Greenport Explained: How a $10B Semiconductor and Tech Campus Comes to a 1,200-Acre Texas Site | News

Greenport is a $10 billion technology, semiconductor, and data center campus developed by Austin-based Carpenter & Associates on a 1,200-acre tech anchor parcel inside the larger Greenport International Airport, Technology, and Data Center footprint on the north side of the Colorado River in Bastrop County. The project runs on a thirty-year, seventy-five-percent tax-share Public-Private Partnership unanimously approved by the Bastrop County Commissioners Court. First-phase buildings are already occupied. The semiconductor anchor ties directly into the SpaceX, EdgeConneX, and Texas CHIPS Act wave reshaping Central Texas.

The Project at a Glance

Greenport is the largest single project in the Big Five by valuation. The full Greenport campus, as described by Carpenter & Associates and reported in industry press, spans roughly 5,426 acres of contiguous land assembled by the developer over more than a decade. Inside that broader footprint, the 1,200-acre semiconductor and tech anchor is the financial and strategic core of the development.

The vision Carpenter & Associates has published over the past several years pulls together pieces that rarely sit on the same map.

A $10 billion mixed-use technology and data center campus
A privately-owned, off-grid international airport with a 10,000-foot runway and 2.9 million square feet of hangar space
9 million square feet of data center, R&D, and corporate technology space surrounding the airfield
An on-site vertiport for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, partnered with Volatus Infrastructure
100% renewable electricity through utility-scale solar, integrated commercial solar and storage, microgrids, and distributed storage
Triple-redundancy fiber through a Greenport venture with FiberLight
Advanced infrastructure-as-a-service across communications, energy, water, wastewater, and transportation

The 1,200-acre semiconductor and tech anchor at the heart of the plan is what carries the bulk of the $10 billion valuation. It is also the part that ties Greenport directly into the broader Texas semiconductor strategy that has accelerated dramatically since the 2023 Texas CHIPS Act and the 2025 Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grants to SpaceX and others.

Carpenter & Associates: The Developer

Carpenter & Associates, headquartered in Austin, is a multi-generational development firm with a real estate portfolio that includes some of Austin’s most recognizable downtown office and mixed-use blocks. The firm has been assembling the Greenport land position on the north side of the Colorado River for more than a decade, originally under the project name Central Texas Airport.

The current iteration, Greenport, is a substantially evolved plan. The aviation component is no longer the primary anchor. The technology, semiconductor, data center, and corporate campus components are. The airport provides a strategic asset for high-value tenants who need direct private aviation access, but the economics of the project now rest on the technology side.

This is not a speculative announcement with no land control behind it. Carpenter & Associates owns the assembled acreage, holds the Bastrop County 381 Agreement, has zoning and permitting in place, and has first-phase tenants operating on site today.

The 381 Agreement: A Texas Landmark P3

Most Bastrop County residents have not heard of a Chapter 381 economic development agreement. It is the single most important policy instrument behind Greenport, and one of the most ambitious Public-Private Partnership structures the county has ever entered.

Texas Local Government Code Chapter 381 authorizes counties to enter into agreements with private developers in which a portion of the new tax revenue generated within a project boundary is shared back with the developer to fund infrastructure and offset development risk. The Bastrop County Commissioners Court unanimously approved a 381 Agreement covering Greenport that provides the project with a 75% annual share of property, sales and use, and hotel occupancy tax collections within the project boundaries for thirty years.

Three things make this agreement noteworthy.

First, it was unanimous. The Commissioners Court did not split the vote on this. That signals a level of alignment across the county leadership that is rare on projects of this scale.

Second, it is a tax-share, not a tax abatement. The county still collects the remaining 25 percent of the new revenue generated inside the project, which on a $10 billion valuation is a number large enough to reshape county finances. That 25 percent did not exist before the project.

Third, the structure is scoped to thirty years, which matches the build-out and stabilization horizon of a project of this complexity. Most Texas economic development agreements run ten to fifteen years. The thirty-year structure signals that both sides expect this to be a generational asset.

Why This Site, Why This Plan

The 1,200-acre semiconductor and tech anchor sits at the intersection of three trends that have converged in Central Texas over the past five years.

The Texas semiconductor wave. The 2023 Texas CHIPS Act created the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund, a $698 million state program that has already awarded grants to SpaceX, Silicon Labs, IntelliEPI, Dongjin Semichem Texas, and KoMiCo. SpaceX alone is investing $280 million to make its Bastrop facility the largest printed circuit board and panel-level packaging plant in North America. Greenport is positioned to capture the next wave of semiconductor tenants, suppliers, and R&D operations following SpaceX into the county.

The data center build-out. EdgeConneX is investing $4.4 billion across two campuses in Cedar Creek. Greenport’s first occupied buildings include data centers and bitcoin miners. The infrastructure-as-a-service model that Carpenter & Associates has built into Greenport, including the integrated solar microgrid and the FiberLight triple-redundancy network, is purpose-designed for hyperscale and AI workloads. That is what the next decade of demand looks like.

