Texas LLM Compute Footprint

Overview

Contracted Is Not Energized

12.3 GW of disclosed IT capacity is contracted or announced. About 0.3 GW runs AI workloads today.

Six organizations train and serve the U.S. frontier models: OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Meta (Muse), Google (Gemini), Microsoft (MAI), and Amazon Web Services (Nova). All six are building in Texas at the same time, and between them they have contracted or announced roughly 12.3 GW of data center capacity in the state.

Almost none of it is running yet. 12.3 GW of contracted or announced capacity, while ~0.3 GW is actually energized and running AI workloads today (mid-2026).

That gap between contracted and energized is the single most important fact about this page. Stargate Abilene has about 300 MW live out of 1,200 MW planned, and it is the only site on this list with substantial operating AI capacity. Everything else is under construction, permitted, financed, or still awaiting a final investment decision. The 12.3 GW figure describes commitments through 2028, not machines drawing power today.

Texas attracted this buildout for three reasons, and only one of them is the usual answer. Cheap land and a permissive permitting environment matter. So does the ERCOT interconnection queue - but as an obstacle, not an advantage. The queue is long enough that four of the largest projects here bypassed it entirely by building their own generation on site, a structure called behind-the-meter power. Chevron is building 2.67 GW of gas for Microsoft at Pecos. Pacifico Energy built 7.65 GW of gas capacity for what became Amazon's GW Ranch. Crusoe integrated a 900 MW plant into the Microsoft campus at Abilene. Intersect Power, now an Alphabet subsidiary, co-locates wind, solar, and battery storage with Google's Meitner campus in the Panhandle.

Six companies arrived independently at the same conclusion: in Texas, the binding constraint is not land, capital, or chips. It is a utility interconnection queue, and the way around it is to stop asking for one.

The sites

Every Frontier Lab and Hyperscaler Site in Texas

Each row is a site serving one of the six. Power source colors the map and the bars.

A dash means no IT load is public. Three dataset figures are shown as undisclosed because they measure something else: GW Ranch (power plant size), Cedar Creek (planned gas plant) and Google Midlothian (acreage).

Reading capacity

How to Read the Capacity Column

Data center capacity gets quoted three different ways, and the three differ by more than a factor of three at some sites on this page.

Critical IT load
The power delivered to compute equipment. This is the honest number for comparing sites, and it is the number this page uses wherever it is available.

Utility or interconnection capacity
What the grid connection can deliver. Hut 8's Beacon Point campus has a 1,000 MW interconnection agreement against 704 MW of contracted IT load. The difference is cooling, conversion loss, and headroom.

Generation capacity
The size of the power plant. At Amazon's GW Ranch, Pacifico Energy's plant is rated at 7.65 GW. That number is not the data center. Amazon has permitted three buildings at roughly 189,000 sq ft each and has never disclosed an IT load for the site. Quoting 7,650 MW as GW Ranch's capacity overstates it by an unknown but very large margin.

Blank entries in the table mean no figure is public. Several operators - Meta, Amazon, and Google among them - do not publish per-site power at all. A blank is more accurate than a guess.

By company

Six Companies, Six Ways to Build

Each company page carries the full site detail, financing and power arrangements.

Structural patterns

Structural Patterns

Behind-the-meter generation is now the default at scale

Every Texas project above 800 MW on this page - Meitner, GW Ranch, Pecos, Abilene, Hubbard, Shackelford - builds or contracts its own generation rather than queuing for an ERCOT interconnection. Six organizations reached that conclusion independently, which makes it a structural fact about the Texas grid rather than a preference of any one operator.

Bitcoin miners became the fastest path to energized land

Barber Lake, Abernathy, Riot Rockdale, and Beacon Point all sit on infrastructure originally built to mine bitcoin. Miners spent 2018 through 2024 acquiring interconnected sites with cheap power in west and central Texas. When training demand arrived, those sites were the only ones where power was already flowing. Hut 8, Riot, Cipher, and TeraWulf have all converted or leased out capacity, and in every case the AI contract dwarfs the mining revenue it replaced.

The labs increasingly do not own their compute

Anthropic owns none of its 1.8 GW. OpenAI's capacity runs through Oracle, Crusoe, Vantage, and SoftBank. Microsoft's largest new Texas AI capacity is leased from Crusoe. Only Google, Meta, and Amazon build on their own balance sheets, and even Google guarantees rather than owns at Hubbard and Barber Lake.

Financial exposure and operational control have separated

Beacon Point runs four parties deep - Hut 8 owns, Nvidia leases, Lambda operates, Anthropic buys. Google carries the lease risk at Hubbard, Barber Lake, and Abernathy while Anthropic runs the compute. Reading these sites by tenant alone misses who is actually exposed.

Two counties hold projects from competing companies

Milam County has Stargate's Sandow Lakes site and Riot's Rockdale campus, both on the old Alcoa footprint, about 5 miles apart. Bastrop County has Amazon's 1,300 acres at Cedar Creek and the separate 2,842-acre campus Anthropic is negotiating for.

Constraints

Constraints

The ERCOT interconnection queue is the reason for the behind-the-meter pattern. Hut 8's Beacon Point was reported in August 2026 as possibly among 23 projects cleared through the current review period, with initial energization scheduled for Q1 2027 and roughly two quarters of schedule buffer. Projects without their own generation are exposed to this timeline; projects with it are not.

A statewide moratorium on new data center projects was announced 3 August 2026. Its effect on the permitting- and filing-stage sites here is unresolved. Round Rock, Cedar Creek, Floydada, and the Anthropic Bastrop campus are the most exposed.

Water is the constraint operators are pre-empting. Meitner is air-cooled. Pecos uses closed-loop cooling with brackish non-potable groundwater. Microsoft's Abilene campus and Crusoe's other buildings use closed-loop non-evaporative liquid cooling. In a state where the buildout is concentrated in the Panhandle and west Texas, evaporative cooling is becoming difficult to permit.

Local opposition is now a scheduling risk. Project Eagle in Wharton County and the Bastrop campus both face organized resistance. Amazon withdrew a 7.2M sq ft proposal in Louisa County, Virginia in July 2025 after similar opposition, so this is not a Texas-only pattern, but Texas is where the density is highest.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• AI Data Center Exemplars
• Texas Data Center Moratorium
• Behind-the-Meter Power
• ERCOT Large Load Interconnection
• Stargate Abilene (Campus 1)
• Meta Temple Data Center