Wichita Falls Data Center Market

Overview

The Wichita Falls market covers the North Texas counties along the Red River, with Wichita Falls, Vernon and Graham as its main towns. It sits inside the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid in Texas. For decades the area held only telecom facilities. Since 2024 it has drawn bitcoin miners, AI campus developers and a hyperscaler looking for land with power.

History

Oil booms at Electra in 1911 and Burkburnett in 1918 drove the city's early growth. Sheppard Field opened in 1941 and still anchors the local economy as Sheppard Air Force Base. Southwestern Bell built its nine-story Lamar central office downtown in the 1950s. It still houses the area's tandem switch, where other carriers connect. Williams Communications bought a network building on Lee Street in 2000, and Lumen runs it today.

Large-scale data centers arrived only recently. American Electric Power (AEP) retired the Oklaunion coal plant near Vernon in 2020 and sold the site. In 2024 the bitcoin miner Genesis Digital Assets (GDA) opened its Rowdy Data Center on the plant grounds. Late that year the Wichita Falls City Council rezoned 227 acres on the north side for a hyperscale campus by Calvano Development. In 2025 the Wichita Falls Economic Development Corporation sold land in its business park for a second campus.

The Market Today

City leaders named Skybox Datacenters as the business park buyer in February 2026. Skybox is developing PowerCampus Texas there with Blue Owl, planned for up to 10 buildings and about $12 billion. The first building is due in late 2028 or early 2029. A second phase of about 171 acres is approved but has not closed. Calvano's subsidiary MegaVolt Infrastructure now markets a 412-acre site on the north side.

Smaller projects are reusing existing buildings and land. DataNovaX is converting a vacant call center on Airport Drive into a data center, with power expected in 2027. Kings Branch Data owns about 35 acres on Randy Drive that the city annexed in 2025.

Outside the city, the market centers on large tracts and reused industrial power. In Archer County, Google plans a campus on about 2,500 acres off Three Way Road. In Graham, Stream Data Centers is buying Plug Power's cancelled hydrogen plant site and its grid connection. SWI Group took control of GDA in 2026 and plans to move its sites toward AI workloads. Sabey Data Centers assembled land south of Oklaunion, but county records show the tract changed hands in 2026.

Advantages

• Reusable grid connections. Retired plants and cancelled industrial projects left substations and interconnection rights behind. Developers now reuse them near Oklaunion and Graham.
• City support. City leaders called the Skybox campus the largest industrial announcement in Wichita Falls history. Skybox requested no local incentives and agreed to pay for the campus infrastructure.
• Land. Large ranch and farm tracts sit within reach of 345 kV and 138 kV transmission lines.
• Workforce. Sheppard Air Force Base hosts the Air Force's largest technical training wing, with more than 60,000 graduates a year. Midwestern State University joined the Texas Tech University System in 2021.
• Proximity to Dallas-Fort Worth. Wichita Falls sits about two hours northwest of Dallas-Fort Worth, the largest market in the state. US 287 and I-44 link the city to Fort Worth, Amarillo and Oklahoma City.

Challenges

• Grid connection pause. On August 3, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott paused approvals of new data center grid connections pending an audit. ERCOT now expects its first batch study of large loads to miss its April 2027 deadline.
• Queue congestion. ERCOT tracks more than 400 GW of large-load requests, and about 90% of them are data centers. In October 2026 Skybox took its dispute over ERCOT's classification of the campus load to the Public Utility Commission of Texas.
• Local approvals. In May 2026 the city council rejected a data center rezoning near homes on Airport Drive. In June 2026 Archer County commissioners refused a tax abatement for Google's campus. They later opposed its state wastewater permits.
• Water. The 2011 to 2015 drought drew the city's lakes down to about a fifth of capacity. The city approved one 2026 project only with water limits and a ban on evaporative cooling. Clay County commissioners passed a resolution against high-water data centers.
• Severe weather. The region lies in Tornado Alley. An F4 tornado killed 42 people in Wichita Falls on April 10, 1979. Winter Storm Uri forced rolling outages across the ERCOT grid in February 2021.

Trends

• Industrial reuse. A retired coal plant, a cancelled hydrogen plant and a vacant call center have all turned into data center sites since 2024.
• Miners turn to AI. GDA's new owner plans to convert bitcoin mining sites to AI and high-performance computing.
• Hyperscale land banking. Large buyers now assemble thousands of acres well outside Wichita Falls, ahead of grid approvals.
• Bring your own power. Developers such as Kings Branch Data plan on-site natural gas generation to avoid long grid waits.

Power and Policy

ERCOT runs the grid, and the Public Utility Commission of Texas regulates it. Oncor delivers power in Wichita Falls, Archer County and Graham, and AEP Texas serves the Vernon area. At Oklaunion, a 220 MW back-to-back DC tie links ERCOT with the Southwest Power Pool grid in Oklahoma. Senate Bill 6, signed in June 2025, sets grid rules for loads of 75 MW or more. It requires large loads to disclose on-site backup generation and lets ERCOT curtail them in grid emergencies. In 2026 ERCOT began grouping large-load requests into batch studies.