico are doing — will set the pace for the next phase.