The site checklist.

Site selection for a Texas data center is risk retirement in a specific order. Power first, because it is the constraint everything else waits on; then fuel, land, water, fiber, permits, incentives, people, and weather. A good site is not the one with the best average score — it is the one where the most items on this list are already done.

Power path first

Before anything else, establish how electrons reach the racks and when. A grid-served site lives or dies on its interconnection queue position — real, documented, and studied, not merely requested. A behind-the-meter site lives or dies on its generation plan: fuel, permits, equipment, and contract. Either answer can work. No answer, or a vague one, disqualifies the site regardless of everything below, because every other line item is decoration on a site that can't be powered. Pressure-testing a provider's claims is its own discipline — see evaluating a BTM provider.

Gas and land

If the power plan is behind-the-meter, the fuel supply is part of the site: firm, contracted gas with physical deliverability, on terms as long as the power commitment. Land control should be equally hard — owned or long-term leased, with acreage for the full buildout, not just phase one. "Under negotiation" is not control. West Texas is attractive on both counts, which is why stranded Permian gas anchors projects like Power Foundry.

Water, cooling, and fiber

Cooling strategy determines water demand, and water is a genuinely local question in Texas — rights, aquifers, districts. A site pitched without a cooling design is a site with an unpriced liability. Fiber is the quieter sibling: route diversity and latency to the metros that matter. Neither kills a deal as often as power does, but both surface late and expensively when skipped early.

Permits and incentives

Air permits for on-site generation are the schedule gate — issued beats pending, and pending beats planned, because agency review runs on the agency's clock and cannot be bought forward. Incentives run on the opposite clock: they are negotiable, but mostly before commitment, so the incentive conversation — sales-tax programs, local property-tax agreements, the value-limitation framework for the largest projects — belongs inside diligence, not after closing. Both areas require current-rules advice from counsel and incentive advisors; the programs' shapes are stable, but their details move.

Workforce, weather, and hazard

Construction at this scale needs trades in volume within driving distance, and operations need a permanent team willing to live near the site — worth verifying against the actual labor market, not assumed. Weather and hazard exposure — heat, wind, hail, and the rare deep freeze — belongs in the design basis, the redundancy math, and the insurance conversation rather than in a footnote. None of these items usually decides a site alone. Together they decide whether the schedule survives contact with reality, which is the only score that matters.

About Corley Energy

Corley Energy is a behind-the-meter independent power producer, founded in 2024 by Jake Corley, Tim Bozeman, and Mark Meyer. We convert stranded Permian Basin natural gas into firm, contracted electricity for AI data centers at Power Foundry, our ~1,000-acre development in Upton County, Texas. Start with what a power foundry is, see the company facts, or check current capacity on the Sites page.

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The JETI Act and Texas power generation · Evaluating a firm gas supply agreement · Natural gas power generation in West Texas · Browse the full library