Texas AI Data Center Intelligence Hub

Executive summary

Colchis is a real and materially advanced proposed high-performance-computing and artificial-intelligence data center campus, but it is not yet an approved or under-construction 1-gigawatt facility. Cipher Digital Inc. controls the project through Colchis LLC, has funded required development deposits, has site control near AEP's Red Creek substation, and has a fully executed 1-GW direct-connect agreement with AEP. The decisive unresolved issue is ERCOT's new large-load Batch Zero process. Cipher's own disclosures make the proposed 1,000-MW capacity and 2028 energization date expressly subject to that process.

Strongest public evidence of commitment: Cipher acquired 53% of Colchis LLC in October 2025, became managing member, and increased its actual ownership to 76% by March 31, 2026 through additional capital contributions; Cipher recorded $56.6 million of acquired “strategic contracts” associated with Colchis (an accounting value for development rights, not a land price or total cost); the project has a fully executed 1-GW Direct Connect Agreement with AEP, under which AEP is to construct a dual interconnection facility; Cipher says all necessary deposits have been funded and the land is secured.

Largest remaining uncertainties: no ERCOT Batch Zero classification or final load allocation had been made public by the research cutoff; no tenant or executed Colchis lease has been disclosed (Cipher's AWS, Fluidstack/Google, and third-hyperscaler leases concern other campuses); no public campus plan, building count, square footage, cooling design, water source, construction contractor, budget, job estimate, or groundbreaking date was located; no Colchis-specific TCEQ/EPA environmental record, local incentive agreement, or construction permit was located.

Bottom line: Colchis should be tracked as a credible 1-GW proposed HPC/AI campus with substantial site-control and interconnection work completed — not as a fully permitted, financed, tenanted, or construction-ready development. The next major public milestones are Cipher's Aug 4, 2026 business update and ERCOT's expected Aug 7, 2026 Batch Zero classification notices.

1. Project fact sheet

Confidence convention used throughout this report: High = primary company filing, official government/utility record, or multiple mutually consistent sources; Medium = credible local reporting or reasonable inference from primary records; Low = single secondary source, automated aggregator, or unverifiable claim.

2. Corporate structure and ownership

Cipher changed its name from Cipher Mining Inc. to Cipher Digital Inc. on February 20, 2026 to reflect its shift from bitcoin mining toward large-scale HPC/AI infrastructure. In October 2025, Cipher purchased 53% of Colchis LLC, became its managing member, and consolidates it in its financial statements; the minority interest is classified as redeemable. During Q1 2026, additional capital contributions increased Cipher's actual ownership to 76% as of March 31, 2026.

The often-repeated “approximately 95%” figure is not present ownership — Cipher said its expected majority financing contribution “could result in approximately 95% equity assuming standard lease and development terms in a future HPC lease,” a conditional future economic outcome. Cipher has not named the minority member or disclosed the LLC agreement.

Cipher's FY2025 10-K recorded $56.6 million of acquired “strategic contracts” related to Colchis, with the 47% noncontrolling interest initially recorded at ~$30.3 million — an accounting value for development rights/contracts. It is not a land purchase price, construction budget, proof of full land ownership, or proof of tenant financing. Cipher's March 23, 2026 $200 million corporate revolver expressly excludes Colchis LLC from the general JV-investment cap, giving Cipher flexibility to keep funding it — not a dedicated Colchis loan or proof of full financing. No Colchis-specific construction loan, bond, or complete development budget was located.

Sources: Cipher FY2025 Form 10-K, Cipher Q1 2026 Form 10-Q, Cipher Mar 23, 2026 credit agreement.

3. Site location and land status

The campus is in unincorporated Tom Green County, northeast of San Angelo, near City Farm Road and US Highway 67 North, approximately 2,500 feet east of the separate Skybox/Emergent site and adjacent to AEP's Red Creek substation (publicly mapped at ~31.52886, -100.32111). Cipher repeatedly describes the land as adjacent to an existing substation — useful for interconnection cost/length, but it does not by itself establish a verified 1-GW block of spare deliverability.

