Galaxy Digital buys past the grid queue in McGregor, Texas
The company's own July 28 release confirms it will carry the grid buildout itself. The land-sale math underneath, unpublished elsewhere, shows why cheap rural acreage now beats scarce urban sites.
Galaxy Digital has bought roughly 500 acres in McGregor, Texas, and instead of waiting on the local utility to build the power infrastructure, the company says it will fund and build its own substation and back any utility upgrades with its own financial guarantees. The company confirmed the structure in a July 28 release announcing the McGregor Industrial Park campus, its second major Texas data center site after the 1.6 gigawatt Helios campus.
Why it matters
Power, not land or zoning, is now the gating factor on AI campuses, and interconnection queues commonly run two to four years. Galaxy is paying to skip that line rather than wait in it. The company’s release frames the substation spend as protection for ratepayers, giving it “full financial security as required by the utility for incidental upgrades to local infrastructure.” For developers, the transferable lesson is not the AI use case, it is the capital stack: beneficiary-pays grid financing changes both the schedule and the underwriting on any power-hungry project, and it is now the question a site selector should ask on every deal. That risk sits opposite the one we flagged in Loudoun County, where Active Infrastructure’s data center bid was rejected on siting politics rather than power. Galaxy can write a check to solve a grid problem; it cannot write one to solve a zoning vote.
The numbers
The campus starts at 74 megawatts in its first phase, targeting first power in 2028, before expanding toward a multi-hundred-megawatt build through 2030, per Galaxy’s release. The company says it will carry full property tax obligations from day one, adding an estimated minimum of $130 million to McGregor’s local tax base. Data Center Knowledge separately reported the total planned investment at more than $400 million, a figure Galaxy’s own release does not state. Our own math on the release’s numbers: the land purchase produced about $7.5 million in revenue for the city on roughly 500 acres, working out to about $15,000 an acre, cheap enough that self-funding a substation still pencils against a scarce-urban-site alternative.
What’s next
Watch whether McGregor’s beneficiary-pays structure becomes Galaxy’s template beyond Helios, and whether other AI developers follow it to jump interconnection queues rather than lobby utilities to move faster. The bigger test is whether local jurisdictions keep welcoming self-funded grid buildouts once the buildings actually start drawing power in 2028, or whether the political resistance building in places like Loudoun County catches up to Texas too.