SHACKELFORD COUNTY, TEXAS — Vantage Data Centers will invest $25 billion to develop a 3.7 million-square-foot, large-scale data center campus in Shackelford County, which is situated near Abilene, Texas, and about 120 miles west of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Construction of the new 1.4-gigawatt (GW) campus, dubbed “Frontier,” has already begun, with the first of 10 buildings scheduled for delivery in the second half of 2026.
The 1,200-acre, multi-phase project is expected to create jobs for 5,000 people across construction and ongoing operations at the campus, according to company representatives. Additionally, Vantage has pledged annual college scholarships for Shackelford County students throughout the lifespan of the project and plans to hire locally while providing training opportunities.
“This investment in Texas will be a significant economic growth driver for the area as we rapidly deploy the digital infrastructure needed to support AI applications,” says Dana Adams, president of Vantage’s North America operations.
The Frontier campus will be capable of supporting server racks with a power draw of more than 250 kilowatts (kW), while utilizing liquid cooling to support the next generation of graphics processing unit (GPU) loads.
Vantage is also pursuing LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for Frontier, which will align with the company’s “sustainable by design” blueprint. The company aims to preserve resources in the community, such as using a closed-loop chiller system that requires minimal water for cooling, which is “expected to save billions of gallons of water annually.”
Vantage states that the Frontier campus represents its largest investment to date. In Texas, the company currently has another data center under construction in San Antonio, according to Data Center Map. Last month, the company announced a $3 billion investment for a data center campus in Nevada.
Denver-based Vantage Data Centers owns and operates data centers in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, with a global network of 36 data center campuses generating nearly 2.9 GW of critical IT load.
Vantage is a portfolio company of DigitalBridge Group Inc. (NYSE: DBRG), a global alternative asset management company based in Boca Raton, Fla.
— Abby Cox