The cluster effect. Greenport sits inside a tech corridor that already includes SpaceX, the Boring Company, X, EdgeConneX, Wyldwood Studios, Line204, and Tesla’s Gigafactory thirty minutes west. The same logic that drove Silicon Valley in the 1970s and Northern Virginia in the 1990s applies in Bastrop County right now. Companies cluster where other companies they need are already located, and Greenport is positioned as the largest single contiguous landing pad for that next wave.

The infrastructure design tells the same story. Greenport plans 100% renewable electricity backed up by Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative, the Lower Colorado River Authority, and ERCOT, plus its own Greenport Energy LLC subsidiary. The fiber backbone is triple-redundant. The site’s “speed to market” specifications include a shovel-ready status with no required public hearings, no required building permits, no height or density restrictions, and favorable soil conditions for fast site work.

That combination is engineered for one specific kind of tenant: large-scale technology operators who need to move from site selection to shovel-in-ground in months, not years. Semiconductor packaging operations, hyperscale data center operators, AI training facilities, and defense contractors all share that profile.

The Current State of Construction

Greenport is not a hypothetical project. Industry press has confirmed that first-phase buildings on the campus are operating, with bitcoin mining operations and data center tenants already in place. Carpenter & Associates has stated publicly that additional technology enterprises have expressed interest in leasing land at the park, and the firm is in active capital raise mode for the next phases.

The vertiport partnership with Volatus Infrastructure is a separate but related milestone, positioning the site to be one of the first FAA-compliant operational electric aviation vertiports in the United States. The CBRE Group has been disclosed as a real estate partner on the broader Greenport campus.

The honest reality is that Greenport will be a long buildout. The full 5,426-acre vision Carpenter has described, including the airport, the technology center, the residential components, and the supporting infrastructure, will take well over a decade to complete. The 1,200-acre semiconductor and tech anchor at the heart of the plan is the most likely component to scale fastest, because the demand is already here.

What It Means for Bastrop County

Even at the conservative 25 percent share the county retains under the 381 Agreement, Greenport at full buildout produces a property tax revenue stream that exceeds anything Bastrop County has ever seen from a single development. That revenue funds Bastrop ISD, the county budget, the Emergency Services Districts, and the road and water infrastructure investments that the rest of the county depends on.

The job projections from the Perryman Group, an independent Texas economic analysis firm retained by Carpenter, forecast more than 300,000 new job-years over the first fifteen years of the airport and technology center combined. That is direct, indirect, and induced employment, the standard methodology for measuring economic impact at this scale. A meaningful share of those jobs are six-figure technology, engineering, and skilled trades positions of exactly the kind discussed in our recent post on the twelve trades and degrees Bastrop County students should pursue right now.

The supplier ecosystem that grows around a campus of this scale is its own economic engine. Logistics, food service, hospitality, construction, electrical contracting, mechanical contracting, security, and dozens of other supporting industries all benefit from a 1,200-acre anchor tenant of this size. That ripple effect lands across Bastrop, Cedar Creek, Elgin, Smithville, and beyond.

The Honest Caveats

Greenport is a project with real ambition and a real history. Both parts are worth being honest about.

The original Central Texas Airport project announced in 2010 did not break ground on its initial schedule. Carpenter & Associates evolved the plan, expanded the land position, deepened the infrastructure design, and reorganized around technology and semiconductors as the demand profile in Central Texas shifted. The current Greenport plan is a substantially different and more credible vision than the 2010 version, supported by the 381 Agreement, the existing tenant base, and a $10 billion target valuation that aligns with the broader Texas tech investment wave.

That said, projects of this scale always face execution risk. Capital availability, ERCOT power allocation, supply chain timelines, anchor tenant signing, and macroeconomic conditions can all slow phases. The county and the developer have built the legal and infrastructure framework. The buildout takes years.

What is no longer in doubt is that the project is real, the land is assembled, the agreements are in place, the first tenants are operating, and the broader Texas semiconductor wave provides exactly the kind of demand environment Greenport was engineered to serve.

The Big Picture

Greenport is the most ambitious single project in the Big Five. It is not the fastest to break ground. It is not the most visible from Highway 71. It is the one with the largest target footprint, the most ambitious infrastructure design, and the highest ceiling for what Bastrop County could become over the next twenty years.

Combined with the EdgeConneX hyperscale campuses, the SpaceX semiconductor expansion, Wyldwood Studios, and Line204, Greenport completes the picture of what Bastrop County leadership has been building toward. A diversified, high-value commercial tax base anchored by technology, manufacturing, and entertainment, on land that was generating $25,000 a year in property tax revenue a few years ago and now sits inside one of the most strategic economic corridors in North America.

The world is building its future here. Greenport is the part of the plan that says how big the future actually gets.

Want the full picture? Explore the Big Five anchor projects, or read about the twelve careers Bastrop County students should pursue to participate in the wave Greenport is helping to build.