AustinIO > Texas Spotlights Hub
Texas Spotlights Hub
Each facility below has its own AustinIO spotlight page. A facility gets one when it leads its category in Texas by size, is the first of its kind, or carries a strategic role that the rest of the state's industrial base depends on. The facilities fall into six categories:
- Gigafactories and manufacturing
- Fabs and semiconductor
- Data centers and campuses
- Aerospace and defense
- Critical materials
- Energy and systems
The first three match the gigafactory, fab and data center legs of the Texas Industrial Triad. The Austin metro anchors (Tesla, Samsung and SpaceX) are also covered together on the Giga Austin Nexus page.
Gigafactories and Manufacturing
| Facility | Operator | Location | Why It Leads |
|---|
| Tesla Giga Texas Complex | Tesla | Austin (Travis County) | Four frontier programs at one address: Model Y and Cybertruck production, Optimus humanoid production, Cortex AI training clusters, and the Terafab Research Fab |
| Tesla Megapack and Megablock at Brookshire | Tesla | Empire West Industrial Park, Brookshire (Waller County) | Tesla's third Megapack factory, after Lathrop and Shanghai; dedicated Megapack 3 and Megablock line sized for up to 10,000 Megapacks (about 40 GWh) a year, ramp starting late 2026 |
| Tesla Lithium Refinery | Tesla | Robstown (Nueces County, near Corpus Christi) | First major US-scale lithium refinery; turns spodumene concentrate into battery-grade lithium hydroxide and cathode precursor for the 4680 cell line at Giga Texas |
| Sandow Lakes / Xebec Megasite | Xebec Holdings | FM 1786, Milam and Lee Counties | Former Alcoa smelter on 33,000 acres now hosting solar cell manufacturing, AI training, bitcoin mining and on-site power generation; about 1.5 GW today, scaling toward 3.9 GW by 2028 |
Fabs and Semiconductor
| Facility | Operator | Location | Why It Leads |
|---|
| Samsung Taylor Fab | Samsung Foundry | Taylor (Williamson County) | Largest semiconductor commitment in Texas history at over $45B; 2nm gate-all-around (GAA) logic; fabricates Tesla AI5 chips; Fab 1 ramping to volume in 2027 |
| TI Sherman (SM1) | Texas Instruments | Sherman (Grayson County) | World's largest 300mm analog and embedded processing fab; SM1 in volume production since December 2025, first of four planned fabs sized for up to $40B |
| TIE NGMM Center | UT Austin, Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE) | Austin | Only advanced packaging plant in the world dedicated to 3D heterogeneous integration; backed by an $840M DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing (NGMM) award and about $552M in State of Texas funding |
| Terafab Production Facility | SpaceX and Tesla (Intel foundry partner) | Gibbons Creek, Grimes County | Volume production fab on Intel 14A at the former Texas Municipal Power Agency (TMPA) coal plant site, about 6,000 acres; $16.8B initial phase, up to $119B across four phases |
| Substrate Inc. / Project Factory One | Substrate Inc. | RELLIS Campus, Bryan (Brazos County) | Prospective $10B-$13B commercial fab on a 288-acre reinvestment zone, described in Texas Comptroller filings as first of its kind in the US |
| Texas A&M Semiconductor Institute (TSI) | Texas A&M System | RELLIS Campus, Bryan (Brazos County) | $226.4M Texas CHIPS Act research facility, 80,000 sq ft with Class 100 and Class 1000 cleanrooms and 300mm tools; broke ground April 2026, completion targeted for early 2028 |
Tesla's research-scale fab at the Giga Texas North Campus, the development partner to the Grimes County production fab, is covered on the Terafab Research Fab page.
