Milam County’s Commissioners Court held a public hearing and took up a Chapter 312 tax abatement agreement with Milam County DC, LLC on Nov. 24, 2025 for a data center on about 607 acres in Precinct 2 inside the SE DC Devco Reinvestment Zone, with an Authorizing Order dated that day and a First Addendum on the Dec. 8 agenda. The agreement, posted by the county in draft, commits the project entity to $18 billion of Phase 1 investment within five years across up to 10 real property phases, abates 100 percent of county taxes for 10 years per phase, fixes payments in lieu of taxes at $750,000 a year for each $1 billion invested, which comes to $13.5 million a year at full Phase 1, requires at least 400 full-time jobs paying more than 120 percent of the county average wage within five years of construction start, and claws back abated taxes if the project entity walks away before the end of 2029 or fails to build. The county judge wrote on Feb. 9, 2026 that the data center near Burlington was under construction on land long out of agricultural production, nearly half of it designated wetlands.

On Jan. 9, 2026 OpenAI announced that it had signed a 1.2 gigawatt lease with SB Energy for the initial buildout of the Milam County Data Center and that OpenAI and SoftBank Group were each investing $500 million in SB Energy, following $800 million of redeemable preferred equity from Ares Infrastructure Opportunities funds in 2025. The companies said they plan to build new generation to meet the site’s needs and protect Texas ratepayers, that the data center is designed to minimize water use, and that construction would create thousands of jobs. SoftBank’s chief financial officer told analysts in February that SB Energy is a consolidated subsidiary and that project financing for the Milam and Borden County projects would likely sit on the group’s balance sheet under IFRS, structured as nonrecourse. No ERCOT large-load, PUCT, Oncor or TCEQ record for the site has been located, which leaves open how Gov. Abbott’s Aug. 3, 2026 freeze on data centers in ERCOT’s interconnection process, and the Sept. 21 halt on TCEQ permits, apply to it. No document reviewed states the corporate link between Milam County DC, LLC and SB Energy, and none uses the name “Project Freebird.”