Texas – Councilors approve over $5 billion hyperscale data center
WICHITA FALLS (KFDX/KJTL) — An over $5 billion investment is coming to Wichita Falls.
“We’re proposing a data center, and a data center can’t go anywhere. It has to go in a specific location,” project developer Mark Calvano said. “The closer it is to a substation, the better off it is. 30th District courtroom nears renovation completion
At the meeting on Tuesday, November 5, councilors voted unanimously to rezone a 200-acre lot at City View Drive and 287, adjacent to Oncor’s facilities, to build a multi-million-square-foot building to house a hyper-scale data center.
It’s essentially a storage center for digital data, and alongside it will come ancillary battery storage.
He said,
Kind of a bit of a new technology, but it’s a great technology because what it does is you purchase electricity from the grid when it’s inexpensive and sell it back when it’s more expensive,
“When there’s a brownout, these batteries come online. And they sell power back.”
Chamber CEO Ron Kitchens said bringing 2.3 million square feet of development is a $5 billion investment for every million square feet.
He said,
The building is much less expensive than all the equipment that goes in it, and the equipment’s changed out on average every three years,
“So this isn’t like we’re going to get an asset and depreciate to nothing in the tax base. It’s constantly reinventing itself.”
While the center itself requires minimal staffing since it’ll be comprised mainly of servers, Kitchens said the five- to 10-year-long project will require over 4,000 construction workers.
Kitchens said,
Where are we going to get all these workers from? Well, nobody has them—that’s the good thing,
“The good thing is we’ll be able to train for these jobs.”
According to Calvano, similar data centers, like Google’s in Midlothian, bring in big bucks.
He said,
That’s now a $1 billion project. This can have a $1 billion property tax basis, and that itself could be good for the city,
Which councilors see as a potential relief for taxpayers.
District 5 City Councilor Tom Taylor said,
It’s going to broaden our property tax base, which means there won’t be any major increases or any increases at all to the property tax rate,
“I like what you said about as a secondary thing, may possibly bring other economic endeavors to our city.”
The land’s owners support those endeavors.
Broker agent Matt Macklemore said, speaking on behalf of the owners.
We believe that such approval will result in new business investment and job growth that will benefit Wichita Falls,
Calvano said that hyper-scale data centers like this one house a single party, typically Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.
READ the latest news shaping the data centre market at Data Centre Central
Texas – Councilors approve over $5 billion hyperscale data center, source
