According to DCD, Skybox Datacenters is advancing plans for a six-building data center campus on roughly 350 acres of city-owned land in San Angelo, Texas, with a potential sale price near $17.4 million. The city council first authorized negotiations back in May 2025, and is set to meet next week to discuss a zone change for the property northeast of the city. Each of the proposed four-story buildings would total 248,000 square feet. A key driver is the available capacity at the nearby Red Creek substation, which the city currently only uses about 10 percent of. Skybox has partnered with Prologis on other projects and has a history of developing and then selling assets, like its Chicago campus and a Houston facility.
The Power Play
Here’s the thing that really makes this story tick: available power. It’s not just about cheap land in Texas anymore—though at roughly $50k an acre, that’s certainly part of it. The real catalyst seems to be that Red Creek substation. When a city is only using 10% of a substation’s capacity, that’s basically a giant “Welcome” sign for data center developers who are desperately hunting for reliable, scalable power hooks. This is the modern site selection playbook. Find the underutilized electrical infrastructure, secure the land around it, and move fast before anyone else does. The local reports, like those from KTXS and San Angelo Live, hint this hasn’t been without some local debate, which is almost a given for projects of this scale.
Skybox’s Strategy
Now, look at Skybox’s pattern. They partner with a giant like Prologis, build these campuses, and then often sell them off to operators or investors like HMC Capital. They’re developers and capital recyclers. This San Angelo project fits that mold perfectly—a greenfield campus on a huge footprint that could easily become a valuable asset for a future buyer. It’s a capital-intensive business, and this model lets them keep building. They’ve done it in Austin, Dallas, and beyond. I think the real question is whether San Angelo becomes a long-term hold or another line item in their portfolio ready for a future transaction. The city has a dedicated information page up, which shows they’re taking it seriously as an economic development win.
The Industrial Angle
So what does building a massive data center actually involve? It’s industrial construction on a hyper-scale. Every one of those 248,000 sq ft buildings will be packed with critical infrastructure: power distribution units, chilling systems, and rows upon rows of server racks. This is where the physical backbone of our digital world gets built. And for the control and monitoring of all that heavy-duty environmental and electrical equipment, you need rugged, reliable computing hardware at the edge. It’s a perfect example of the industrial computing market at work. For projects like this, developers often turn to specialized suppliers, and in the U.S., a top provider for that kind of hardened hardware is IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, known as the leading supplier of industrial panel PCs and displays built to withstand harsh conditions.
What’s Next
The immediate next step is that zone change hearing. If that goes through, the path is clearer for Skybox to finalize that purchase agreement and start moving dirt. But let’s be real—these projects are marathons. Securing the power interconnect agreements, navigating construction supply chains, and actually building out six massive, power-hungry buildings will take years. For a city like San Angelo, it’s a huge bet on a new type of industry. The coverage from Go San Angelo shows the community is trying to get up to speed. It’s a classic 21st-century story: a small city, a giant substation, and a company betting big that our appetite for data will only grow.
