TACC Selects Sabey Data Centers in Round Rock as Colocation Partner for New Supercomputer

As the home for Horizon and future LCCF systems, TACC will leverage the advantages of colocation including a campus that will accommodate high-density deployments with low-cost renewable power

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced it has chosen Sabey Data Centers (SDC Austin) as its colocation partner for the Horizon supercomputer. Horizon is part of the nation's newly announced National Science Foundation-funded Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF), which will revolutionize America’s computational research for the next decade.

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SDC Austin is TACC's colocation partner for the upcoming Horizon supercomputer. The campus is located in Round Rock, Texas. (Photo: Business Wire)

Horizon will be the largest academic supercomputer dedicated to open-scientific research in the NSF portfolio. It will provide 10x performance improvement over Frontera, the current NSF leadership-class computing system, for simulation and meet the unique scientific requirements of the open science community. For AI applications, the leap forward will be even larger with Horizon, with more than 100x improvement over Frontera. Horizon will go into operation in 2026.

SDC Austin, located in Round Rock, Texas, is the newest campus in the Sabey portfolio. Upon completion, the campus will have a critical capacity of over 85 megawatts and a footprint of 430,000 square feet. The campus is being built to accommodate high-density deployments, such as those required for AI applications, with low-cost renewable power.

“We are excited to announce Sabey as the home for Horizon and future LCCF systems,” said Dan Stanzione, Executive Director of TACC and Associate Vice President for Research at UT Austin. “We have entered a unique partnership with Sabey to leverage all the advantages of colocation with our very specific needs for cutting edge, high-density supercomputing. The demands of AI have driven the commercial data center space to look more like supercomputing data centers—liquid cooling, high density, and high efficiency. We look forward to an innovative and productive partnership as we venture off campus and work ever more closely with the private sector.”

“We are thrilled to partner with TACC on Horizon by delivering the robust infrastructure necessary for this groundbreaking supercomputer,” said Mark Noonan, Senior Vice President of Revenue for Sabey Data Centers and UT Austin graduate. “Our innovative design, which integrates both liquid and air cooling, allows us to support the extreme densities that Horizon demands while meeting our sustainability goals.”

The LCCF is a distributed project that will collaborate with four science centers across the country to leverage their deep expertise within the nation's cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.

Horizon will include a significant investment in specialized accelerators to enable state-of-the-art AI research and more general-purpose processors to support the diverse needs for simulation-based inquiry across all scientific disciplines. In addition to Horizon, LCCF will provide a range of large-scale data storage systems and interactive computing capabilities.

Beyond the hardware, the project will deploy a wide suite of software and services collectively designed to maximize the utility of LCCF and enable new usage modes for broad classes of applications. Access to the facility will be open to all scientists and engineers nationwide with allocations to the facility determined through open peer-reviewed processes.

Sabey Data Centers Austin is located at 1300 Louis Henna Blvd in Round Rock, TX.

About Sabey Data Centers:

With a portfolio of more than four million square feet of mission-critical space, Sabey Data Centers is one of the largest privately-owned multi-tenant data center owners/developers/operators in the United States. Sabey specializes in scalable, custom-built data center solutions recognized for their efficiency, low total cost of ownership, operational maturity and sustained uptime. Sabey provides sustainable data center services to many of the world's top financial, technology and healthcare companies. The company is a joint venture between Sabey Corporation and National Real Estate Advisors, LLC, acting as the investment manager on behalf of its institutional clients.

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TACC partners with Sabey Data Centers for Horizon, the largest academic supercomputer for open science, launching in 2026. #Supercomputing #AI #SabeyDC