What Does the Skybox Data Center Mean for Wichita Falls Home Prices and Rent?

A Wichita Falls Business Park site that sat quiet for years is about to become the biggest industrial project in the city’s history. Skybox Datacenters is building a large-scale data center campus here called PowerCampus Texas, and city leaders say it could double or triple the local tax base once it’s fully built out. I was in the room at the Chamber of Commerce State of the Economy event when this was announced, and I’ve spent the weeks since digging into what it actually means for the people I work with every day: buyers, sellers, renters, and investors across Wichita Falls, Burkburnett, and Iowa Park.

This isn’t a hype piece. It’s the same disciplined breakdown I’d walk a client through before they make a decision on one of the largest financial assets they own.

What Is Skybox PowerCampus Texas?

Skybox PowerCampus Texas is a data center campus being developed on roughly 225 acres inside the Wichita Falls Business Park, with the potential to grow to around 300 acres and up to 2 million square feet of space across multiple buildings. The company purchased the land from the city for more than $14.5 million, and city officials have called it the largest industrial announcement in Wichita Falls history.

The first building is planned at about 150,000 square feet, with a target of being operational by late 2028. If the full campus gets built out over time, Skybox has said the site could eventually support several hundred megawatts of power, serving hyperscale and AI computing clients. Any grid or infrastructure upgrades needed for the project are being paid for by Skybox, not by Wichita Falls taxpayers.

Why Is Everyone Talking About Tripling the Tax Base?

City leaders and Forward Wichita Falls, the organization now leading economic development efforts for the city, have said this project could double or even triple Wichita Falls’ commercial tax base once complete, and that matters because a broader tax base means the city has more room to fund roads, utilities, and services without leaning as hard on residential property owners.

That’s the pitch, and it’s a real one. A single industrial user paying property taxes on a multi-hundred-million-dollar facility takes pressure off everyone else’s tax bill. But a bigger tax base years from now doesn’t tell you what happens to your street, your rent, or your home value in the next 12 to 24 months. That’s a separate conversation, and it’s the one most homeowners actually need to have.

Will 3,500 to 5,000 Construction Workers Really Affect Local Housing?

Yes, and this is the piece that affects you sooner than the tax base does. Estimates shared around this project put the construction workforce at 3,500 to 5,000 workers at peak, and Wichita Falls does not currently have that much spare rental housing sitting empty.

Construction workers on a project this size typically need short-term housing: apartments, extended-stay units, single-family rentals near the site. When that many people show up looking for a place to live at roughly the same time, in a market that wasn’t built with that kind of surge in mind, rents move. This is the exact dynamic that’s already played out in other Texas cities that landed a data center, and it’s worth understanding before it hits your lease renewal.

What Is a Data Center, and Why Does It Need So Much Land and Power?

A data center is essentially a warehouse full of computer servers, built to run and cool that equipment around the clock. Data centers matter right now because almost everything people associate with AI, from ChatGPT to Netflix recommendations to your bank’s fraud alerts, actually runs on physical servers sitting in buildings like the one Skybox is planning here. Demand for that computing power has grown faster than most of the country’s existing infrastructure can handle, which is why companies are moving into smaller markets like Wichita Falls instead of staying concentrated in traditional hubs like Dallas or Northern Virginia. 

The buildings themselves don’t employ many people once they’re operating; the jobs and the local economic disruption are heaviest during construction, not afterward. That’s a detail worth sitting with. The 3,500 to 5,000 workers driving housing demand right now are largely temporary. Once the buildings are up, the permanent staff running a facility like this is a much smaller number. That shapes how a smart buyer or investor should think about timing, which I’ll get to below.

Is the Water Usage Concern About Data Centers Legitimate?

It’s a fair question to ask, and the good news is that PowerCampus Texas is designed around closed-loop cooling. A closed-loop system recirculates the same water through the cooling process instead of continuously drawing fresh water and evaporating it off, which is the more efficient approach and a meaningful step up from the older open-loop or evaporative cooling setups that drive the biggest water-usage concerns people associate with data centers. Skybox states directly that after the initial system fill, annual water usage for the entire ten-building campus is comparable to just 40 typical homes.

