PowerBridge Breaks Ground on 2GW-Plus Alpha Digital Campus in Texas

By Marcus Bennett

PowerBridge has broken ground on a multi-gigawatt powered land campus spanning roughly 3,400 acres near Pecos, Texas. The company announced the milestone last week. The project, called Alpha Digital, sits in Reeves County in West Texas and will deliver more than 2GW of new co-located power generation, electrical infrastructure, and fiber conduit. Initial site work began last month.

Who is building it, and how?

PowerBridge was formed last year with a specific mandate: develop large-scale data center campuses on land owned by LandBridge. The company is led by Alex Hernandez, who previously founded and ran Cumulus Data and served as CEO of Talen Energy. The campus sits close to the Waha natural gas hub, which matters for a project built around gas-fired generation.

The structure is a split one. PowerBridge develops the powered campus and supporting infrastructure. Future data center buildings will be developed by other parties and customers. No end-users have been announced so far.

Two partners are involved. Liberty Energy subsidiary Liberty Power Innovations will design, develop, and operate scalable, modular natural gas power generation at the site under a joint venture with PowerBridge. TOPSFiber is handling the fiber side.

What does this change for the timeline and the grid?

The initial phase calls for 300MW of generation capacity, with room to expand. First power is expected in Q4 2027. Deployment continues through the first half of 2028. That is a long lead time, and it tells you the project is betting on demand that arrives late this decade.

The campus has two design features worth noting. It aims to export excess energy to the grid rather than operating as an isolated island. And it plans to use non-potable water for cooling via a closed-loop system, which addresses one of the most common objections to data center builds in dry regions.

Liberty Energy CEO Ron Gusek framed the project in broad terms. He said: "This project represents the convergence of two enormous industries: energy and digital infrastructure."

TOPSFiber struck a similar note in its own post. The company said: "Projects of this magnitude begin long before the first piece of equipment arrives. They take vision, strategic planning, coordination, strong partnerships, and a commitment to excellence at every stage. We're grateful to have been part of this milestone and look forward to the opportunities ahead."

Where does the land come from?

The landholding side of the story runs through LandBridge, a NYSE-listed company formed in 2021 by Five Point Infrastructure, a Texas-based private equity and infrastructure investor. LandBridge owns approximately 320,000 surface acres across Loving, Winkler, Reeves, Pecos, and Andrews Counties in Texas, plus Lea County in New Mexico.

Most of that acreage sits in the Delaware sub-region of the Permian Basin. Five Point Infrastructure was founded in 2012 and holds approximately $8 billion in assets under management across multiple investment funds.

What happens next?

Watch three things. First, whether PowerBridge names anchor tenants for the data center buildings, since none are public yet. Second, whether the 300MW initial phase holds to its Q4 2027 first-power date. Third, how the grid export arrangement takes shape, because selling excess generation changes the economics of the whole campus. The land, the gas, and the financing are in place. The customers are the open question.