Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Two AI campuses in Texas and Ohio seek three-quarters of the power US data centers averaged in 2025
Campuses in Texas and Ohio are pursuing up to 27 gigawatts between them, against an average draw of about 36 gigawatts for all US data centers in 2025. For buyers of that capacity, the open budget line is the new-generation cost Indiana lawmakers want developers to share.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- Meta alone has 21 data centers under construction, among them 1-gigawatt campuses in Lebanon, Indiana, and El Paso, Texas.
- US data centers used nearly 40% of the world's data-center electricity in 2025, more than all of Australia used that year, according to the Energy Institute.
- Berkeley Lab projects data centers will use 11.8% of US electricity by 2030, up from about 4.4% in 2023.
- New York has temporarily paused construction of new large-scale AI data centers.
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Why it matters
- cost If Indiana writes Soliday's risk-sharing demand into rules, developers carry part of the cost of new generation, and that cost is likely to reach tenants' contract prices.
- constraint Capacity budgets for 2026 and 2027 can count only on first phases, because the multi-gigawatt totals are scheduled in stages through 2028.
- exposure A state pause like New York's can stop new large builds outright, so capacity plans tied to sites in one state carry that state's political risk.
- decision Public investment figures span about $1.5 billion to $10 billion per gigawatt, so a per-gigawatt budget has to come from a developer's own terms.
The board-deck version of this story compares two campuses with a national total. A Texas campus is pursuing up to 17 gigawatts and an Ohio campus up to 10 [2][3], while US data centers as a whole used about 313 terawatt-hours in 2025 [6]. Both campuses are on Business Insider's list of US projects of at least 1 gigawatt that have broken ground [1]. Spread over the 8,760 hours in a year, 313 terawatt-hours is an average draw of about 36 gigawatts [1]. The two campuses are sized at roughly three-quarters of that [3]. Business Insider's rule of thumb is about 835,000 average American homes per gigawatt supplied for a year [4]. On that basis the Texas site alone equals some 14 million homes [4].
That version is incomplete because it sets a ceiling beside an average. Business Insider's verbs for the two campuses are "pursuing" and "aiming" [2][3], and a capacity figure is the most a site could draw. A skeptic would say the large figures are ambitions. The answer is that these sites exist but arrive in stages. Project Freebird is a 1.2-gigawatt Stargate campus in Milam County, Texas, being built by SoftBank-backed SB Energy. It expects its first phase by October and further phases through 2028 [13]. Meta's 1-gigawatt campus in Lebanon, Indiana, broke ground in early 2026 and is due in early 2028 [11].
The public dollar figures are too far apart to give a cost per gigawatt. Meta's Lebanon site is a $10 billion, 1-gigawatt project [11]. Freebird's total investment is expected at $1.8 billion to $3 billion for 1.2 gigawatts [13], or about $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion per gigawatt [5]. Google's Fort Wayne campus is a $2 billion project expected to need up to 1.2 gigawatts at full build-out [14]. Meta's El Paso site originally called for $1.5 billion and later rose to $10 billion, about 6.7 times the first figure [12][6]. Business Insider does not say what each figure includes.
A budget also needs a line for who pays for the generation these sites require. Some Indiana politicians have raised concern about the power the Fort Wayne campus needs and who will foot the energy bill [14]. "If companies want to build a data center here, and we have to build new power generation for them, then they need to share in that risk," Indiana Rep. Ed Soliday, a Republican, told Business Insider [15]. Residents across Indiana have urged state lawmakers to regulate the industry [11]. In Texas and Utah, residents have objected over noise and property values [7]. Pew counts more than 3,000 operating US data centers and over 1,500 under development, mostly in rural areas [5].
A company contracting AI capacity this quarter faces a trade-off between securing a site early and knowing what its host state will charge for new power. OpenAI made the early choice in Ohio, where it has contracted most of the planned capacity [3]. I'd expect any generation cost a state assigns to developers to reach the tenants who signed first. In Indiana, the terms so far amount to concern from some politicians and one legislator's demand that developers share the risk [14][15].
What to watch
- Whether Indiana lawmakers turn Ed Soliday's risk-sharing demand into rules for large new electricity loads.
- Whether Project Freebird's first phase is finished by October, the first test of a phased gigawatt schedule on the list.
- How long New York's pause on new large-scale AI data centers lasts, and whether another state adopts one.