"We're really concerned with what's really going to be built there," Linda Bailey told a reporter outside the old 3M campus on River Place Boulevard, watching construction crews kick up dust behind a fence line that's been quiet since 2019. Her question sounds simple. Her neighbors have been asking it for months, in HOA Facebook groups and Nextdoor threads that stretch from River Place into Steiner Ranch. On Thursday night, the people with the answers finally showed up at Four Points Middle School.
What came out of that room was a lot of clarity about what's moving in next door, and almost none about how much it's going to use once it's running.
What's actually confirmed. The site is a 156-acre former 3M office and lab campus at 6801 River Place Blvd, sitting empty for six years before an investment firm called Karlin Real Estate bought it in 2021 and renovated it in 2024 under the name Highpoint 2222, with plans for a mix of retail, housing, and tech tenants. That mixed-use future never fully materialized. In March 2026, an entity called SE Cosmos LLC closed on the property instead. SE Cosmos is tied to SB Energy, a SoftBank-backed infrastructure company, and the project now goes by a different name: Project Cosmos.
The first confirmed tenant is Graphcore, a UK-based semiconductor company that will use the campus as its US engineering headquarters for chip research tied to advanced computing and robotics. SB Energy's own SEC filing, submitted August 31 as part of an IPO registration, describes a 15-year lease with a SoftBank affiliate worth roughly $2.5 billion in rent over its term. That same filing refers to the property, dozens of times, as one of the company's data centers.
That last detail matters more than it looks like it should, because for weeks before the filing became public, SB Energy's spokesperson had described the site differently. Jaime Carlson, the company's head of commercialization and risk, told residents at the town hall that this project has been unlike the company's usual playbook. "We're not usually coming in and renovating a site," she said. "Typically, we spend years on the ground getting permits, talking to fire departments, talking to local school districts, getting to know local stakeholders, so by the time we're breaking ground, folks know us."
That admission is the honest version of what residents already suspected: this rollout skipped the part where the neighborhood gets told what's coming before the equipment shows up.
The Word Nobody Would Say Until the Filing Forced It
For weeks, the company avoided calling this a data center in conversations with residents and reporters, even as construction equipment sat visibly on the property. Bailey said as much after meeting with SB Energy representatives on September 8: "They understand there's been a gap in communication, but they would not say the word 'data center.'"
The SEC filing settled that argument. It also raised a harder one, because the International Code Council's own definition of a data center is a density threshold, not a label. A building crosses into data center territory once it uses more than 20 watts per square foot at peak load. Whether Austin calls this an "engineering headquarters" or a "research and development site," as SB Energy has, or a data center, as its own SEC filing does, the power draw is the power draw. Austin City Council Member Marc Duchen, who represents the district, put the problem directly at the town hall: figuring out what to regulate depends on what you call the thing, and right now nobody has agreed on the name.
What Residents Still Don't Have, and Why They Never Will Get It the Normal Way
Here is where the town hall ran into a wall that no amount of goodwill from SB Energy could get around. Austin Energy's own representatives told the room that customer-specific electricity usage is legally protected information. The utility cannot disclose it publicly even if it wanted to. That single fact means the number residents most want, how many megawatts this campus will actually draw once Graphcore and any future tenants are running, is not something a future town hall will produce either. It isn't a transparency failure on SB Energy's part. It's how the disclosure rules work for every commercial customer on the grid, data center or otherwise.
The filing itself puts a ceiling on the number: up to 50 megawatts of IT power, enough to run roughly 40,000 households, plus another 25 megawatts available for office use. Austin Energy is completing substation and transmission upgrades to support that load, and its policy requires new commercial customers to cover 100 percent of the infrastructure cost themselves rather than spreading it across existing ratepayers. That's a real, verifiable commitment. What's not verifiable, now or later, is the actual draw once the facility is operating, because the law that protects that number from disclosure doesn't have an exception for public curiosity.
Water tells a similar story, with one useful anchor point. Austin Water's Heather Cooke told the room that 3M's operation used between 24 million and 36.6 million gallons per year from 2012 through 2018. SB Energy says it expects Cosmos to land at or below that figure, using closed-loop chillers that require an initial fill of about 450,000 gallons and then recirculate rather than draw fresh water repeatedly. That's a specific, checkable promise, unlike the electricity number. But it comes with its own asterisk: an earlier site plan application reviewed by the city this summer claimed no change in water demand at all and made no mention of a data center. A revised application landed on Austin Water's desk earlier this week, days before the town hall, and the utility says it's still reviewing it and will likely require SB Energy to complete a formal water benchmarking process before signing off.
| What's Confirmed | What's Still Undisclosed |
|---|---|
| 156-acre site, 1.1 to 1.2 million square feet | Actual electricity draw once operational |
| First tenant: Graphcore, US engineering HQ | Full list of future tenants |
| 15-year SoftBank lease, ~$2.5B in rent | Exact water use once running (only a target, not a number) |
| Up to 50MW IT power, 25MW office power | Whether "data center" or "R&D site" governs future oversight |
| First phase construction targeted for spring 2027 | Any binding commitment tied to the water target |
Why City Hall Can't Just Say No
Some residents have asked why the city doesn't simply stop the project or require a public review before it proceeds. The answer traces back to the property's Highpoint 2222 permits from 2024. Because that redevelopment was already approved for tech and life science tenants, SB Energy didn't need a zoning change to convert the use toward a data center, and it had already obtained the necessary building permits by the time it closed on the property in March. Austin City Council Member Mike Siegel explained the limit plainly: the city cannot pass retroactive zoning that would force a permitted project to be dismantled after construction has already started. The regulatory gap residents are frustrated by isn't a loophole SB Energy found. It's the absence of any Austin rule written specifically for data centers, a gap the city has only recently begun trying to close.
That gap isn't unique to Four Points. State Representative Vikki Goodwin told the town hall that Texas handed out roughly $1 billion in tax incentives to data centers in 2025 alone, a figure she expects could climb to $3.5 billion over the next few years if the subsidy structure continues. Statewide, 258 data center proposals were pending when the Texas Public Utility Commission surveyed developers in 2025 about their power and water needs. Only 17 percent responded.
What Changes for Anyone Driving Quinlan Park or RM 2222
Practically, this means the dust and equipment visible from River Place Boulevard and the surrounding corridor aren't going anywhere before spring 2027, when SB Energy expects the first phase of construction to wrap. The tranquil stretch Bailey described, the same lot local school buses once used as a quiet cut-through, will keep functioning as an active construction site for at least another year and a half. Beyond that, the honest answer is that nobody in that room on Thursday, including the people running Austin's utilities, has the number residents actually want. What they have is a target for water, a ceiling for power, and a legal structure that keeps the real figures private long after the cameras leave Four Points Middle School.
If you're watching this unfold from a home in Steiner Ranch or anywhere else along the RM 2222 corridor, the useful takeaway isn't alarm. It's knowing which promises are checkable and which ones simply can't be, by law, no matter how many town halls follow this one.
For more on the Community Impact reporting from Thursday's meeting, their full account is worth reading directly at communityimpact.com, and KXAN's on-the-ground coverage of the construction site itself is available at kxan.com.
If you're weighing a move in or around Steiner Ranch and want a clear-eyed read on how nearby development, infrastructure, and market conditions actually connect, Chris Krueger has spent two decades on both the building and selling side of this market. Let's Work Together.
