Vantage to Build Frontier in Texas

In the AI data center arms race, the projects just keep getting bigger. Yesterday Vantage Data Centers raised the ante again by announcing plans for a $25B investment out in Shackelford County, Texas. The result will be their Frontier campus, which will look to meet the voracious demand for AI infrastructure.

To save you a trip to Google Maps, Shackelford County sits in central Texas to the northeast of Abilene and has a population of just over 3,000 people. Vantage has secured 1,200 acres upon which it plans to build 10 data centers totaling 3.7M square feet of space.  The facilities will support ultra high-density racks of up to 250kW+ with a total of 1.4GW of power lined up. Cooling will use a closed-loop chiller stystem requiring minimal water.

As projects go, that’s a big boy. Of course, the buildout will span many years of supply and demand waves and shifts in technology, so the $25B price tag can only be an estimate. But construction is already underway, with the first building scheduled for delivery in the second half of 2026.

Vantage expects to employ some 5K people across construction and ongoing operations, which is rather more people than the county itself can provide at the moment. Indeed, at full buildout Frontier will have 1600 square feet of data center space for every man, woman, and child currently living there. With contribution to local charities and pledges for college scholarships for local students in addition to the direct economic impact, Vantage is definitely taking Shackleford County to someplace new.

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Categories: Datacenter