Houston is a working colocation market, not a land rush.

Why Houston reads differently from every other market on this site

Most of the markets we cover are supply stories. Land is bought, power is queued, and the interesting question is what lands in 2028. Houston is the opposite. Three quarters of its inventory is standing and running, the under-construction count is two, and the operators are the ones who serve enterprises rather than hyperscalers.

That is a function of demand rather than a failure of ambition. Houston's data center requirement comes from energy, engineering, petrochemicals, ports, healthcare and the medical center, and those buyers want cabinets, cages and a few megawatts near their own people. They are not the source of hundred megawatt pre-leases, so the market did not build for them.

What has been announced in Houston

Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below was read on the page it links to.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.

Seismic imaging is why the high density question came here early

Houston has run genuinely dense compute for longer than most markets, because the oil and gas industry has been doing large-scale seismic processing since long before anyone called it AI infrastructure. That history is useful to a buyer: the operators here have real experience with high draw racks, and the honest ones will tell you which halls can take them and which cannot.

It also sets a trap. A facility that handled dense HPC in 2015 is not automatically ready for what a modern GPU deployment does to cooling and power distribution. Ask about the specific hall, the specific cooling loop, and what was retrofitted rather than designed in.

Every Houston facility we track

44 data centers across Houston, from the facility database we hold as a Bridgepointe partner. It is the layer that says whether a building exists yet, which no permit record answers directly.

Operators with the most facilities here: DataBank (5), Serverfarm (5), Data Journey (3), Digital Realty (3), LOGIX Fiber Networks (3), Element Critical (2), Equinix (2), GIGA Energy (2), Sungard Availability Services (2), Switch (2).

Where they cluster: Houston (27), Katy (4), Montgomery (3), Hockley (2), Spring (2), Brazoria (1).

The largest buildings coming to this market

11 facilities here are under construction or planned. These are the ten largest by floor area, and a size on file is not a promise of a delivery date.

From the Signal facility database, which we hold as a Bridgepointe partner rather than as a public record, so these rows carry no filing link and street addresses are held back. A building existing is not the same as space being available in it: every facility above may be full, pre-leased, or closed to your size. Finding out is a call, not a lookup. See how we verify capacity.

What the public construction record shows in Houston

TCEQ air permits filed in Harris County and the surrounding Houston counties. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.

Operators appearing by name: DataBank (2).

The most recent filings on the record

Collected from TCEQ air permit search. A permit proves that construction is happening. It does not prove that space is available, and no public filing anywhere discloses what is contractible at a named building. That answer comes from an operator call, which is the part we do by hand. See how we verify capacity.

Weather is a real diligence item here, and it is answerable

Houston is a Gulf Coast market with hurricane exposure and a well documented flooding history, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. What matters commercially is that the question has specific answers, and that operators who have been through it can give them.

• What is the elevation of the building relative to the 500 year floodplain, and has the map been revised since it was built?
• How many days of fuel are held on site, and what is the refuelling contract during a regional event?
• Where is the fuel stored, and is that location itself above the flood line?
• What actually happened at this building during the last named storm and the last winter event?
• Does the staffing plan assume people can reach the site, and what is the ride-out arrangement if they cannot?

The winter question matters as much as the hurricane one. Texas is on ERCOT, an isolated grid, and the 2021 winter emergency is inside the operating memory of every facility in this market. An operator who answers that question crisply is telling you something about the whole organization.

Where the market is, submarket by submarket

When Houston is the right answer

Houston fits when your users, your equipment or your regulators are on the Gulf Coast, when the requirement is enterprise-sized rather than hyperscale, and when you want space that exists now rather than a phase in 2028. It is also a serious disaster recovery pair for Dallas-Fort Worth, on the same grid but four hours away, which is a different risk profile without a different vendor list.

It is the wrong answer when you need tens of megawatts, when you want deep cloud on-ramp choice, or when hurricane exposure is a board-level objection you cannot win. Dallas has more of everything except proximity to the Gulf Coast, and for most large requirements that trade is the right one.