A rural Texas ranch once housing the largest aluminum smelter in the world is getting new life as an advanced manufacturing site that is expected to have more readily available power than anywhere else in the United States.
Construction on the initial phase of about 3,300 acres of what is being called Sandow Lakes in Rockdale, Texas, began in the second half of last year, with occupancy expected by the third quarter of 2026, according to JLL, the brokerage that is marketing the site for the owner.
Dallas-based real estate investor Xebec bought the land about 58 miles northeast of the Texas capital city of Austin in 2021 after the sprawling property was on the market for six years. The now 33,000-acre site connected by a series of lakes once housed an Alcoa-owned aluminum smelter.
Xebec founder and CEO Randy Kendrick is redeveloping the 50-square-mile site — more than double the size of Manhattan — into a "mixed-use super site" that he expects to attract manufacturing users from around the world.
The industrial park outfitted with abundant electrical power, water, rail, natural gas and interstate access is being marketed as the only megasite in the Lone Star State. Sandow Lakes is a 20-minute drive to Taylor, Texas, where Samsung is building an advanced chip manufacturing plant and a 45-minute drive from Tesla's automative factory and headquarters in Austin.
The campus is expected to "stand at the nexus of people, power and place, enabling the reshoring of critical manufacturing and supply chains back to America," Kendrick said in a statement.
JLL is putting together a data center component for Sandow Lakes, but brokers declined to share further details. The nation is taking stock of its data center needs from the growth of artificial intelligence, and President Donald Trump unveiled a joint venture during his first week in office called Stargate that includes plans for OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to invest up to $500 billion to expand the nation's data centers and support the AI boom.
Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said the joint venture's first data centers are under construction in Abilene, Texas, a rural city about 150 miles west of downtown Fort Worth. There are 10 buildings under construction, and Oracle can expand to 20 locations beyond the Texas city, Ellison said.
A renaissance
Future phases of the larger Sandow Lakes development outside Austin could include residential, retail, office, hospitality and leisure facilities, according to the statement.
The property has 1.5 gigawatts of existing capacity of power today, with an Oncor transmission substation expected to deliver another 1.2 gigawatts of power during the third quarter of 2025, JLL brokers told CoStar News. More substations are planned, and the property could have 3.9 gigawatts of power by 2028, representing the largest amount of readily available power in the United States, according to the JLL brokers.
An American manufacturing renaissance is underway, and Xebec plans to play a big role in supporting this transformation, JLL said.
"The company has been in stealth mode with a lot of work going on behind the scenes to capture the immense demand in the market for heavy power and manufacturing," Greg Matter, JLL's head of advanced manufacturing, told CoStar News. "To have water, power and land readily available in a live-work-play concept, there's nothing out there today that matches Sandow Lakes."
At capacity, the 3,300-acre advanced manufacturing site is expected to have up to 35 million square feet of industrial space — making it the largest manufacturing and logistics site in Texas.
In JLL's newest industrial tenant demand survey, the firm found that manufacturing facilities will account for 18.8% of future industrial requirements. This part of the sector has increased 354% since 2018, with the Dallas-Fort Worth region, Chicago and Phoenix being key hubs for this national growth, Matter said.
"We are speaking with groups we are in negotiations with today," Matter added. "This is an incredibly exciting time. It has been a really great secret, and now we are open for business."
Sandow Lakes also has built-to-suit options with little-to-no design constraints for would-be distribution and manufacturing users, including cold storage and light industrial uses. The typical build-out of facilities at the site would include flexible clear heights, bay spacing, rainwater harvesting, microgrid solar power and LED and motion-censored lighting.
The private on-site rail intermodal transportation includes a loading bay and 7 miles of tracks joining up with the Union Pacific Rail Line.
Along with the site's proximity to Austin, Sandow Lakes is located within an hour drive to College Station and a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Houston, the Dallas-Fort Worth region and San Antonio.
For the record
JLL's Matter, Ace Schlameus, Zane Cole, Richard Quarles, Kurt Griffin and Nathan Orbin are overseeing industrial leasing at the site on behalf of Xebec.