The midsummer wave of U.S. data center development is not defined by a single market, developer or technology company. It stretches from the Georgia coast to West Texas, from the industrial Midwest to the Mississippi River. What links the projects announced since early June is not just their scale, it is the realization that scale alone is not enough.
Developers are still announcing multibillion-dollar campuses and gigawatt power requirements, but the language surrounding those announcements has changed. Companies are emphasizing who will pay for new generation and transmission, how cooling systems will limit water consumption, what communities will receive beyond temporary construction employment, and when contracted customers will begin occupying capacity. In several cases, the announcement is less about acquiring land than proving that a project has become commercially and electrically credible. As we have seen progressing through the industry, the latest announcements point toward campuses that combine compute, power, financing and community agreements in one development package.
OpenAI Goes Direct in Georgia
OpenAI, on July 22 disclosed Project Camellia, a long-term data center development in Effingham County, Georgia. OpenAI said it is designing and developing the campus itself and has contracted with Georgia Power for 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, to be delivered in phases from 2028 through 2032. The project has been reported as a roughly $20 billion investment on approximately 1,400 acres, making it one of the largest individual data center proposals currently moving through the U.S. pipeline.
Project Camellia is notable not only for its size but for OpenAI’s more direct role. The company has traditionally secured capacity through cloud providers and infrastructure partners. By taking responsibility for designing and developing the Georgia campus, OpenAI is signaling that control over power, schedule and facility design has become strategically important as AI companies compete for increasingly scarce large-scale capacity. The project remains early in development, with infrastructure, phasing, financing and operating details still to be completed.
OpenAI paired the announcement with a detailed community compact framework. It pledged to pay the full cost of infrastructure and electric service, use a closed-loop cooling system, provide $80 million in community benefits, make as much as $71 million in Codex credits available to eligible Georgia students, and commission an annual independent audit of its commitments. It also said the campus would be designed to reduce power consumption during periods of high grid demand before residential customers are affected.
The package treats community engagement as part of the infrastructure stack rather than a public-relations exercise begun after zoning approval.
Microsoft Pairs 2 Gigawatts of Capacity With Dedicated West Texas Power
Microsoft delivered another defining announcement on June 22, unveiling a new data center campus in Pecos, Texas, that would add approximately 2 gigawatts to its global capacity. The company described the project as one of the largest single capacity additions in its history and said the multibillion-dollar investment would unfold over five to seven years, supporting more than 6,000 construction jobs at peak and hundreds of permanent operating positions.
The central feature of the Pecos plan is its power arrangement. Microsoft said the campus would initially operate with a co-located natural-gas generation facility behind the meter, allowing the site to receive dedicated electricity without drawing its opening load from the existing public grid. Chevron separately announced a 20-year power agreement with Microsoft for the West Texas facility. Microsoft said it would fund the new generation and supporting infrastructure, while the power plant and campus could eventually connect to the broader regional grid.
Microsoft also emphasized water conservation. The campus is planned around closed-loop cooling that requires an initial water charge but little additional water during steady-state operation, and the company said it would use non-potable water where possible. In an arid West Texas market, those design choices are not secondary sustainability features; they are fundamental to whether the development can maintain local support.
PowerPlay AI Adds 400 Megawatts to the Abilene Power-First Corridor
The concentration of behind-the-meter development in West Texas expanded again on July 20, when PowerPlay AI announced plans for an initial 400-megawatt AI data center development in the greater Abilene area. The project is being advanced through a joint venture with an unidentified Nasdaq-listed neocloud company and is targeting delivery of its first 400 megawatts of power in 2028.
PowerPlay AI said the joint venture has completed site-feasibility work, infrastructure assessments, land assembly and property acquisition. The partners are now progressing natural-gas service agreements and completing a request-for-proposals process to select an independent power producer. The planned generation would operate behind the meter, supplying electricity directly to the data center rather than depending initially on a conventional utility interconnection.
The company has not disclosed the joint venture partner, the project’s anticipated capital cost, the precise location of the site or whether the initial 400 megawatts represents utility capacity or fully deliverable critical IT load. The announcement should therefore be viewed as an early development milestone rather than a final construction commitment. Nevertheless, PowerPlay AI said the site already benefits from installed natural-gas infrastructure, nearby fiber, assembled land and a location outside an incorporated municipality where conventional municipal zoning restrictions would not apply.
PowerPlay AI’s model also represents another variation of the emerging power-secured development platform. The company is not presenting itself solely as a data center operator. Instead, it aims to transform undeveloped land into energized, construction-ready campuses that can be leased, sold or jointly developed with hyperscalers, neocloud providers and other large computing customers.
