US 79 Data Center Corridor

Overview

The Corridor Samsung's Power Built

Switch between the Williamson County core and the full run through Milam County, where Riot Rockdale and Stargate Milam add almost 2 GW.

The US 79 Data Center Corridor runs about 30 miles across eastern Williamson County from Round Rock through Hutto to Taylor, and on into Milam County toward Rockdale. It is one of the five supernodes of the Austin Supercluster, and the inheritance-based one: operators chose it because the industrial base was already built.

The chain starts at Samsung Taylor. Powering a fab of that scale brought Oncor into eastern Williamson County with transmission it would not otherwise have built there on that schedule. Data center operators needing hundreds of megawatts now plug into capacity the fab already justified, and powered land along the corridor trades at 1.6 to 2.5 times the price of ordinary industrial parcels.

Rail

Two Class I Railroads at Taylor

Taylor is served by both Union Pacific and BNSF, the two Class I railroads in the western US, and RCR Taylor Logistics Park puts that service on 755 acres with its own spur and yard for transload, manifest, unit-train and storage traffic. When it opened in January 2021, no other public industrial park in the Austin area had Class I service.

Dual service means a shipper can bid two railroads against each other and reach both networks without a short-line handoff. For a fab that consumes bulk chemicals, gases and construction materials, and for suppliers that would rather not truck through Austin, that makes Taylor a rail gateway for the north side of the metro. Union Pacific continues along US 79 to the rail-served sites at Sandow Lakes.

Beyond data centers

A Fab, a Satellite Factory and a Rail Park

Blue Origin chose Hutto Crossing for Constellation Park, next to Colovore and 11 miles west of Samsung, and announced it on October 8, 2026 with an $18.17M Texas Enterprise Fund grant. Hutto and Williamson County approved their incentive agreements in August, two months before the state announcement.

Hutto and Taylor

Hutto to Taylor in 11 Miles

• Leading-edge fabSamsung Taylor, up to ten fabs
• AI data centersSkybox, Colovore, Project Comal, Blueprint, Iron Mountain
• Satellite manufacturingBlue Origin Constellation Park
• Supplier park and railRCR Taylor Logistics Park; the Korean suppliers in Taylor and Hutto
• TransmissionOncor's Samsung-justified build and the two 300 MW Skybox substations

The 11 miles of US 79 between Hutto and Taylor now hold a leading-edge fab with room for ten, the corridor's largest data centers, a satellite factory, a rail park with two Class I railroads, and the Korean suppliers that followed Samsung. Both cities have courted the projects: Hutto with its megasite and the Blue Origin agreements, Taylor with Samsung and the RCR park. Fabs, data centers and orbital manufacturing, three of the supercluster's nine domains, now sit within those 11 miles.

Growth is outrunning rules at the edges. When Taylor stalled Project Mustang's zoning, the developers threatened to build its 750 MW gas plant in the county; the city then annexed it in October on terms that require closed-loop cooling on non-potable water.

Constraints

Power, Water and Pace

Power. The corridor's advantage is transmission Oncor has already built; the campuses arriving later compete for what is left in ERCOT's large-load queue or bring their own gas, as Project Mustang and Stargate Milam do. See ERCOT Large-Load Interconnection.

Water. Samsung, T1 Energy and Stargate Milam all draw on Milam County water, through EPCOR's Sandow pipeline from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. See Texas Water Supply and Stress.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• Samsung Taylor Fab
• Blue Origin Constellation Park
• Sandow Lakes / Xebec Megasite
• US Hwy 79 Deep Tech Corridor
• I-35 South Data Center Corridor
• Cedar Creek Data Center Cluster