Taylor County and the City of Abilene have approved a project with Lancium, a Houston-based energy technology and infrastructure company, to build a hyperscale, renewable energy powered data centre campus in Abilene and Taylor County.

The project, named Clean Compute Campus, will cover an area of 8000 acres and represents one of the largest private capital investments in Abilene and Taylor County history at US$2.4 billion. The cash will be deployed over 20 years and is expected to create 57 full-time jobs.

The development is pending final negotiations with Taylor County, the City of Abilene, and the Development Corporation of Abilene (DCOA).

The campus will begin at 200 megawatts with an expansion capacity to over a one gigawatt.

Michael McNamara, Co-founder and CEO of Lancium, said: “We are very proud to be part of the community and build one of our flagship Clean Campuses in Abilene. We chose Abilene for our second Clean Campus because of its ideal location, proximity to abundant wind and solar generation, high-quality workforce and the opportunities to grow in the future.”

Breaking ground in the first quarter of 2022, the Clean Compute Campus will initially contain approximately 100,000 square feet of industrial electric services equipment and data servers.

Taylor County Judge Downing Bolls, said: “We are proud to be at the forefront of this movement that will utilize and revitalize 800 acres of land.

“This partnership is historic with Lancium’s projected investment of approximately $2.4 billion in improvements to real property in the County.”

Lancium has recently broken ground on different data centre site in Fort Stockton, Texas.

The initial application at the Fort Stockton Clean Campus will be a 100,000+ square-foot facility for Bitcoin mining and other high throughput computing workloads.

The expected completion date for the first 25MW stage is Q1 2022 with the facility reaching full capacity of 325MW by year end 2022.