Our Facilities
Texas, USA Operational
Location | Childress County, Texas (USA) |
Land | 100% freehold |
Status | Operational / Under Construction |
Power Capacity | 200MW operating 550MW under construction |
Connectivity | Dual physical fiber paths |
Employment | Over 50 full-time local jobs when fully operational |
Our facility is located in Childress County, Texas (population 7,000), approximately 250 miles northwest of Dallas & in close proximity to multiple wind and solar generating facilities in the region.
The site is directly connected to the ERCOT electricity grid via a 345kV transmission connection located on the 420-acres of freehold land owned by IREN. The connection has the capacity to deliver 750MW of electricity to the site.
Our Childress operations today comprises 200MW of operating data centers. We are constructing an additional 150MW of data centers in 2024 and 400MW to support our growth from 2025. The operations today support approximately 25 full-time local jobs, with over 300 contractors helping to deliver our 2024 expansion. Once fully built out to 750MW, we expect Childress to support more than 50 full-time local jobs.
Infrastructure such as (high wind rated design) warehousing, 3 phase power, town water and access roads have also been established to support operations and the future development phases.
The facility will generate long-term revenue streams for Childress County and the local community over the multi-decade expected life of the business. IREN has committed to hiring & purchasing locally and contracting with local businesses where it is possible and makes sense to do so.
The site is strategically placed in the West Texas Load Zone with access to low-cost excess renewable energy.
The region has approximately 37GW of renewable energy installed, however only approximately 18.5GW of nameplate transmission line capacity to export this renewable power to major load centers (such as Dallas and Houston) and due to technical constraints these lines can often only operate at approximately 12GW of effective transmission capacity.
This constraint currently results in wind and solar farms often being curtailed (or temporarily turned-off) at times of high renewable energy generation due to a lack of local load.
IREN's Childress operation will support existing renewable energy generation and further build out of renewable generation by establishing a flexible load in the West Texas Load Zone. which is able to operate during low-cost power during periods of oversupply (e.g. excess intermittent renewable energy) and then reduce electrical consumption during certain high price time periods when the market is in undersupply (e.g. solar/wind output is insufficient or during an extreme weather event).