From Frontera to Stargate: Texas becomes an AI compute state

The academic line

The Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin set out a three-system roadmap in early 2024: Frontera as the incumbent NSF leadership-class machine, Vista as a bridge system, and Horizon as the future flagship. Vista, TACC's first hybrid CPU-GPU production system, came online on 4 September 2024, expanding AI and machine learning capacity ahead of Horizon.

Horizon is planned as the centrepiece of the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility and has been described as the largest academic supercomputer in the country. Installation has begun; members should treat published completion dates as provisional until TACC confirms production status.

“Academic and commercial compute now draw on the same isolated grid and compete for the same engineers.”

The commercial line

On 22 July 2025 Oracle and OpenAI agreed to develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts of Stargate capacity nationally as part of a reported $30 billion per year cloud agreement. On 23 September 2025 OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announced five new Stargate sites, including one in Milam County in Central Texas, within a stated push toward a $500 billion, 10-gigawatt commitment. On 30 September 2025 Crusoe's Stargate campus at Abilene in Taylor County went live on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with the first two buildings operating and six more planned.

Capacity figures for Abilene circulating publicly — in the range of hundreds of megawatts of IT load rising toward roughly a gigawatt, with capital costs estimated in the tens of billions — come from third-party modelling rather than company disclosure, and vary widely between analysts. On 14 November 2025 Google announced a $40 billion investment in three new Texas data centers; precise site locations were not detailed in the announcement.

• 4 Sept 2024 — TACC's Vista enters production; Horizon installation begins.
• 22 July 2025 — Oracle and OpenAI agree a further 4.5GW of Stargate capacity.
• 23 Sept 2025 — Milam County named among five new Stargate sites.
• 30 Sept 2025 — Stargate Abilene goes live on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• 14 Nov 2025 — Google announces $40bn for three new Texas data centers.

The shared constraint

ERCOT is an interconnection largely isolated from the rest of the country, which means Texas absorbs its own load growth. Every gigawatt of AI campus load is a decision about generation, transmission and, during summer peaks, demand response. Academic and commercial systems draw on the same grid and increasingly compete for the same electrical and mechanical engineers.

ACS advises members involved in siting decisions to publish honest load forecasts to interconnection processes and to treat curtailment commitments as engineering obligations rather than negotiating positions. A commitment that cannot be executed under real conditions transfers risk to households on the same feeder.