A 69-acre tract on Highway 351, right where the pavement meets CR 521 near Hamby, went on the market in mid-December 2025. Priced at just under $2 million, the listing leads with its location next to a new data center project rather than the land itself. As of this writing, it's been sitting there for nearly eight months.
That gap between the pitch and the pace is the story. Land near Hamby is being marketed on the strength of an AI data center boom that even the companies building it can't describe consistently from month to month. If you're weighing acreage or a homesite out there, the interesting question isn't whether something big is happening near Hamby. It obviously is. The question is whether the size of that project has actually translated into the kind of durable demand that justifies paying a premium for proximity to it.
Hamby itself has been on maps since 1902, when postal officials renamed the community after its first postmaster rather than let it stay "Corners," a name tied to the four county lines that meet nearby. It sits about five miles east of Abilene at the intersection of State Highway 351, and for most of the last century it stayed a quiet crossroads. That changed fast.
The flagship project is the Stargate campus, backed by OpenAI and Oracle and built by Crusoe on what's known as the Lancium Clean Campus. Texas Standard reported in January 2026 that the site covers just over a thousand acres and was on track for a four million square foot buildout, part of a $500 billion nationwide push into AI infrastructure. By June 2026, Data Center Dynamics reported that Crusoe had topped out the final building of a six-building second phase, pushing the campus toward roughly four million square feet and 1.2 gigawatts of capacity, with completion still targeted for mid-2026.
That's the visible part. Texas Monthly's January 2026 feature described a second Stargate-related site already in the works "near the town of Hamby, eight miles northeast of Abilene," and separate reporting from Epoch AI in April 2026 described a third project, a 1,200-acre campus with ten buildings under construction by Vantage just across the county line in Shackelford County. Land listings in the area now routinely mention proximity to these projects by name, including one that markets its frontage as sitting near what it calls "the new Advantage Data Center." For a community that had one gas station and a handful of ranches a decade ago, that's three major buildouts within a few miles of each other.
Here's the part that should slow down anyone pricing land off the headlines. In March 2026, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI and Oracle had scaled back planned expansion at the Abilene site. Industrial Info Resources covered the fallout, noting that Oracle publicly called the report "false and incorrect" on social media within days, even as OpenAI's own infrastructure lead seemed to confirm parts of it. Industrial Info's own project tracking had actually flagged two buildings as cancelled months earlier, which may be what the confusion traced back to.
By April 2026, analysts at Epoch AI laid out the more concrete version: OpenAI had planned to expand the Abilene campus to 2.1 gigawatts, then reversed course and redirected that capacity to other sites entirely. Microsoft has since stepped in to partner with Crusoe on a 900 megawatt project next door instead. So the flagship site is still growing, just not along the exact path that was announced, and not entirely with the partners originally attached to it.
None of this means the project is failing. Epoch AI's April 2026 analysis still described Abilene as the most complete Stargate site in the country, with four of eight planned buildings already operational at the time. But a buyer treating "next to the data center" as a fixed, permanent value driver is betting on a project whose own backers have changed the story twice within the same six-month stretch.
The uncertainty isn't just financial. KTXS spoke with Hamby resident Lacie Rivera in May 2026 about the closed-loop cooling system the data center uses, and about what residents still don't know.
"I think it's a lot of unanswered questions. I think a lot of people don't know where to go to get answers."
Rivera's concern centered on water use in an area that regularly deals with drought, and on wanting a public meeting with city leaders rather than the current pace of information. KTXS noted it had contacted the City of Abilene for comment and never received a follow-up interview. The same outlet has also reported separately that the influx of construction workers has pushed local rents higher amid already scarce housing.
For a land buyer, this matters beyond the headline. If you're planning to build a homestead or run livestock on acreage near Hamby, water access and well capacity are worth confirming independently, not assuming based on what a listing implies about the area's growth.
The data center story has split the local land market into two distinct groups that don't behave the same way.
| Traditional Hamby homesites | Highway-frontage or "AI-adjacent" tracts | |
|---|---|---|
| Example | The only active listing in the established Hamby Estates subdivision was priced near $450,000 | The 69.13-acre Highway 351 and CR 521 tract listed at $1,999,000 |
| Marketing angle | Rural living, established neighborhood, modest lot count | Proximity to data center campuses, commercial or mixed-use potential |
| Market pace | Thin inventory, roughly 19 homes for sale across the broader Hamby-Abilene area | Listed since mid-December 2025 and still active roughly eight months later |
| What it's priced for | Comparable rural home sales | Speculative future use tied to continued AI infrastructure growth |
The first market is small and behaves like rural real estate anywhere in the Big Country. The second is being priced against a story that's still being written, and the days-on-market numbers suggest buyers are more cautious about that premium than the listing copy assumes.
Part of why the project landed in Taylor County at all comes down to incentives. Texas Monthly and Texas Standard both reported that the City of Abilene and Taylor County approved an 85 percent property tax abatement over ten years for the flagship project, a significant concession for a $3.5 billion facility.
The Texas Tribune's February 2026 reporting adds a detail worth sitting with if you're evaluating whether this growth is durable. ConstructConnect estimated the Abilene project needed around 1,500 workers to build but only about 100 to operate once finished. Under current state rules, a data center of at least 100,000 square feet only needs to create a minimum of 20 permanent jobs to qualify for sales tax exemptions. That's a real gap between the construction-phase economic bump Abilene is seeing now, with sales tax revenue reportedly up by double digits, and the long-term employment base the project will actually support once the cranes leave.
If a tract near Hamby is priced above what comparable rural acreage would otherwise command, here's what's worth confirming before that premium makes sense to you:
None of these questions are reasons to avoid land near Hamby. They're the difference between buying into a location and buying into a headline.
The AI boom near Hamby is real, and it's already changed how land out there gets priced and marketed. But real growth and priced-in hype are two different things, and the honest answer to what a specific tract is worth depends on details that don't show up in a listing description. If you're weighing acreage, a homesite, or a rural property anywhere between Hamby and the rest of the Big Country, the Kristen Dressen Kyker Team has spent years walking this exact ground with buyers who wanted a straight answer before they wrote an offer. Contact us and let's look at the actual numbers together.
Is the data center near Hamby still expanding? Yes, but not exactly along the path first announced. Construction continued through mid-2026, with the flagship site's second phase underway, even as OpenAI redirected some planned capacity to other locations and Microsoft stepped in on an adjacent project with Crusoe.
Does being near the data center guarantee land will hold or gain value? Not on its own. At least one of the highest-profile tracts marketed around the project has sat listed for nearly eight months without selling, which suggests buyers are treating the location premium with more caution than the asking price assumes.
What should I actually check before buying land near Hamby? Confirm water access independently, verify whether the parcel is inside city limits or the unincorporated county, and look at how long the listing has actually been on the market rather than relying on the asking price alone.
Who you work with matters! When it comes to your real estate needs, you should work with the best. Whether it is buying, selling, renting, second homes, investing, or more, we are happy to help assist you in any way that we can.
2500 S Willis St Abilene, TX 79605