A person holds a smartphone to ask a question to ChatGPT. More data centers are moving into Texas towns.
Philip Dulian/picture alliance via Getty Images/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
Data centers are popping up across the Lone Star State, and now two new artificial intelligence data center projects totaling nearly $500 million are set for parts of Central Texas. New filings on the same day with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) are revealing the progress of two massive data center projects north of Austin.
The next phase of a massive $470 million AI data center is currently underway in Burlington, a Milam County city between Austin and Waco, according to the filings. Meanwhile, construction is set to begin this summer on a new $20 million data center near Dell Technologies’ headquarters in Round Rock, a north Austin suburb.
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Both projects, registered in TDLR on April 15, will bring a huge economic boost to each Central Texas area through tax benefits and local job creation. However, some Texans in surrounding small towns are worried about the long-term impacts data centers could have on their communities, including city water and state grid electricity use.
OpenAI’s Texas data center
The first TDR filing is for “Freebird Data Center Phase 1,” a new hyperscale data center in Milam County linked to OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research and development company that owns ChatGPT. Construction on the data center first began in October 2025 as part of a larger $500 billion Stargate Project announced last year by President Donald Trump.
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Stargate is planning to build five other data centers in Abilene, Ohio, New Mexico and the Midwest, designed to create more than 100,000 jobs. The project is backed by leaders of Softbank, OpenAI and Oracle, who are also behind the Freebird data center in Burlington on County Road 133.
The $3 billion facility includes the new construction of a single-story 548,950 square foot data center to help power the future of ChatGPT and other AI tools. Construction on phase 1 of Freebird Data Centers is expected to be finished this October.
Freebird Phase 1 in Milam County, TX officially topped out this week!
From first beam to topping out in two weeks is pretttty, prettty, pretttty good.
Industrializing compute == compressing the cycle time from power to intelligence and making it repeatable! pic.twitter.com/cQFNPoJulU
— Peter Hoeschele (@retephoeschele) March 19, 2026
Milam County residents appeared optimistic about the economic benefits of the project when it broke ground last year, 25 News KXXV reported.
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Switch’s Central Texas data center
Las Vegas-based Switch, an AI factory maker, is building a new $20 million data center in Round Rock. This new development appears to be part of “The Rock,” a more than 1.5 million square foot, 185-megawatt Tier 5 data center campus located adjacent to Dell Technologies’ headquarters.
The facility will serve as a major AI and cloud infrastructure hub, featuring advanced liquid-to-chip cooling, according to a release. Switch first announced the project in 2021 and has made progress with its first building already in use at 150 Dell Way.
Whereas the company’s latest data center will be located at 300 Dell Way. Construction on the 72,600 square foot data center will begin this June and is slated to be completed by June 2028.
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The City of Round Rock currently has three data center projects, including Skybox, Switch and Sabey. In early December 2025, Skybox’s proposed data center raised concerns among some residents about its potential impacts on electricity and water usage.
However, the city confirmed to MySA that its two already-built Switch and Sabey data centers have not had huge impacts on the city’s water supply or affected existing residential electricity customers. The city says on its website that these data centers use a closed-loop cooling system, which is required in the planned unit development (PUD) to reuse the same water internally and only use small amounts of periodic makeup water.
A spokesperson for the City of Round Rock added that although Switch’s current data center is near a single-family neighborhood, the city has not received any noise complaints from nearby residents.