Project dossier · Abilene (Taylor County), Texas

Stargate Abilene Approved

The flagship Stargate site, built by Crusoe on Lancium's Clean Campus - the most complete Stargate location, with roughly four of eight buildings operational (~0.3 GW live) as of mid-2026. OpenAI and Oracle capped the site at 1.2 GW in March 2026, dropping further expansion amid grid-interconnection delays exceeding a year. Power is a mix of on-site natural gas and grid supply.

Key facts

Operator
Crusoe
Owner
OpenAI / Oracle / SoftBank (Stargate)
Tenant
OpenAI / Oracle
Size
1,200 MW
Location
Abilene (Taylor County), Texas
Stage today
Approved

Source
read 2026-08-07

What to do next

Next step: Approved — pivot from stopping it to a binding CBA: enforceable caps on noise, water and cost, plus a community benefit.

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What has happened so far (24 events)

  • 2021-12-21incentive
    Taylor County Commissioners approved a Chapter 312 tax abatement for Lancium's $2.4 billion 'Project Artemis' data center campus, the largest project in Abilene/Taylor County history, starting at 200 MW with a goal to expand to 1 GW. · source
  • 2024-07-18announcement
    Crusoe and Lancium announced a partnership to build an initial 200 MW AI data center at the Lancium Clean Campus near Abilene, with plans to expand to 1.2 GW; two buildings totaling 980,000 square feet were expected to be energized in 2025. · source
  • 2024-11-19announcement
    The Development Corporation of Abilene, City of Abilene and Taylor County announced Crusoe's 998,000-square-foot data center at Lancium's Clean Campus, a combined estimated $3.4 billion investment on about 90 leased acres, to be leased to a Fortune 100 tenant in 2025. · source
  • 2025-01-21announcement
    At the White House on January 21, 2025, Trump announced the Stargate joint venture (OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank) with up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure investment; Time reported construction had already begun on the Abilene, Texas data center that will house part of Stargate. · source
  • 2025-02-05hearing
    The Abilene City Council held a public hearing on a second 20-year tax abatement for Lancium covering 940.89 acres, abating 85% of tax liability while retaining 15%, projected to return $70-90 million to Abilene taxpayers over the term. · source
  • 2025-02-11hearing
    Taylor County residents raised concerns at a commissioners meeting about Lancium's tax breaks, citing energy viability, environmental hazards from heavy metals, and questioning whether Lancium should be classified as a data center rather than an energy grid; the final agreement vote was set for February 25. · source
  • 2025-02-13vote
    The Abilene City Council voted to approve the amended tax abatement agreement for Lancium, with Mayor Weldon Hurt stating the data center would use less than 1% of Abilene's daily water consumption. · source
  • 2025-03-18construction
    Crusoe announced it had begun second-phase construction at the Lancium Clean Campus, expanding the Abilene site to eight buildings, about 4 million square feet and 1.2 gigawatts, targeting completion by mid-2026. · source
  • 2025-03-24financing
    Crusoe secured 4.5 GW of natural gas power through a joint venture with Engine No. 1, including seven GE Vernova turbines acquired by Engine No. 1 and Chevron to generate behind-the-meter power for AI data centers including Abilene. · source
  • 2025-05-21financing
    Crusoe, Blue Owl Capital and Primary Digital Infrastructure announced the second phase of a $15 billion joint venture to fund the 1.2 GW Abilene campus, jointly sponsoring construction of six new buildings; a JPMorgan-led consortium provided a $7.1 billion construction loan. · source
  • 2025-07-17filing
    As of July 2025, Oracle was contesting Taylor County's roughly $200 million appraised valuation of the first phase of the Abilene data center, despite already holding an 85% property tax abatement. · source
  • 2025-09-29announcement
    OpenAI and partners announced five new Stargate data center sites (including in Milam and Shackelford counties, Texas), with the Abilene flagship campus described as already running and delivering NVIDIA GB200 racks, as part of a pipeline totaling nearly 7 GW. · source
  • 2025-09-30operational
