While Abilene's Stargate and Meta's Louisiana campus soak up the national headlines, an $18.7 billion AI campus has been quietly rising 90 minutes east of Dallas since February 2025 — and most of the construction industry still hasn't heard of it.
The Matrix Data Center Campus in Sulphur Springs is one of the largest active private construction programs in Texas: 1,677 secured acres in Hopkins County, a planned 30 identical data center buildings, 3 gigawatts of IT capacity, and roughly 7,000 construction jobs at peak. The first building is targeted to come online in Q4 2026 — which puts the heavy trades on site right now.
What happened
Houston-area developer MSB Global Services broke ground on Phase I in February 2025 under a public-private partnership with the City of Sulphur Springs and Hopkins County. By October 2025, local reporting confirmed sitework and vertical construction underway. The company's own program documents describe a $18.7 billion buildout delivered in three phases, with the first 500,000-square-foot AI building and its initial on-site power generation targeted for operation in Q4 2026.
Unlike the hyperscaler-owned megaprojects, Matrix is a developer-led campus: MSB Global is building the shells, the power, and the campus infrastructure, with AI tenants taking capacity as buildings deliver.
Project scope
The design choice that matters most for contractors is uniformity. The campus is laid out as 30 identical 100 MW buildings — a modular, repeat-design program rather than a single monolith. Local reporting describes each building as roughly double the footprint of a Costco.
Repeat-design campuses change the construction math:
- Crews compound efficiency. The concrete, steel, and MEP packages on building 8 are the same as building 3. Contractors who win early packages and perform are positioned for years of repeat work.
- Procurement runs in trains. Generators, switchgear, chillers, and fuel cells are ordered in fleet quantities, which means the schedule is exposed to equipment lead times more than design changes.
- Phase I alone is a major program: the first phase plans eight 100 MW buildings — 800 MW, more than most entire data center markets held five years ago.
Construction cost and investment
The announced program value is $18.7 billion, which works out to roughly $6.2 million per MW of IT capacity across the 3 GW campus — inside the range documented in our data center cost breakdown once on-site generation is included. County and city officials cite more than $100 million per year in tax revenue at buildout, alongside 1,500 permanent jobs.
The power strategy is a major share of that capital. Phase I runs on a Bloom Energy fuel-cell microgrid, with a geothermal microgrid planned in Phase II — an on-site generation approach that avoids the multi-year interconnection queues that stall grid-served campuses (the same constraint that has frozen data center construction in markets like Dublin).
Permits and approvals
The project operates under a flagship public-private partnership agreement with the City of Sulphur Springs and Hopkins County, which cleared the way for the February 2025 groundbreaking. Individual building permits are issued locally as phases advance — Sulphur Springs is a home-rule city, so the permit trail runs through the city's development services rather than a state portal. Texas's data center tax incentive program applies to qualifying campuses of this scale.
Who's building it
MSB Global Services leads the development and construction program itself. No third-party general contractor has been publicly named — a meaningful difference from hyperscaler projects where the GC roster (Holder, Turner, DPR, Mortenson) is usually public. For subcontractors, that means the buyer of trade packages is the developer's construction organization, and vendor registration runs through MSB Global directly. The company has held on-site open houses for local and regional contractors — a signal that trade procurement is active.
Schedule and construction status
- February 2025 — Phase I groundbreaking
- October 2025 — sitework and first-building construction confirmed underway
- Q4 2026 — first 500,000-sq-ft building and initial power generation targeted online
- Through 2028 — Phase I's eight buildings (800 MW) deliver; Phase II (geothermal microgrid) follows
- 2028–2029 — full 30-building, 3 GW buildout targeted (company materials point to 2029; some local reporting says end of 2028)
That is an aggressive curve: roughly one 100 MW building delivered every six to eight weeks at peak. Sustaining it requires stacked crews across multiple buildings simultaneously — the labor profile looks less like a construction project and more like a production line.
Power and infrastructure
The islanded microgrid strategy is the project's defining construction feature. Fuel cells arrive as manufactured modules, but they still require pads, fuel infrastructure, switchgear buildings, and extensive medium-voltage distribution — electrical scope that runs parallel to the data halls rather than after them. Phase II's geothermal component would add drilling and well-field construction, a trade mix almost no data center campus in the country currently employs.
Contractor opportunity
With ~7,000 construction jobs at peak and a repeat-design program running into 2029, Matrix is one of the deepest sustained trade opportunities in the Texas market:
- Concrete and civil — 30 building pads plus campus roads and utility corridors on 1,677 acres
- Structural steel and precast — repeated identical frames, ideal for fabricators who can hold a production slot
- Electrical — the largest package by value: microgrid distribution, switchgear, generators, and 30 data halls of fit-out (what electricians need to know)
- Mechanical — high-density AI cooling across every building (liquid cooling is changing the build)
Procurement status: MSB Global has not published a formal bid calendar; interested subs should register directly with the developer. No packages appear on public bid boards — this is private work, the kind tracked on our private bid board when posted.
Why this matters
Sulphur Springs is the clearest example yet of the data center boom escaping the established markets. Hopkins County is not Loudoun County or the Atlanta corridor — it's a rural county seat of 16,000 people absorbing one of the ten largest private construction programs in the country. The local trades pool cannot staff 7,000 positions, which means traveling crews, per-diem packages, and workforce housing — the same dynamics reshaping data center construction wages nationally.
What happens next
Watch for the Q4 2026 first-building energization — hitting or missing that date will signal whether the 2028–2029 full-buildout target is real. Phase II's geothermal microgrid decision is the other marker: if MSB Global proceeds, it adds a drilling program unlike anything else in the market. We track every major filing in our data center permit tracker and the broader map of where every major data center is being built.
Sources and methodology
Facts above are drawn from MSB Global Services' published program materials and press kit, contemporaneous local reporting (KLTV, KETK, Construction Equipment Guide), and third-party project trackers, each linked in the fact box. Cost-per-MW math is Buildermuse analysis. Where sources conflict (final buildout year) or are silent (design team, third-party GCs), the fact box says so rather than guessing.