The Abilene project joins Microsoft’s Pecos campus in demonstrating how West Texas is becoming a testing ground for gas-powered, behind-the-meter AI infrastructure. The approach may accelerate delivery, but it will also bring greater scrutiny of emissions, fuel-price exposure and the long-term relationship between privately supplied generation and the regional electric grid.
Hut 8 Turns a Texas Campus Into a Contracted Infrastructure Asset
Three days before OpenAI’s Georgia announcement, Hut 8 reported that it had fully commercialized its 1-gigawatt Beacon Point AI data center campus in Nueces County, Texas. The company signed a second 15-year lease covering 352 megawatts of IT capacity, doubling the unnamed investment-grade tenant’s commitment to 704 megawatts. Hut 8 valued the new lease at $9.8 billion over its base term and placed total base-term contract value for the campus at $19.6 billion.
Beacon Point demonstrates how AI campuses are increasingly being underwritten before delivery. Hut 8 said its contracted AI portfolio now totals 949 megawatts of IT capacity supported by 1,330 megawatts of utility capacity, with aggregate base-term contract value of $26.6 billion.
The company expects the first Phase 2 data hall at Beacon Point to be delivered in the second quarter of 2028. That timetable reinforces another pattern in the latest announcements: customers are reserving capacity years before delivery. AI infrastructure demand is being translated into long-duration leases that allow developers to finance construction, electrical equipment and site work well ahead of occupancy.
Kansas City Emerges as a Multi-Gigawatt Market
Digital Realty’s June 22 acquisition of roughly 1,440 acres at Astra Enterprise Park in De Soto, Kansas, marked another major expansion beyond the traditional primary markets. Digital Realty acquired the site for approximately $475 million in cash and common units in its operating partnership and entered into a utility agreement that could provide 600 megawatts by early 2028, rising to 2 gigawatts at full delivery.
The first phase, Astra North, is expected to cover about 280 acres and accommodate nine data center buildings totaling approximately 3 million square feet. Digital Realty estimates that the initial phase could employ more than 1,000 workers at peak construction, while the completed campus could support approximately 250 full-time jobs. The broader site includes the former Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant property, an industrial tract already undergoing redevelopment.
Amazon Builds a New Missouri Cluster and Spends Another $3 Billion in Mississippi
On June 15, Amazon announced a $10 billion data center campus in Montgomery City, Missouri. State officials said the project would create approximately 400 direct jobs, thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in property-tax revenue over 25 years. Amazon also committed more than $7 million to community programs and infrastructure.
The power arrangement was again a central part of the announcement. Amazon and Ameren Missouri said the company would pay 100% of the cost of providing electric service to the campus, including the infrastructure required to connect it to the grid, without incentives or discounted electric rates. Missouri’s large-load tariff framework is designed to prevent data center costs from being shifted to residential and commercial customers.
Amazon also plans to build water infrastructure and transfer the completed system to the local water district. Its related water-efficiency program with Arable Labs is expected to help farmers reduce groundwater withdrawals by 100 million gallons annually. These commitments reflect the new competitive landscape among states: winning a hyperscale campus increasingly requires not only incentives and available land, but credible rules governing utility cost allocation and resource use.
The Missouri project follows Amazon’s Nov. 20, 2025 commitment to invest at least $3 billion in a new Warren County, Mississippi, data center campus serving AI and cloud workloads. Amazon estimated that the project would create at least 200 direct data center jobs, support more than 300 additional full-time-equivalent positions in the region and sustain thousands of construction and supply-chain jobs across the state.
The Warren County campus builds on Amazon’s previously announced $10 billion investment in two Madison County data center campuses. Together, the projects are creating a substantial Mississippi footprint supported by state development programs, regional power infrastructure and a growing construction and operations workforce. Amazon described the Warren County project as the largest private investment in the county’s history and launched a $150,000 community fund supporting STEM education and other local priorities.
The Development Boom Meets Its Limits?
The past 45 days also supplied a warning about projects that fail to maintain political and legal support. On July 2, Blackstone-owned QTS terminated its portion of the Prince William Digital Gateway project in Virginia and withdrew related filings after years of litigation and local opposition. Compass Datacenters had already exited its portion in April. The court fight centered on the county’s rezoning process and public-notice requirements.
The Digital Gateway collapse matters because it occurred in Northern Virginia, the country’s most established data center region. It demonstrates that market demand, capital and proximity to fiber cannot overcome every entitlement failure. Developers now have to treat community consent, procedural compliance and environmental review as schedule-critical inputs alongside substations, transformers and generators.
That reality explains a focus of these announcements. OpenAI’s community compact, Amazon’s ratepayer protections, Microsoft’s behind-the-meter power strategy and the long-term leases signed by Hut 8 are all responses to the same question: what makes a giant project believable?
The gigawatt era has arrived, but the projects most likely to survive it will be those that can prove, from the beginning, exactly who will power them, who will pay for them and who will benefit when they are built.
