Data Boom: Williamson County’s data center explosion

As data centers capture headlines across Texas, one Austin-area county quietly slipped under the radar to become a major hub for the developments.

Gary Oldham, who helped form Protect Round Rock to oppose a planned data center in Round Rock, was stunned to learn that there were already eight centers operating in Williamson County, where the Austin suburb is located.

“I think we pay more attention to local goings on than the average person,” Oldham said. “It really shocked us how that got past us.”

There are currently 30 operational or planned data centers on nine campuses in Williamson County, according to local press reports and industry data. That’s almost half of the nearly 70 projects across the five-county Austin Metropolitan Statistical Area.

“This isn’t a Williamson County or Central Texas thing. Or even a Texas thing. This is a U.S. growth issue,” explained Dave Porter, executive director of the Williamson County Economic Development Partnership. “How to accommodate this new AI technology and the information highways that are driven through the data centers is a global growth issue.”

Boom or bust?

Porter said that several things make Williamson County’s area east of Interstate 35 attractive to data center developers. But largely it’s what some refer to as the Samsung Effect. The electric infrastructure supporting Samsung Austin Semiconductor’s massive silicon chip fabrication plant makes eastern Williamson County a prime location for data centers.

“All the infrastructure is there in that stretch between Hutto and Taylor and Samsung,” Porter said. “It’s about the availability of power.”

Porter warns, however, that talk of a data center bonanza could be premature. Real estate developers that cater to data center operations, rather than companies that actually operate centers, are behind many of the potential projects. As a result, Porter suggests, not all these data centers may be built. 

He compared the current data center land rush to the solar power explosion of the early 2000s. 

“When the U.S. opened that market and technology, a massive influx of solar panel projects from Europe and China came to the U.S., all looking for incentives,” he said. “Today, there’s probably zero of those companies left.” 

Similarly, “you have data center developers, and then you have the actual end users,” Porter said. “Data center developers have created a demand that may not be factual.

They’re out there trying to secure the land and the power, and then go sell that to an end user. And at the end of the day, if the (option) on the property expires, nothing happens.”

It also can be challenging for data centers to get approval to connect to power grids, such as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Grid operators are concerned that data centers could overwhelm the grid when extreme weather causes spikes in power demand.

“Because of how much uncertainty there is about how many data centers are real, about how much load is going to be connected, it has kind of paralyzed a lot of the processes,” University of Texas at Austin energy expert Josh Rhodes told the Wall Street Journal.

Water and power

A survey of existing and proposed Williamson County data center locations confirms that developers are targeting the eastern part of the county. All the data center campuses are along or east of I-35. There are nine centers planned for three campuses in Round Rock, five centers on two sites in Hutto, one each in Georgetown and Jarrell, and 14 on three campuses in Taylor.

None are in the western part of the county.

Opposition to data center development has so far had little impact. Gary Oldham’s organization opposed an AI-focused facility planned for a residential area close to Old Settlers Park, but despite his gathering 3,500-signatures on a petition – more signatures than there were votes in the last city election, Oldham noted – the Round Rock City Council signaled unanimous preliminary approval.

“It’s the ninth data center to be approved in Round Rock,” Oldham said, “and unless we can find some basis on which to continue the fight, it looks like it’s going to happen.”

Data centers focus on two main things: water and power. How much of each will a given data center consume, and how will that impact a community’s utilities?

While water availability is a major concern of opposition groups, it is mitigated by the closed-loop cooling systems used by modern data centers

For example, the proposed campus for Iron Mountain’s data centers, on about 500 acres southwest of Samsung, was originally intended to be used by the residential Taylor Meadows Development featuring almost 1,900 single-family homes. Now, the Iron Mountain campus is expected to host seven data centers instead.

By replacing almost 2,000 single-family homes with data centers, the projected water demand actually dropped. Iron Mountain’s proposed 30,200 gallons per day requirement is less than the wastewater volume estimated for the residential development.

“The water issues aren’t, in my mind, as critical to a data center site as the availability of power,” Porter said.

At full build-out over several decades, the 30 proposed Williamson County data centers would have a capacity of 1.6 to 1.9 gigawatts. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas says that higher amount is enough electricity to power roughly 400,000 average Texas homes under peak summer conditions, or 1.4 million homes under normal conditions.

The three data center campuses in Taylor alone would account for about half of those 1.9 gigawatts. 

Currently, just eight of Williamson County’s 30 potential data centers are operational. Those eight facilities – six in Round Rock and two in Hutto – have a combined capacity of about 500 megawatts, or half a gigawatt.

Williamson County’s existing and proposed data centers:

• Sabey Data Center in Round Rock has one operational data center, one under construction and a third in the planning stage. It is expected to host the University of Texas at Austin’s Horizon supercomputer for advanced scientific research.
• Switch campus has two operational data centers as part of the Dell system that are both already online in Round Rock.
• Skybox Old Settlers data center, recently approved by the Round Rock City Council, is the only data center campus in the county proceeding without any municipal tax incentives.
• Thin-nology Facility already operates three small data centers: an independent enterprise managed-services and colocation data center operating off Helios and two Local Carrier/Edge Nodes, which are telecom/private enterprise switching facilities.
• Hutto’s Skybox campus already operates two data centers, with two more planned over the next decade. The Colovore data center in Hutto is also operational.
• Blueprint in Georgetown is under construction, and the city of Jarrell is negotiating an incentive agreement with Mesones Data Center, which includes an on-site natural gas generator.
• Project Comal’s six data centers by KDC Real Estate have been been permitted adjacent to the Samsung factory. 
• Iron Mountain has proposed seven data centers on about 500 acres southwest of Samsung. Blueprint’s Taylor data center is listed as “under construction” though construction has yet to begin.

Richard Stone is a Central Texas native reporter and editor with 35 years of award-winning experience covering local issues that matter. More at Wilcoblues.com.