That distinction matters for Wichita Falls specifically, given how much this community has already had to think about water planning. A closed-loop design doesn’t mean zero water use, but it means this facility is not built around the kind of continuous fresh-water draw that fuels the scarier headlines about data centers elsewhere. I’d still encourage anyone curious about the specifics to follow the permitting documents as they come through the city, but the underlying engineering choice here is the right one.

What Happened in Abilene When a Data Center Arrived?

Abilene is the closest real-world comparison we have, since it became the flagship site for the Stargate AI infrastructure project. According to Zillow data reported by TIME, average rent in Abilene reached $2,395 a month, up roughly $1,000 from the year before, and local housing officials there say the city already had a shortage of around 5,600 units before construction even ramped up.

Local reporting has put the construction workforce in Abilene at several thousand workers, arriving in a market that didn’t have the housing stock to absorb them. The result: bidding wars on rentals, landlords raising rates because they finally could, and, according to community workers there, more people being priced out entirely. Abilene is not a perfect match for Wichita Falls. It’s a larger project, tied to a $500 billion national initiative with different scale and timeline. But the underlying mechanism, a fast surge of construction workers hitting a housing market with limited supply, is exactly the dynamic Wichita Falls is heading toward.

Abilene isn’t the only data point worth looking at. In Loudoun County, Virginia, which now hosts more than 600 data centers, the real property tax rate has actually dropped from $1.145 per $100 of assessed value in 2016 to $0.805 in 2025, according to a National Taxpayers Union discussion of the county’s finances. That’s the version of this story that rarely makes headlines: a tax base broad enough that homeowners end up paying less, not more, over time. I’d take that comparison with a grain of salt too, since it’s coming from a taxpayer advocacy group making its case rather than a neutral audit, and Loudoun County had over a decade to grow into that outcome. But it’s a fair counterweight to Abilene, and it points to the same conclusion either way: how this plays out for Wichita Falls homeowners depends less on whether a data center shows up, and more on how the growth around it gets managed.

What Should Renters in Wichita Falls Do Right Now?

If you’re renting, the smartest move is to lock in your housing cost before demand catches up to supply, not after. Once several thousand construction workers are actively competing for the same apartments and rental homes you are, landlords have far less reason to hold rent where it is.

That might mean renewing a lease earlier than you planned, negotiating a longer term now instead of month-to-month, or seriously running the numbers on buying instead of renting if you’re on the fence. None of those are urgent-sounding sales lines. They’re just what the math says when a market this size is about to add pressure on the demand side.

What Should Buyers Know About the Market Phases Right Now?

Markets like this tend to move through three phases: early awareness, active construction demand, and post-completion stabilization. Wichita Falls is in the first phase right now, which is the phase where prices haven’t fully priced in what’s coming yet.

That’s actually the more favorable window for buyers, not the worse one. Once the construction workforce fully arrives and rental competition tightens, home prices in the surrounding area tend to follow, because renters who get squeezed out start shopping to buy, and investors start paying attention to rental yield potential near the site. Buying in the early phase means less competition and more negotiating room than buyers will have a year or two from now.

What Should Current Homeowners Do With This Information?

If you own a home in Wichita Falls, this is a good time to understand your equity position and have an actual strategy, not just watch the news and wonder. Depending on your goals, that could mean holding and letting value appreciate as the project progresses, or it could mean this is the right window to sell before the market gets more competitive and complicated to navigate.

There’s no single right answer for every homeowner, because every seller’s priorities are different. Someone planning to stay ten more years has a different calculus than someone weighing a PCS move or a retirement transition. That’s a conversation worth having with real numbers on the table, not a guess.

The Bigger Picture

A project of this scale doesn’t arrive often in a city like ours, and it’s going to reshape parts of the local housing market over the next few years whether anyone plans for it or not. Abilene shows what happens when a city gets caught flat-footed by the pace of construction demand. Wichita Falls still has time to plan ahead of that curve instead of reacting to it after rents have already jumped.

If you want to talk through what this means for your specific situation, whether you’re renting, buying, selling, or holding, I’m happy to walk through the numbers with you.

This article reflects information available as of publication and general real estate market observations. It is not tax, legal, financial, or investment advice. Consult a licensed professional for guidance specific to your situation.