Frontier Vantage Data Center, near Albany, Texas

Vantage Data Centers is building Frontier, a data center campus with 1,400 megawatts of power capacity, on about 1,200 acres in Shackelford County, Texas, near Albany and northeast of Abilene, as part of the Stargate expansion for Oracle and OpenAI. Vantage broke ground in December 2025 and said the first of 10 planned buildings, totaling about 3.7 million square feet, would go live in the second half of 2026.

Vantage announced the $25 billion campus in August 2025, its largest investment to date, and Shackelford County commissioners approved it unanimously in July 2025 after a public hearing, creating a tax reinvestment zone. Under a 10-year abatement, Vantage agreed to pay the county $10 million a year instead of property taxes, which the Albany News said could raise the county's yearly budget by nearly 200 percent, plus $150,000 a year to local charities and 10 college scholarships. Company representatives told the county the project would create 250 full-time jobs paying $25 million a year, with up to 6,500 workers on site at the peak of construction.

The company says the campus uses liquid cooling with a closed-loop chiller system that "requires minimal water," but filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, cited by Construction Owners, show the contractor Voltagrid is cleared to run 210 gas generators on site with a combined 700 megawatts of capacity. Residents have raised traffic since: Twylia Waldon told commissioners in July 2026 that trucks run "all day, all night long" and "do not follow the speed limits," and Blaine Kayga said at an August town hall, "I have a cracked window just because of all the gravel trucks."

A second project, Project North, is now before the county: Bolt Data and Energy wants to build on the Buck Nail Ranch about 16 miles west of Albany, an estimated $8.8 billion investment that would generate its own power. More than 100 people packed the Commissioners Court when it was introduced in July 2026, and in September commissioners unanimously accepted Bolt's tax abatement application and agreed to form a citizen advisory committee for the negotiations. The Shackelford County Hospital District has hired its own attorney, and trustee Mike Parsons said questions remain about the project's water needs and emissions.

County Judge John Viertel, who leads the Commissioners Court handling both projects and begins a second term in January 2027, told KTXS: "We're not able to do a whole lot unless we do some abatement," adding, "which allows us to do some control and to set up terms." Gov. Greg Abbott called on June 30, 2026 for new AI data centers in rural Texas to be banned unless companies provide their own power and reuse their own water, a state policy that would affect any future expansion here.