50,000-Acre, Hydrogen-Powered Data Center Campus Planned In Texas
A Texas energy developer is pitching a 50,000-acre, off-grid data center campus near the Mexican border that it says will eventually be powered entirely by hydrogen and green energy sources.
Energy Abundance Development Corp. unveiled plans Friday for what it is branding Data City, Texas — a data center megacampus in the Laredo area that the developer claims will eventually support 5 gigawatts of capacity for artificial intelligence computing.
Fully isolated from The Electric Reliability Council of Texas's grid, the site is adjacent to Hydrogen City, a 2-terawatt hydrogen energy project being built by the same developer that is due to be completed in 2028.
The data center campus will be built in three phases, according to the firm, with 300 megawatts of capacity and 1M SF of data center space due to come online next year. No timeline has been given for the two subsequent phases, which Energy Abundance says will bring total capacity to 5 gigawatts spread across more than 15M SF of leasable space.
While Energy Abundance has promoted the Data City as being “powered by 100% 24/7 green energy,” power for data city will initially come from on-site natural gas turbines combined with wind, solar and battery storage. Over time, the developer says the gas turbines will run on hydrogen sourced from its facility next door.
Houston-based Energy Abundance, which operated as Green Hydrogen International Corp. before rebranding last week, is a developer of large-scale, behind-the-meter energy projects. Despite being newcomers to the data center space, the firm’s leadership has pitched Data City as a transformative project that will lead to the emergence of AI that surpasses human cognitive abilities — a theoretic breakthrough known as Artificial General Intelligence.
"Data City is a world-class infrastructure project, pioneering a new behind-the-meter approach," Brian Maxwell, founder and CEO of Energy Abundance, said in a statement. "Data City surpasses all others in size, sustainability, and cost-efficiency— we believe it will be the birthplace of AGI."
The data centers being constructed in the project’s initial phase are being specifically designed for AI, the developer says. The buildings will be optimized for direct-to-chip liquid cooling, a technology needed to support the latest high-performance computing equipment from GPU-makers like Nvidia.
