Skybox Datacenters will develop the first large-scale data center campus in Wichita Falls, Texas, on a 225-acre tract inside the Wichita Falls Business Park. City leaders and the economic development agency Forward Wichita Falls named the company at a press conference in the city, according to local broadcaster News Channel 6. Skybox is branding the site PowerCampus.
The land changed hands before the announcement. Data Center Dynamics reports that Skybox bought the tract from the Wichita Falls Economic Development Corporation for more than $14.5 million in October, through an entity called Texas Data Centers Campus LLC, and that the buyer holds an option on a further 125 acres. Skybox's own site lists PowerCampus Texas as a 300-acre location with room for up to 2 million square feet, developed with Blue Owl.
Build-out is staged. The first building is 150,000 square feet and could be operational by late 2028, with up to seven buildings planned and further phases arriving roughly every six months after the first, News Channel 6 reports.
Two numbers a buyer would want are not on the table. No tenant has been secured, and Data Center Dynamics reports that Skybox is aiming to have one in place by the end of the year. Neither the company nor the city has published a power figure for the campus, so the megawatt capacity, the interconnection queue position and the utility serving it are all unknown.
Water drew the sharpest questions locally. A Skybox representative told the press conference the campus would consume the equivalent of about four households per 150,000 square foot building, citing an average household use of 1,200 gallons a month, which works out to roughly 4,800 gallons a month per building. That is a closed-loop or air-cooled consumption profile rather than an evaporative one, but the company has not published a cooling design, and a filed water-use permit or a stated design wet-bulb approach would settle it.
Skybox also said any infrastructure upgrades needed to serve the campus would be funded by the company rather than by residents. Employment is put at 200 to 350 staff once the full campus runs.
The developer is not new to the state. Data Center Dynamics describes Skybox as a wholesale colocation and turnkey enterprise data center builder with projects in Houston, Round Rock and San Angelo, plus Santa Clara, California, and campuses developed with Prologis in the Hutto and Pflugerville areas of Austin, in Dallas, in Virginia and in Chicago, the last of which has since been sold to HMC Capital. It previously sold a Houston facility to Element Critical.
Wichita Falls has other data center activity in the pipeline. Data Center Dynamics reports that a rezoning application covering 37 acres on Airport Drive, part of a proposed 98-acre campus of up to nine buildings totalling about 1.35 million square feet from local attorney Brad Altman, was recommended for approval by the planning commission but tabled by city councillors at their February 3 meeting.
For buyers, a named developer on a bought and entitled 225-acre site in a secondary Texas market is a capacity option worth tracking, but one with no announced power, no tenant and a first delivery still more than two years out. Engineers evaluating it should ask for the interconnection agreement and the cooling design before treating the water figure as settled.
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