Summary
- PowerHouse is planning a 300MW, four-building data-centre campus on roughly 88 acres in Westlake, Texas.
- The developer says it has paid for a 350MW Oncor substation associated with the project.
- Planning and power are advancing together, illustrating how electrical infrastructure is shaping hyperscale site delivery.
PowerHouse Data Centers is planning a 300MW data-centre campus in Westlake, Texas, backed by a 350MW Oncor substation that the developer says it has funded.
Plans filed by engineering consultancy Kimley-Horn cover approximately 87.96 acres at 13580 Denton Highway, near US Highway 377 and Westport Parkway north of Fort Worth. The project is known as the Circle T Data Center.
Site plans show up to four buildings of around 300,000 sq ft each, giving the development roughly 1.2 million sq ft of potential data-centre space. The listed owner is Circle T Owner LP, with representatives from PowerHouse and parent company American Real Estate Partners involved in discussions with local officials.
PowerHouse told Westlake officials it had paid Oncor to bring a 350MW substation to the project without placing the cost on local residents. The infrastructure is expected to serve the data centre while also supporting a town pump station.
The local planning route is being handled in stages. The first data centre is permitted under the site’s existing zoning, while subsequent buildings are expected to require specific-use approval. Westlake’s planning and zoning commission has advanced proposals associated with the scheme.
Substation capacity shapes the site
The electrical commitment is the more consequential part of the filing. A four-building campus can be reconfigured, phased, or redesigned as customer requirements change, but a 350MW power route establishes the basic scale of what the site can ultimately support.
Large data-centre developers are increasingly securing utility infrastructure earlier in the real-estate process because an entitled building without a credible energisation date has limited value to hyperscale customers. Substations, transformers, transmission upgrades, and interconnection studies can determine delivery schedules long before the shell is complete.
PowerHouse’s wider development pipeline reportedly exceeds 8GW, while material presented to Westlake officials listed 11 active and planned Texas projects totalling about 10GW. That scale makes utility coordination and power delivery central to the company’s expansion programme.
Texas has attracted a particularly large pipeline because it combines available land, energy development, and major fibre routes. The volume of proposed load is also creating regulatory pressure around grid impacts, customer cost allocation, water use, and whether requested megawatts represent projects likely to be built.
That increases the value of projects that can show committed infrastructure rather than an early-stage utility request. Funding a dedicated substation gives the Westlake proposal a more tangible power component, although energisation will still depend on Oncor’s delivery programme and the wider network.
The 50MW difference between the data centre’s stated 300MW capacity and the 350MW substation also provides room for site infrastructure and other loads, but the final electrical design has not been disclosed. Nor has PowerHouse named a tenant or provided a detailed construction timetable for all four buildings.
The project therefore remains a development pipeline rather than operating capacity. Its progress will depend on subsequent local approvals, electrical delivery, and customer commitments.
The order of operations is already clear: the developer is advancing real estate, planning, and utility infrastructure together. That increasingly defines hyperscale development — a site becomes commercially useful when the building programme and the power programme can reach the same date.