    Crusoe announced the first phase of the Abilene campus is live and running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with Oracle having begun delivering NVIDIA GB200 racks in June 2025. · source
  • 2025-11-18construction
    Crusoe topped out the eighth and final building at the Abilene Stargate campus, acknowledging 7,000 tradespeople who contributed; the full campus encompasses approximately 4 million square feet with 1.2 GW total power capacity. · source
  • 2025-12-22coverage
    Crusoe's Abilene AI data center won 'North American Data Center Project of the Year' at the 2025 DCD Global Awards, cited for rapid 12-month modular delivery and direct-to-chip liquid cooling at 1.2 GW scale. · source
  • 2026-01-26coverage
    Texas Standard reported the $3.5 billion Stargate campus had about 6,000 construction workers on site, received an 85% property tax abatement over 10 years, and was expected to create roughly 300 permanent jobs upon completion. · source
  • 2026-02-04coverage
    Time reported Abilene's average monthly rent had risen to $2,395 (up about $1,000 year-over-year), the Abilene Housing Authority documented a pre-existing deficit of approximately 5,600 housing units exacerbated by the Stargate worker influx, and voucher placement rates had dropped from 80% to about 50%. · source
  • 2026-03-01news
    In March 2026 OpenAI and Oracle capped the Abilene site at 1.2 GW, dropping expansion plans amid grid delays of more than a year; later buildings have run behind their permitted schedules. · source
  • 2026-03-05coverage
    KTXS reported Lancium and Crusoe executives briefed Abilene city leaders that construction on the roughly 4-million-square-foot, eight-building campus will run through the first quarter of 2027, with about 9,000 craft workers on site daily and a closed-loop liquid-cooling design. · source
  • 2026-03-27announcement
    Crusoe announced a new 900 MW AI factory campus adjacent to the existing Abilene site to support Microsoft, with two buildings (each 336 MW critical IT) and a 900 MW on-site power plant, bringing total projected Abilene capacity to 2.1 GW; site prep was already underway with the first building expected energized mid-2027. · source
  • 2026-04-08financing
    Speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Abilene, Lancium CEO Michael McNamara said the site is fully financed long-term, citing a 15-year Oracle lease and a 20-year Microsoft lease, per KTXS. · source
  • 2026-06-04protest
    Local outlet KEYJ reported that Abilene residents launched a 'Save Abilene' website to organize opposition, citing concerns about housing costs, infrastructure strain, water usage, electric demand, and tax incentives relative to community benefits. · source
  • 2026-06-17report
    Distilled Earth reported that Crusoe's third and fourth Abilene buildings, begun in March 2025 and permitted for completion by March 2026, were still not online as of June 2026; Crusoe's CEO disclosed costs of $19.2 billion per GW including gas plants, and the site experienced multi-day winter outages from power and cooling equipment failures. · source
  • 2026-08-12coverage
    KUT/Texas Public Radio reported the Stargate build has driven an Abilene housing crisis, with average monthly rents near $2,600 (up roughly 50% year over year), about 9,000 construction workers on site, and about 1,000 permanent jobs expected once operational. · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (0 filed · 11 places to look)

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

  • EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 32.450, -99.730 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
  • EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
  • EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Recent news

13 stories tracked since 2026-05-29 across 8 outlets. 12× A community is pushing back on a nearby data center. 1× Water use for cooling is straining the local supply. Most recent: “OpenAI data center constructed in Abilene, Texas” (The Lufkin Daily News, 2026-09-30).

+1 more on the story tracker.

Automated news aggregation, not human-verified — follow each link to the original outlet. Part of the story tracker, 13 headlines archived.

Around here

Other tracked projects in Texas

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “Stargate Abilene”, aigridwatch.com/projects/stargate-abilene-tx, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).

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