Data Centers and Campuses
| Facility | Operator | Location | Why It Leads |
|---|
| Meta Temple Data Center | Meta Platforms | Temple (Bell County) | Meta's Texas hyperscale campus on the I-35/I-14 corridor; established Bell County as a hyperscaler-grade site |
| Stargate Abilene (Campus 1) | Stargate JV (OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, MGX) | Abilene (Taylor County) | Flagship of the Stargate program and the only Texas site with substantial live AI capacity; 1.2 GW planned, about 0.3 GW live; Lancium owns the land, Crusoe built it, Oracle runs it for OpenAI |
| Fermi America Project Matador | Fermi America (Texas Tech University System partner) | Near Amarillo (Carson County), next to Pantex | Behind-the-meter private grid targeting 11 GW from gas, four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, solar and storage; sells firm power to multiple data center tenants |
| Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) | UT Austin | Austin (J.J. Pickle Research Campus) | Largest academic supercomputing center in the US and home of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Leadership-Class Computing Facility; runs Frontera, Stampede3 and Vista |
| Horizon at Sabey Round Rock | TACC / Sabey Data Centers | Round Rock (Williamson County) | $457M NSF supercomputer, the largest academic system for open research in the US; built with Dell, NVIDIA and VAST Data at Sabey's SDC Austin campus |
| Skybox/Prologis Hutto Megasite | Skybox Datacenters / Prologis | Hutto (Williamson County) | Largest data center on the US 79 corridor: up to 600 MW through two private Oncor substations and up to 4M sq ft across six to eight buildings |
| Tract Caldwell Valley Technology Park | Tract Capital Management | Uhland (Caldwell County) | About 3,000 acres of powered land leased as pads, up to 4 GW planned; Bluebonnet and Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) substation partnership |
| CloudBurst Evolve San Marcos Data Center I | CloudBurst / Evolve Holdings | San Marcos area (Hays County) | $14.5B, 1.2 GW AI campus in three 400 MW phases, powered entirely behind the meter by natural gas from Energy Transfer's Oasis Pipeline |
Aerospace and Defense
| Facility | Operator | Location | Why It Leads |
|---|
| Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Fort Worth | Lockheed Martin | Air Force Plant 4, Fort Worth (Tarrant County) | F-35 Lightning II final assembly, the largest fighter production operation in the world; record 191 aircraft delivered in 2025 |
| SpaceX Starlink Factory Bastrop | SpaceX | FM 1209, Bastrop County | Largest satellite-related manufacturing site in North America by output; Starlink user terminals and components, plus semiconductor packaging; part of the Musk Bastrop Complex |
| Firefly Aerospace | Firefly Aerospace | Cedar Park (Williamson County) | Blue Ghost made the first fully successful commercial Moon landing on March 2, 2025; builds the Alpha rocket and is developing Eclipse with Northrop Grumman |
| SpaceX Starbase | SpaceX | Boca Chica (Cameron County) | Starship integration, testing and launch; Starbase incorporated as a city in 2025 |
| CTSDC Spaceport Cedar Park | Central Texas Spaceport Development Corporation (Williamson County and City of Cedar Park) | Cedar Park (Williamson County) | Nonprofit that channels state and federal spaceport grants; over $128M announced across Firefly (144,000 sq ft headquarters campus), Wright One and AUMOVIO |
| Blue Origin Project Blue Hub | Blue Origin | Hutto (Williamson County) | $550M manufacturing and R&D complex, confirmed and announced October 2026 |
Critical Materials
| Facility | Operator | Location | Why It Leads |
|---|
| Round Top | USA Rare Earth | Hudspeth County (about 80 miles SE of El Paso) | North America's richest known heavy rare earth deposit, holding 15 of the 17 rare earth elements including dysprosium and terbium; commercial production targeted for 2028 |
| MP Materials Independence Magnet Plant | MP Materials | Fort Worth (Tarrant County) | First fully integrated US rare earth magnet plant in a generation; sintered neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets at about 1,000 metric tons a year, expanding to 3,000, under a Department of Defense partnership |
Energy and Systems
| Facility / Region | Operator(s) | Location | Why It Leads |
|---|
| Permian Basin | ExxonMobil, Chevron, Diamondback and others | West Texas and southeastern New Mexico | Largest oil-producing region in the US at about 6 million barrels a day, roughly 40% of US crude |
| Roscoe Wind Complex | RWE | Nolan, Mitchell, Scurry and Fisher Counties | 781.5 MW across four wind farms; the world's largest wind farm when commissioned in October 2009, at the center of a West Texas wind cluster exceeding 4 GW |
| Samson Solar Energy Center | Invenergy | Lamar, Red River and Franklin Counties | 1,310 MW, $1.6B, one of the largest solar facilities in the US |
| Comanche Peak Nuclear | Vistra (Luminant) | Glen Rose (Somervell County) | 2,400 MW, two units; site of the first major hyperscaler nuclear power purchase agreement in ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), 1,200 MW for 20 years, announced September 2025 |
| Rodeo Ranch Energy Storage | Plus Power | Near Pecos (Reeves County) | 300 MW / 600 MWh; largest standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) in ERCOT when it came online in December 2023 |
Related Coverage
Industrial Triad | Facility Node List | Mapping the Convergence | The Austin Supercluster | The Texas Nexus | Texas AI & Hyperscalar Data Centers | Texas Energy Nexus
