BT Gateway Data Center LLC filed permits for a 100,000 square foot facility outside Royse City, Texas, according to Data Center Dynamics's coverage. The filing covers a $384 million project at 4989 County Road 2656, an unincorporated stretch of Hunt County northeast of Dallas-Fort Worth. Construction runs August 2026 through February 2027, per the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation record, filing number TABS2026023619.
BT Gateway traces back to Belltown Power, a Farmers Branch renewable energy developer that entered data center development in 2024. Belltown has already announced six North Texas sites carrying a combined 1.435 gigawatts of requested load, backed by solar and battery storage. One 15 megawatt facility in that group has secured capacity. The other five remain in utility study.
Belltown's pipeline hasn't moved in a straight line. It separately filed for Project Kahla, a 1.5 gigawatt facility in Jewett, Leon County, split between gas and grid power at 500 megawatts each. It also withdrew an earlier application for a Quinlan site in Hunt County this year. None of that history appears in the BT Gateway filing, which like most TDLR records covers structural and mechanical scope only. It says nothing about rack density, chip generation, or whether the plant runs air-cooled CRAH units or liquid loops from day one.
Dallas-Fort Worth summers push wet-bulb temperatures high enough that evaporative cooling loses efficiency for real stretches of the year. The same math is playing out 200 miles south, where Austin's data center boom is running into its own water ceiling. Texas operators building AI capacity in 2026 increasingly default to liquid or hybrid air-liquid architecture, and investors are pricing that shift directly. Vertiv's cold-plate acquisition and Hut 8's Texas build both bet that air-only plants are shrinking as a share of new North Texas capacity.
The BT Gateway address sits on a county road in unincorporated Hunt County, where water lines were built for farms and small subdivisions. Rural water supply corporations in this part of North Texas rarely size their systems for a plant with a heavy cooling draw. The same mismatch shows up across the broader 2026 construction pipeline, where cooling procurement is running years ahead of the water and utility studies meant to support it.
BT Gateway's TDLR filing covers structural and mechanical scope only. The document that actually names chiller counts, CDU capacity, and water tap size arrives later, through county and utility approvals. That step is where the real cooling architecture becomes public record, if Belltown discloses it at all.