The Stargate program's flagship site is taking shape in Taylor County, Texas, where Oracle is developing and operating an eight-building, 1.2-gigawatt campus on roughly 1,000 to 1,100 acres at Lancium's Clean Campus outside Abilene to run OpenAI training and inference workloads. The project was first reported by Industrial Info Resources, with further coverage from Stargate.how, The Compute Wire, and ItechGuides.

Abilene City Council adopted an 85% property-tax abatement for Oracle. The campus broke ground in 2024, two buildings went live in September 2025, early workloads were reported running by July 2025, and Oracle stated that 42% of total capacity had been delivered as of August 5, 2026. The remaining capacity is scheduled for subsequent quarters, with full eight-building completion targeted around 2027.

A planned expansion from 1.2 GW to 2 GW, along with an associated roughly 600 MW add-on, was cancelled in March 2026. An adjacent parcel was reallocated to Microsoft. The core OpenAI-Oracle campus continues to build toward its 1.2 GW target.

Oracle is developing and operating the site under the Stargate AI-infrastructure program, which OpenAI has described as a $400 to $500 billion multi-site initiative. The Abilene campus runs OpenAI training and inference workloads on NVIDIA GB200 systems via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, making it less a conventional colocation or cloud node and more a purpose-built AI supercomputing facility at a scale the United States has not previously attempted in a single location.

The campus interconnects directly to the ERCOT grid, bypassing the regulated-utility queue structures that slow projects in other states. Lancium's flexible-load model means the campus can participate in ERCOT demand-response programs, which matters at 1.2 GW. The NVIDIA GB200 density also changes the mechanical and electrical loading profile relative to conventional hyperscale: these buildings are not interchangeable with a standard cloud shell, and commissioning requires specialists who understand AI-cluster networking, liquid cooling at rack level, and high-density power distribution, all of which are skills in short supply nationally.

Abilene and Taylor County sit in an oil, gas, and power-oriented labor market with deep experience in heavy construction, transmission, and industrial maintenance. That background translates well to data center civil, mechanical, and electrical work, but the conversion is not automatic. Overwatch Mission Critical opened an Abilene operations hub in 2026 explicitly to serve this campus and Project Frontier, signaling that the regional ecosystem is being deliberately built rather than assumed. The nearest major supplemental labor pool is Dallas-Fort Worth, roughly 150 to 180 miles east, but DFW carries intense competing demand from its own hyperscale builds, limiting available surplus. The practical result is a staffing model that blends local energy-sector trades, inbound national mission-critical specialists, and periodic draws from DFW contractors, with training programs converting experienced energy-infrastructure workers into data-center-qualified roles. A campus still under active construction through 2027, with commissioning waves running in parallel, will sustain hiring pressure across multiple disciplines simultaneously. We break down roles, pay bands, and where the talent is in our guide to hiring data center talent in Taylor County, Texas.

Sources: Industrial Info Resources, which first reported the campus details, with additional coverage from Stargate.how, The Compute Wire, ItechGuides, KUT / The Cool Down, Cryptobriefing, and Overwatch Mission Critical.