Wichita Falls City Council has approved a rezoning request for a data center development in Texas.
Located in the north of Wichita Falls, the 227 acres close to Kiel Lane, City View Drive, and the Northwest Freeway will be rezoned from residential to light industrial after the council voted unanimously in favor.
First reported by Times Record News and Texomas Home Page, the developer - Mark Calvano of Calvano Development - aims to create a hyperscale data center for use by a single tenant, which he suggests would be appropriate for the likes of Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Google, or Amazon.
Wichita Falls is a city, and the county seat of Wichita County, in Nothern Texas. It is close to the border with Oklahoma, between Oklahoma City and Dallas Fort Worth.
The land in question is adjacent to an Oncor facility, a transmission and distribution electric utility in Texas. Calvano noted this was an intentional choice, telling the council "We’re proposing a data center, and a data center can’t go anywhere. It has to go in a specific location. The closer it is to a substation, the better off it is."
The data center planned will be a single-story building up to 45 feet tall, and will also feature battery storage units that cost around $1 million each. Calvano estimates the total project could reach 2.3 million sq ft (213,677 sqm) of data center space.
The battery storage units will enable the facility to use energy from the grid "when it's inexpensive" and sell it back at other times. Calvano added: “When there’s a brownout, these batteries come online. And they sell power back.”
The maximum amount of electricity available to the site is 300MW, unless it is supplemented with onsite solar.
A timeline for development was not offered, by Calvano noted that it would be done in a "phased" approach.
Wichita Falls Chamber of Commerce CEO, Ron Kitchens, estimated that the project would bring around $1 billion to the city in taxes, and could require 2,000 workers per million sq ft during the construction phase.
Earlier this year a new build-to-suit (BTS) data center provider announced that it was also seeking to develop in Wichita Falls. DataNovaX is seeking to build on land off I-44 Central E. Freeway and Hwy 287 on Airport Drive next to Sheppard Air Force Base.
Most of Texas' data center market is centered around the Dallas-Fort Worth area. San Antonio, Houston, and Austin also have a notable data center presence.
