By Marcus Bennett

Taylor City Council has unanimously approved a 1GW behind-the-meter data center campus, backed by a dedicated 750MW natural gas plant. PowerHouse and Big Watt Digital announced the approval last week for the Taylor Technology Campus, a 664-acre site formerly known as Project Mustang.

The campus sits between FM 112 and US 79, roughly 35 miles (56km) northeast of Austin in Williamson County. First power is targeted for the first half of 2028. The first phase aims to deliver 500MW of capacity.

The project joins a growing list of Texas data center builds that bypass the grid entirely. PowerHouse and Big Watt plan to generate their own electricity on site, a model known as behind-the-meter power.

How will the campus be powered?

A new 750MW natural gas plant will serve the site directly. This means the campus does not depend on incremental grid capacity to run. The developers argue that power access, not land or capital, is now the binding constraint on data center construction.

"By pairing digital infrastructure with dedicated, behind-the-meter power, we are designing for and addressing one of the biggest constraints facing data center development today - access to reliable power - without relying solely on incremental grid capacity," said Alex Hern, co-CEO and co-founder of Big Watt Digital.

Hern framed the approval as proof of the company's core thesis: "The introduction of the Taylor site demonstrates Big Watt and PowerHouse's immediate progress along with what the company was built to do: bring power and digital infrastructure together from the outset to deliver speed, scale and certainty for the AI economy."

The site will use a closed-loop cooling system to reduce water use. No further technical details on the cooling design were disclosed.

Who are PowerHouse and Big Watt?

PowerHouse, founded in 2022, is a division of American Real Estate Partners (AREP). It has data center projects in operation and development across eight states: Virginia, Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. The company says its portfolio and pipeline total more than 8GW of capacity. Investment firm Brookfield recently took a minority stake in AREP.

Big Watt Digital, founded in 2021 and based in Texas, specializes in dedicated behind-the-meter power generation. Its website lists four projects totaling 5GW across three states.

What does this change for the Texas market?

PowerHouse already has a sizable footprint in the state. In March, it topped out a 201MW data center in Irving, Dallas. It is developing a 768-acre campus with Provident Data Centers in Ellis County, just south of Dallas. The firm also looks set to develop on Tract-owned land outside Austin, and it recently filed for a project in Westlake, outside Fort Worth.

The Taylor approval adds a second major central-Texas project to that list. It also signals that behind-the-meter gas generation has moved from concept to permitted reality at the gigawatt scale, at least in a jurisdiction willing to approve it.

The 2028 target gives the developers roughly three years to build the gas plant and the first phase. Whether the schedule holds will test the model's central promise of speed and certainty.