Amarillo Data Center 2026: Status of Texas’s Largest Planned Campus

What people think: an 11 GW nuclear-powered campus is rising outside Amarillo right now.

The Amarillo data center site has been cleared and permitted, and vertical construction of the first leased building was waiting on a lease that Fermi signed on August 9, 2026. Fermi's 10-Q says preliminary site development began in 2025 and that commercial operations for the first campus are targeted to start in 2027.

KFDA reported on February 6, 2026 that Fermi had paused work at the site near the Pantex plant while it waited for a clean air permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The station reported that 3 million square feet of land had been cleared in a first phase the company said took 150 days.

The permit came through later that month. On February 25, 2026, KFDA reported that the TCEQ had granted final approval for what Fermi called the second-largest Clean Air permit in the country, and that the company would move its gas turbine fleet, six units, from Houston to the Amarillo campus.

The tenant took longer. The Simply Wall St analysis carried by Yahoo Finance on December 14, 2025 reported that Fermi's first prospective anchor tenant had terminated a $150 million advance in aid of construction agreement, with no funds drawn. Fermi's 10-Q describes the TensorWave lease signed on August 9, 2026 as its first customer lease at Project Matador.

What people think: the largest data center in Texas is already operating in the Panhandle.

By planned capacity, Fermi's Project Matador is the largest data center campus announced in Texas that this post could verify, at up to 11 GW of private power and about 15 million square feet. By leased capacity it is a 222 MW project, which is about 2% of the plan.

The arithmetic is ours and the inputs are Fermi's. The 10-Q describes a campus designed for up to 11 GW. The TensorWave lease provides 222 MW of total facility power in a building of approximately 311,496 square feet. That building is about 2% of the planned 15 million square feet, the same share as the power.

TensorWave holds an expansion option for two more buildings that would bring its total to 650 MW, which is about 6% of the plan. Fermi expects approximately $6.5 billion in contracted revenue over the initial 15-year term, excluding renewals and the expansion option.

The plan itself has moved. KFDA's July 2, 2025 report on the announcement gave nearly 6,000 acres and 18 million square feet, and said Texas Tech hoped to have the first data capacity available within a year, which would have been mid-2026. The original plan called for four reactors. The June 30, 2026 filing gives a 5,236-acre site under the Texas Tech University System ground lease and about 15 million square feet, with an expanded footprint of roughly 8,400 acres and up to 17 GW if optioned land and further air permits come through.

What people think: "the Texas Panhandle data center" is one project.

Two large campuses share that search term in 2026. Fermi America's Project Matador sits in Carson County near Amarillo, next to the Pantex plant. Google's campus, developed by Crusoe, sits in Armstrong County near Claude.

The table below compares the two Texas Panhandle data center campuses on developer, tenant, power source, water plan and schedule, using each company's own filings and releases plus Amarillo television coverage.

Crusoe's September 28, 2026 release says the Armstrong County campus broke ground in June 2025 and connects to Serena's Goodnight 1 wind farm, with a second 265.5 MW wind farm, Goodnight 2, under construction. KVII reported on November 24, 2025 that the project sits on 1,300 acres, should finish in late 2028 or early 2029, and is expected to employ 80 to 100 people.

The two builds answer the power question in opposite ways. Fermi is building its own generation and leasing space on a private grid. Google's developer tied the campus to wind farms next door and exports the surplus.

What people think: the money and the tenants are settled, and the only open question is construction speed.

Fermi's schedule depends on dated conditions in its own 10-Q. The TensorWave lease takes effect only at a closing that was expected on or before September 30, 2026, subject to extension, and that closing requires project-level financing. Either party may terminate if the conditions are not met.

As of October 9, 2026, we found no public confirmation that the closing happened. Two other dates sit behind it. The Texas Tech ground lease requires a notice to proceed by December 31, 2026, conditioned on a Phase 1 lease of at least 200 MW. A turbine financing agreement lets the lender market the collateral if Fermi has not signed a 400 MW lease by November 10, 2026.

The balance sheet explains why those dates matter. Fermi reported $62.5 million in cash and $29.2 million in restricted cash at June 30, 2026, down from $408.5 million in cash at December 31, 2025. The filing says conditions raised substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern, and that management concluded its plans alleviated that doubt. Those plans included $431.3 million of convertible notes issued on July 14, 2026.

Leadership and legal exposure changed in the same months. The 10-Q says Lee McIntire became chief executive effective August 11, 2026. It discloses a subpoena received on July 30, 2026 from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and a voluntary document request from the SEC on August 3, 2026, and states that neither contains any allegation of wrongdoing.

Nuclear power is the longest lead item. Fermi now plans to commission one Westinghouse reactor unit in each of 2033, 2034, 2035 and 2036, which it describes as about a year later than its earlier plan for the first unit. In July 2026 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged receipt of the company's draft environmental impact statement.

Water was decided earlier. KVII reported on October 29, 2025 that the Amarillo City Council voted 4-1 to sell Fermi up to 2.5 million gallons per day at twice the rate other industries pay. Fermi's water subsidiary has since signed six groundwater leases covering about 5,227 acres in Carson County, each with a 30-year initial term.

What people think: a giant data center in Texas will strain the power a Houston office depends on.

A Houston office does not share a grid path with Fermi's Amarillo campus. Project Matador is designed around private on-site generation supplemented by about 200 MW from Southwestern Public Service, the Panhandle utility. Houston offices take power from the ERCOT grid over CenterPoint lines.

The large-load growth that touches Houston is in Houston. ERCOT's Batch Zero update to its board on September 14 and 15, 2026 listed Harris County with 5,672 MW of large-load base load, second in the state behind Dallas County at 5,713 MW. That is roughly 25 times the 222 MW Fermi has under lease, and it sits on the same grid as an office in Katy or Sugar Land. Google's Armstrong County campus does draw from ERCOT, per County Judge Adam Ensey, but it is tied to wind farms next door and exports its surplus.

Houston does have a physical link to the project. KFDA reported that Fermi's first six gas turbines were in Houston before the move to the Amarillo campus. The equipment passed through here. The electrons will not.

We field a version of this question often from owners who read a data center headline and ask whether to buy a generator. For most offices of 10 to 200 people, the outage worth planning for is a Gulf storm or a local feeder fault, and the plan is a battery that covers a short outage, a second internet path, and backups stored away from the coast. The Texas data center boom and Houston IT covers the statewide picture.

CinchOps is a managed IT services provider based in Katy, Texas, serving small and mid-sized businesses across the Houston metro area. CinchOps specializes in cybersecurity, network security, managed IT support, VoIP, and SD-WAN for businesses with 10 to 200 employees.

None of the dates in Fermi's filing are yours to manage. These are.

• Through managed IT support, help desk requests are answered in under 15 minutes by an engineer who knows the network.
• Business continuity and disaster recovery keeps backups geo-redundant and outside the Gulf Coast flood zone.
• SD-WAN runs across redundant service providers, such as 5G data and Starlink, alongside the primary line.
• Cybersecurity includes 24/7 threat monitoring.
• Local coverage for Houston, Katy and Sugar Land, with industry practices for oil and gas, energy services and utilities and engineering firms.

The Amarillo data center will be worth watching through the November and December 2026 deadlines, and this page will be updated when Fermi files again. Your own uptime should not wait on anyone's filing. If you want a second set of eyes on your outage plan, talk to CinchOps.