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US 79 Data Center Corridor

The US 79 corridor runs about 30 miles across northeastern Williamson County, from Round Rock through Hutto to Taylor — one of the most active AI compute buildouts in the country, and one that site-selection analysts rank among the most valuable stretches of highway in the United States for AI-industrial development. It exists because of the Samsung Taylor fab: the transmission infrastructure Oncor built to power a $40 billion semiconductor campus opened the door for the data center concentration that followed.

The Samsung Oncor effect

The corridor's origin is a single causal chain. Samsung Austin Semiconductor's Taylor fabrication plant required power at a scale that brought Oncor — the fifth-largest US electric utility — into eastern Williamson County with major transmission infrastructure it would not otherwise have built there, at that scale, on that schedule. That capacity, pre-justified by the fab, is what data center operators needing hundreds of megawatts then plugged into.

This is the corridor's structural advantage. Most Texas data centers compete for ERCOT interconnection at sites where transmission must be built alongside the campus. US 79 operators inherit transmission the fab already justified — which is why Blueprint can market "time-to-power" and secure committed Oncor paths ahead of broader market availability. Powered land trades at a 1.6x to 2.5x premium over conventional industrial parcels; the corridor captures that premium because the Oncor infrastructure is already there. Samsung Taylor is the anchor, but it is a fab, not a data center — the vertex of the Giga Austin Nexus that made the compute corridor around it possible.

The corridor campuses

Six data center developments now define the corridor, and the pace is the story: four are clustered in or beside Taylor, several proposed within roughly 18 months of Samsung's buildout, all siting on the same Samsung-Oncor logic.

Campus	City	Capacity	Investment	Distinctive
Skybox/Prologis PowerCampus	Hutto	~600 MW	$10B+	Corridor's largest; two private 300 MW Oncor substations; Prologis's 5.8 GW national pipeline
Colovore (Project Raptor)	Hutto	180,000 sq ft	$500M	Liquid-cooled AI/HPC; named tenants Cerebras, Lambda, Cirrascale
Project Comal (KDC)	Taylor	360 MW	Not disclosed	Permitted; six buildings directly beside the Samsung fab
Project Mustang	Taylor (edge)	477 MW gas	Not disclosed	Contested; behind-the-meter gas; building in unincorporated county
Blueprint Taylor	Taylor	60 MW	Up to $1B	Minutes from Samsung; half of a fiber-linked dual-site platform
Blueprint Georgetown	Georgetown	25 MW	$160M	Paired with Taylor via regional fiber for distributed architectures

Skybox/Prologis is the corridor's largest single project — up to 4 million sq ft and 600 MW across the Hutto Megasite, powered by two dedicated 300 MW Oncor substations, part of Prologis's 5.8 GW national data center pipeline. Colovore's Project Raptor is the high-density specialist — a liquid-cooled AI/HPC campus in Hutto with named AI-infrastructure tenants, rare in a corridor of anonymous hyperscale shells. Blueprint runs a two-campus Taylor-plus-Georgetown platform linked by fiber, sited minutes from Samsung on the "time-to-power" advantage the Oncor build created. The campus that sits directly beside the fab itself is Project Comal, KDC's permitted 360 MW development in Taylor — the literal expression of the corridor's semiconductor-plus-compute adjacency. At Taylor's contested eastern edge, Project Mustang brings its own 477 MW of behind-the-meter gas and is building in unincorporated county after its city annexation stalled.

Corridor geography

Round Rock is the western terminus — a multi-corridor intersection (US 183, I-35, SH 130, US 79) with a mature legacy data center ecosystem (Sabey, Switch) that sits on the I-35/SH 45 axis rather than the US 79 spine, a parallel Williamson County concentration rather than part of this corridor. Hutto is the central data center node — Skybox and Colovore, a city of ~31,000 that has positioned itself aggressively on a stretch site-selection experts rank among the most desirable in the US. Taylor is the eastern terminus and the anchor — the Samsung fab plus Blueprint's campus, the corridor's semiconductor-plus-compute concentration.

Why it converges

What distinguishes US 79 from every other Texas data center corridor is vertical integration: the semiconductor manufacturing and the AI compute sit on the same corridor, drawing the same power and workforce. The fab makes the advanced-node silicon that AI workloads run on; the data centers nearby run them. Two Samsung suppliers have reportedly evaluated ~70 acres of the Skybox Megasite, and KDC's Project Comal campus sits directly beside the fab in Taylor — the supplier-ring and co-location patterns that only a semiconductor anchor produces. The velocity is its own signal: four data centers clustered in or beside Taylor within roughly 18 months, arriving faster than a town of modest size can write rules for them, which is the friction now playing out in Taylor's council chambers over Project Mustang. The corridor also carries adjacent cleantech manufacturing (GAF Energy's Georgetown solar-shingle plant, the world's largest solar-roofing producer) and, prospectively, aerospace: Blue Origin's Project Blue Hub is reported to be eyeing the Hutto Crossing site next to Colovore, which would add orbital-hardware manufacturing to the mix. Every anchor advances one of the AI-industrial pillars — compute, semiconductor supply, cleantech, and potentially aerospace — on one 30-mile stretch of highway.

Per Cushman & Wakefield data through early 2026, the wider Austin–San Antonio corridor holds roughly 7,800 MW of planned capacity against about 1,150 MW operating, with much under construction already pre-leased; Williamson County captures a disproportionate share. Within the Austin Supercluster, US 79 is the inheritance-based data center supernode — the one where operators chose the location because the industrial substrate, above all the Oncor transmission, was already built.

Last updated September 11, 2026. Capacity and investment are developer-stated buildout figures. Samsung Taylor and GAF Energy are corridor anchors, not data center campuses. The Blue Origin Blue Hub siting is reported and anticipated, not confirmed.

Campuses: Skybox/Prologis · Colovore (Raptor) · Project Comal · Project Mustang · Blueprint (Taylor + Georgetown)

Anchor: Samsung Taylor