Dataset coordinate correction (this ingest): cipher-colchis's stored coordinate is now set to 31.53334, -100.32395 — an owner-supplied site address on the FM 765 corridor (street address withheld from the public record), located ~567 m from the Red Creek substation. That is the only candidate of the three this dataset has carried (a prior 2,223 m midpoint pin, and a 4,412 m press-derived point) that satisfies Cipher's own substation-adjacency disclosure, so it replaces the prior placeholder. locationPrecision moves from county to site accordingly. Cipher itself has still never named a county, address, or parcel in any SEC filing or release.

Second-order data-quality finding: this report's ~2,500-ft Colchis-to-Skybox offset, combined with Colchis being adjacent to Red Creek, is only consistent with Skybox also sitting near Red Creek — the substation Skybox's own published materials say it draws spare capacity from. This dataset's stored skybox-san-angelo coordinate (31.51, -100.37) is ~3.16 miles from Red Creek, which is hard to reconcile with that adjacency. No authoritative Skybox coordinate was located, so that record is flagged, not changed, pending an appraisal-district parcel record or company-disclosed address.

Land: Cipher's YE2025 10-K described ~620 acres under purchase options; February and May 2026 investor updates said deposits are funded and land is “secured” (which can mean options, not fee title). A June 2026 local blog reported Tom Green CAD records showing four tracts owned by Colchis LLC next to Skybox; the underlying CAD records and deed instruments were not independently retrieved for this report, so that claim is carried at [reported], low confidence. No parcel IDs, legal descriptions, sellers, or the full ownership chain are public.

4. Power supply, AEP interconnection, and ERCOT Batch Zero

Cipher announced a fully executed 1-GW Direct Connect Agreement with AEP: AEP will construct the necessary dual interconnection facility, the parties target 2028 energization, and interconnection construction is intended to proceed in parallel with ERCOT's review. This is one of the strongest signs Colchis is more than a speculative site listing — but it is not equivalent to final ERCOT approval, firm 1-GW load status, a committed retail energy-supply contract, or a guaranteed 2028 in-service date.

Texas's transitional Batch Zero process handles very large new loads (75 MW+) after the prior serial-study framework was overwhelmed. ERCOT reported tracking ~438 GW of proposed large loads in June 2026 (~89% data centers). Projects are classified Base Load, Studied Load, or Excluded Load. Cipher's May 2026 investor deck said Colchis's ERCOT submission/approval process was ongoing and that it expected inclusion in Batch Zero — and expressly labeled both the 1,000 MW figure and the 2028 target as subject to that process. As of July 29, 2026, no official public source showed Colchis's classification, an approved MW allocation, required transmission upgrades, or a ramp schedule. Cipher filed comments in the PGRR145 rulemaking on April 8, 2026 concerning return of financial security — evidence of engagement, not of approval.

San Angelo LIVE reported an unnamed high-ranking state official questioning whether Red Creek could support both Colchis and the neighboring Skybox/Emergent proposal on their desired schedules; no underlying engineering study or ERCOT finding accompanied that claim, so this report treats it as an unattributed warning signal and does not carry it into the dataset as a sourced fact.

Dataset gate chosen for grid.interconnection: queued — the AEP utility-side agreement is executed, but ERCOT grid allocation/classification is unresolved, which is what “queued” denotes in this schema. approved would falsely assert an ERCOT determination that does not exist.

5. Campus, tenant, and construction status

Cipher describes Colchis as an HPC site suitable for hyperscale AI training/inference. No Colchis tenant has been announced. Cipher's AWS (Black Pearl), Fluidstack/Google (Barber Lake), and a third hyperscale tenant at another site are all other campuses — not Colchis. The November 2025 Colchis announcement itself refers to the economics of a future HPC lease, not an executed one.

No public source discloses building count, height, square footage, IT-vs-total load, phase sizes, rack density, cooling technology, backup generation, battery storage, transmission-line route, fiber providers, architect/EPC, equipment vendors, site/grading/drainage plans, construction valuation, or a groundbreaking date.

Public evidence supports advanced pre-construction: site control, capital invested, deposits funded, an executed AEP agreement, ERCOT submission/study work, and a target year. It does not support “under construction” for the data-center campus — Cipher's other project updates give detailed earthwork/pad/steel/procurement status when construction is underway; its Colchis updates do not.

