Anthropic's Texas Data Center Bet Collides With a Five-Year Turbine Queue
On October 7, developer Black Chamber Partners filed a $366 million permit with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for a 498,165-square-foot data center building in Cedar Creek, Bastrop County, roughly 26 miles southeast of Austin. The filing, first reported by Data Center Dynamics, names the project "Project Longhorn" and ties it to Anthropic, which is reportedly in talks to lease the capacity. Anthropic, Black Chamber, and power developer Pacifico Energy all declined to comment, so the tenancy is unconfirmed. The construction schedule is not: start November 30, 2026, completion by the end of January 2028.
The economics of the deal run through power, not steel. Pacifico Energy is developing an on-site gas-fired generation facility across the 2,842-acre campus that, at full buildout, is designed to deliver 710 MW of what the filing calls "site-rated redundant power using simple-cycle natural gas turbines," supporting 490 MW of IT load. That is the now-standard behind-the-meter model hyperscalers have adopted to route around interconnection queues — except the turbines themselves have become the queue.
A market quoting 2029 to 2031
GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, and Mitsubishi Power control the overwhelming majority of new large gas-turbine supply, and all three have told investors on recent earnings calls that they have no near-term plans to expand manufacturing capacity. GE Vernova's gas-equipment backlog reached 116 GW in the second quarter of 2026, up from 100 GW the prior quarter, and delivery slots are being quoted as far out as 2031. Roughly 90% of the company's turbine orders are now backlogged. Siemens Energy sold 100 turbines in 2024 and 194 in 2025, with about 60% of recent orders tied directly to data center projects. Global manufacturing capacity sits at roughly 60 to 70 GW a year against total orders exceeding 110 GW — a structural shortfall, not a temporary one.
I think we have to be very thoughtful to make sure that we don't add too much capacity — even though we are starting to sell slots into 2029.
That was GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik on the company's January earnings call, explaining why the manufacturer is deliberately not racing to expand output despite demand that outstrips supply by tens of gigawatts. The logic is rational for a turbine maker that has lived through gas-plant boom-bust cycles before: Strazik and his counterparts at Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Power are each wary of over-building capacity if data center gas demand proves less durable than today's order books assume, and all three can extract premium pricing — reservation fees to hold a production slot are now standard — by simply letting the queue lengthen.
The schedule math that doesn't reconcile
Set Project Longhorn's publicly filed timeline against that backdrop and the gap is hard to miss. A building permitted in October 2026, breaking ground five weeks later, and targeted for completion in January 2028 implies turbines on-site and commissioned within roughly 14 months of groundbreaking — against an industry in which GE Vernova alone is quoting 2029 for new orders and PJM-adjacent projects are being pushed toward 2031. One of three things is likely true: Pacifico Energy locked in turbine delivery positions well before this filing became public, the January 2028 completion date refers to the building shell rather than energized, revenue-generating capacity, or the project is counting on interim grid power while its own generation queues behind everyone else. None of those scenarios were disclosed in the filing, and none of the parties would confirm which applies.
Texas adds a second, independent risk layer. Governor Greg Abbott halted new data-center environmental permits in September 2026 pending an audit of facilities seeking ERCOT interconnection, with the audit due by December. Project Longhorn's own filing suggests the developers are proceeding on the assumption that behind-the-meter generation — power that never touches the ERCOT grid — sidesteps that freeze. If regulators interpret the audit's scope more broadly, or if Pacifico's generation facility needs any grid interconnection for black-start or backup purposes, the turbine queue would not be the binding constraint; the permit freeze would be.
The reality of the situation is that it takes a long time to build gas.
Doug Lewin, CEO of Stoic Energy Consulting, made that point to Latitude Media about gas-fired buildouts generally, and Project Longhorn is a clean test case for it. Anthropic has staked its public credibility on hitting infrastructure commitments on a schedule that increasingly looks set by manufacturers in Schenectady and Munich rather than by its own real estate team. For a company moving toward a public listing and already facing scrutiny over its cash burn, a compute campus that slips a year because of turbine delivery — not financing, not demand — would be a distinctly physical-world failure mode that no model release can paper over.