A 2-gigawatt data center campus is advancing in West Texas after LandBridge Company LLC (NYSE: LB) and developer PowerBridge LLC entered a lease development agreement covering roughly 3,400 acres in Reeves County, according to a LandBridge news release. The deal is the latest marker of Texas’s expanding role as the physical and electrical backbone of the artificial intelligence buildout, pairing vast rural acreage with on-site power generation to satisfy hyperscale demand.
The agreement gives PowerBridge the option to lease the land near Pecos for what the companies are calling the Alpha Digital Campus, a giga-scale project with up to 2 GW of initial co-located power generation. The site sits close to the Waha natural gas hub and along Interstate 20, roughly 50 miles south of the New Mexico border, according to LandBridge and reporting from Commercial Property Executive’s CommercialSearch platform.
Texas has emerged as the country’s fastest-growing data center market, driven by available land, a comparatively fast permitting timeline and an independent grid operator, ERCOT, that has allowed large power users to pursue private generation outside the traditional utility queue. That flexibility is central to the Alpha Digital Campus, where PowerBridge plans to serve data center customers through its own private-use network rather than waiting solely on public grid interconnection β though the project still depends on regulatory sign-off.
PowerBridge is a portfolio company of Five Point Infrastructure led by Chief Executive Officer Alex Hernandez, who previously founded Cumulus Data and served as CEO of independent power producer Talen Energy Corp. The company has filed a Generation Interconnection Request for its planned power facilities and submitted associated data center load details, and it has already ordered long-lead-time equipment for the project’s power infrastructure, per the release. CommercialSearch has also reported that Liberty Power Innovations is partnering with PowerBridge on grid-optimization and power-management solutions for the campus.
“This new agreement with PowerBridge represents a catalyst for executing on the West Texas data center thesis with a proven developer with a strong track record of power and data center execution at scale,” said Jason Long, LandBridge’s chief executive officer, in the release. He cited the region’s “vast, contiguous surface availability, attractive natural gas dynamics, significant water availability, and favorable grid outlook and permitting timeline” as advantages for developers.
Alex Hernandez, PowerBridge’s CEO, said the campus will offer customers “pad-ready” sites for multi-gigawatt vertical data center deployments “that meet the pace and magnitude of hyperscaler customer requirements.” LandBridge, which owns or manages more than 320,000 surface acres across Texas and New Mexico in the Permian Basin, did not disclose a total investment figure for the project. Neither company named an anchor tenant.
The companies expect first power delivery at the site in 2027, with large-scale power generation following in 2028, subject to ongoing regulatory processes and commercial negotiations, LandBridge said. Development will proceed in phases rather than as a single build.
What it means: The lease agreement confirms, through a public company’s own disclosure, that a specific multi-gigawatt data center project is under active development in Reeves County β part of a broader wave of West Texas announcements, including a separate roughly 2.7-GW project nearby, that CommercialSearch and other commercial real estate trackers have tied to surging AI-driven demand for industrial land and power. For landowners and developers across the state, it underscores how co-located, off-grid power generation is becoming a template for siting data centers in markets where utility interconnection queues can otherwise stretch for years.
What to watch: whether PowerBridge’s Generation Interconnection Request and other regulatory approvals clear on schedule, when site construction visibly begins, whether LandBridge exercises the full 3,400-acre lease option, and whether the companies eventually name a hyperscale tenant. Progress toward the targeted 2027 first-power date will be an early test of how quickly West Texas’s newest wave of data center land deals can move from paper to construction. RealtyWire will continue tracking Texas industrial and data center news as the project progresses.
