Project Clydesdale: What a Data Center Development Near Owasso Reveals About America's Infrastructure Race

A single developer. Two major projects in northeastern Oklahoma. One in the ground, one in the pipeline. This isn’t a coincidence — it’s a strategy.

Project Clydesdale, which broke ground near Owasso late last year, and a planned data center in Claremore share the same developer. The pairing is worth paying attention to, not just for what it means for these two communities, but for what it reveals about how serious infrastructure players are positioning themselves right now.

Why Owasso and Claremore? The Site Selection Logic

Developers don't pick secondary markets at random. When a sophisticated operator plants a flag in a place like Owasso — a suburb of roughly 37,000 people north of Tulsa — and then announces a companion project 20 miles away in Claremore, there’s a deliberate calculus behind it.

Site selection for data centers in 2024 and beyond is increasingly driven by what major metros can't offer: land availability, power access, and lower operating costs.

Northeastern Oklahoma checks several of those boxes. The region sits within reach of significant fiber corridors connecting Tulsa to broader national networks. Land costs are a fraction of what developers face in Texas, Arizona, or the Pacific Northwest. And Oklahoma's electricity rates — historically among the lowest in the country — matter enormously when you're building a facility that might draw 50 to 200+ megawatts at full build-out.

The Owasso and Claremore moves suggest the developer isn't dabbling. Running two projects in the same regional corridor simultaneously signals conviction — either a long-term land strategy, a client commitment that demands redundancy, or both.

What "Broke Ground" Actually Means for Local Infrastructure

Breaking ground is a milestone, but the real impact on local infrastructure begins months before the first shovel hits the ground and continues for years after the ribbon-cutting.

Data centers of meaningful scale require substantial utility upgrades. We're talking about dedicated substation capacity, high-capacity fiber drops, and, in many cases, water infrastructure for cooling systems. For a city the size of Owasso, accommodating a facility like Project Clydesdale isn't just about welcoming a new tenant — it often means the local utility grid gets meaningfully improved for the surrounding area as well.

The construction phase alone on a mid-to-large data center can inject tens of millions of dollars into a local economy through labor, materials, and subcontractor activity.

That's before a single server rack goes live. Once operational, data centers are famously low on headcount relative to their footprint — a 100MW campus might employ 50 to 150 people directly. But those tend to be high-wage, technical positions. The indirect economic activity — the facility management firms, the security contractors, the local vendors — adds up in a smaller market like Owasso in ways it wouldn't in Dallas or Phoenix.

The Claremore Project: Redundancy or Expansion?

The announced data center in Claremore deserves as much attention as Project Clydesdale, and perhaps more scrutiny.

Claremore, the Rogers County seat, sits roughly 25 miles northeast of Tulsa. A data center there, developed by the same operator behind Project Clydesdale, raises an interesting structural question: are these two facilities meant to serve the same clients as part of a redundant infrastructure strategy, or is the developer building out a regional platform to serve different market segments?

The answer matters for local stakeholders. Redundant infrastructure — where two facilities mirror each other's data for continuity — suggests enterprise or government clients who require geographic separation between primary and backup sites. That's a more stable, higher-margin business than speculative wholesale capacity.

If it's an expansion play targeting different customers, the developer is betting on sustained demand in a market that hasn't traditionally been on the data center map. Given the broader migration of digital infrastructure out of Tier 1 markets, that's not an unreasonable bet. Hyperscalers and colocation providers have been aggressive about finding Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets where they can build at scale without the land and power constraints that now plague Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, or suburban Chicago.

Infrastructure Development at This Scale: The Financial Picture

Data centers are capital-intensive in ways that are easy to understate. A modest 20MW facility can run $150 to $200 million in construction costs alone, depending on tier classification, power redundancy requirements, and cooling infrastructure. A larger campus — the kind that a developer operating across multiple sites in the same corridor might be building toward — can push well past $500 million.

That capital intensity is precisely why states and municipalities compete hard to attract these projects, and why developers with the balance sheet to execute across multiple sites simultaneously hold significant negotiating leverage.

Oklahoma has used tax incentives strategically to attract data center investment, including sales tax exemptions on equipment purchases — a meaningful advantage when a single facility might acquire hundreds of millions in servers, networking gear, and power infrastructure. Developers know this, and they structure site selection processes to extract maximum value from that competition.

For investors watching projects like Clydesdale, the key metrics aren't just the upfront construction numbers. It's the contracted revenue — the long-term leases or power purchase commitments from anchor tenants — that determine whether a project pencils out. A data center with 10-year commitments from creditworthy tenants looks very different on a pro forma than speculative capacity waiting for customers.

What's Actually Being Built Here

The honest answer, based on available information, is that the full scope of Project Clydesdale hasn't been comprehensively disclosed. What's confirmed: the developer behind it is the same operator planning the Claremore facility, and the Owasso project broke ground late last year.

That opacity is actually typical of this asset class. Data center developers often operate quietly — protecting competitive intelligence, managing community relations, and sometimes honoring confidentiality requirements from anchor tenants who don't want their infrastructure footprint publicized.

What that means for observers — whether you're a local stakeholder, a competing developer, or an investor — is that the visible activity (the groundbreaking, the permit filings, the utility negotiations) is often the most reliable signal you'll get about scale and intent. A developer who's broken ground near Owasso and announced a second project in Claremore is telling you something meaningful about their conviction in this market, even if they're not saying it outright.

The Bigger Picture for Northeastern Oklahoma

Zoom out, and the two-project footprint starts to look like the early stages of something larger. Northeastern Oklahoma isn't a traditional data center hub — but neither was Omaha before a wave of hyperscaler investment, or Columbus before it became one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the Midwest.

What changes a regional market's trajectory isn't usually one project. It's when a credible developer demonstrates that the fundamentals work — power is available, fiber is accessible, local government is cooperative — and other operators start paying attention. Project Clydesdale, combined with the Claremore announcement, could function as that proof of concept.

For local governments in Rogers and Tulsa counties, the near-term priority should be understanding what these projects require and getting ahead of the infrastructure implications — utility capacity, road access, workforce development — before the next wave of interest arrives. Markets that move fast on the enabling infrastructure tend to attract the next project. Those that move slowly often watch the capital go somewhere else.

The developer with two projects in the ground or in planning here has made their bet on northeastern Oklahoma. The region's job now is to ensure that bet pays off — for the developer and for the communities that will live with these projects for decades.

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