6. Water, environment, permits, local government, and community

No public statement identifies a water source, cooling design, or wastewater solution for Colchis; because the site is outside San Angelo city limits, the City's water/sewer answers for Skybox/Emergent do not automatically apply. Searches of TCEQ Central Registry, TCEQ Records Online, and EPA ECHO found no Colchis-specific environmental record under Colchis, Colchis LLC, Cipher Mining, or Cipher Digital at the Tom Green site — an information gap, not evidence the site has no environmental constraints.

Colchis sits outside San Angelo's corporate limits, so the City's May–June 2026 data-center land-use, sewer, and water ordinances primarily govern Skybox/Emergent and future in-city projects, not Colchis. Tom Green County has limited unincorporated land-use authority (plats, road access, floodplain, septic, drainage, negotiated economic-development agreements); no Colchis-specific county plat, road/floodplain/septic permit, or Commissioners Court approval was located. No Colchis-specific incentive agreement (Chapter 380/381, abatement, TIF, grant, value limitation) was located in any indexed source.

The May–June 2026 Tom Green County moratorium discussion concerned Beacon Data Centers' Dove Creek/Westline project in Precinct 4 — already tracked separately as dove-creek-beacon — not Colchis; the two should not be conflated. No Colchis-specific lawsuit, contested permit case, or formal denial was located; June 2026 reporting said Colchis has drawn less organized, project-specific opposition than Skybox or Beacon so far, against a backdrop of broader county-wide data-center opposition (a public petition and the San Angelo Data Center Citizen Coalition).

7. Timeline

8. Risk and status assessment

Overall judgment: Colchis ranks above a speculative land-and-power lead — a controlled JV, meaningful recorded development value, funded deposits, an executed utility agreement, and a defined ERCOT path — but below a committed data-center build, lacking final grid allocation, an executed tenant lease, project financing tied to that lease, and permits plus construction mobilization.

9. Unconfirmed leads and monitoring checklist

Four Colchis tracts (Jun 2026 local blog citing Tom Green CAD): no parcel IDs or deed images were available from the indexed source; carried at [reported], low confidence. Red Creek spare-capacity figures circulated in local commentary are excluded from this report and from the dataset — no authoritative AEP or ERCOT source confirms them. A third lead — an automated deed-record aggregator's association of a named private individual with a Colchis-titled property — was found but is deliberately not repeated or ingested here: the underlying instrument was not retrieved, the entity match was not independently validated, and Cipher has not identified any individual as the minority partner. No ownership conclusion should be drawn from it, so this report and this dataset carry none.

Monitoring checklist: Cipher's Aug 4, 2026 update (ownership, land, tenant, capex, ERCOT status); ERCOT's Aug 7, 2026 classification (Base/Studied/Excluded); subsequent allocation and transmission studies; Tom Green CAD/County Clerk parcel and deed records; County Commissioners Court, floodplain, subdivision, road, septic, and infrastructure-development agendas; TCEQ air/stormwater/wastewater/Central Registry entries; any future Cipher hyperscaler announcement that expressly names Colchis; project-level financing (construction loan, secured notes, tenant guarantee); and construction signals (contractor awards, grading permits, SWPPP notices, satellite-visible site work).

Corrections made to this dataset on ingest

This report forced three corrections to the pre-existing cipher-colchis record, all sourced to Cipher's own SEC filings: (1) owner — “~95% + JV partner” was the conditional future outcome, not current ownership; corrected to 53%→76% actual, with the ~95% figure retained as an explicitly labeled conditional projection. (2) developer — “Cipher Mining JV” updated to Colchis LLC / Cipher Digital Inc., reflecting the Feb 20, 2026 rename. (3) grid.interconnection — “approved” was not supported by any public ERCOT record; changed to queued, reflecting an executed utility-side agreement with grid allocation still pending Batch Zero classification. The record's coordinate and locationPrecision were also updated (§3), and a data-quality flag was added to the neighboring skybox-san-angelo record rather than silently changing its coordinate.