Ask someone in River Place what is happening at the old 3M campus on River Place Boulevard and you will likely hear two different answers, both from the same company. To the city of Austin, the site at 6801 River Place Blvd is a research and development center, permitted for office and lab use. In a federal securities filing dated August 31, 2026, the same site is described as one of the company's "first wave of data centers." That gap is not a slip of language. It is the reason residents packed a middle school gymnasium on September 17 and left with more questions than they arrived with.
The building matters because of where it sits. The 156-acre campus borders River Place and Four Points, and the trucks, dust, and construction crews visible from nearby streets since mid-August are the first physical evidence of what has, until now, mostly been a paper trail. Understanding what that paper trail actually allows the city to do, and what it does not, is the more useful story here than settling on a single label for the building.
From Highpoint 2222 to Cosmos
3M vacated the property in 2019. Karlin Real Estate purchased it in 2021 and renovated it in 2024 under the name Highpoint 2222, with plans for a mixed-use campus that would have included retail space, housing, and space for tech and life science tenants, according to reporting from Community Impact. That plan changed on March 20, 2026, when SE Cosmos LLC, an entity tied to SB Energy, bought the property. SB Energy is a subsidiary of SoftBank Group.
By late August, the site had a new name and a new tenant. Graphcore, a UK-based AI chip and systems company also owned by SoftBank, announced it would locate its U.S. engineering headquarters there. Days later, SB Energy filed for an initial public offering with the SEC. That filing refers to the property as the Cosmos Technology Campus and lists it alongside two other SB Energy projects, one built for OpenAI in Milam County and another in which NVIDIA holds a strategic investment, as part of the company's first wave of data centers. The filing also discloses a 15-year lease with a SoftBank affiliate as tenant, with expected aggregate rent of approximately $2.5 billion over that term.
A rough timeline of how fast this moved:
- March 20, 2026 — SE Cosmos LLC closes on the property
- August 13, 2026 — Construction activity photographed on site
- August 25, 2026 — SB Energy names Graphcore as first tenant
- August 31, 2026 — SEC filing describes the campus as a data center
- September 8, 2026 — SB Energy meets with community members, avoids the term "data center"
- September 17, 2026 — Town hall at Four Points Middle School draws city, county, and utility officials
R&D Center or Data Center? The City Answered a Different Question
At the town hall, SB Energy's Jaime Carlson, head of commercialization and risk, told residents the site's zoning has not changed and that the company's public description, research, development, and engineering related to advanced AI compute, still stands. That description is technically accurate and also somewhat beside the point. Austin's building code does not classify a facility by what a company calls it in a press release. Under the 2024 International Building Code, a data center is defined by power density, specifically an IT load greater than 10 kilowatts and more than 20 watts per square foot of conditioned floor area. City staff reviewed SB Energy's permit application against that threshold, which means the same code that governs server farms also governs whatever is going into the old 3M labs, regardless of which name ends up on the door.
That distinction is why Austin City Council Member Mike Siegel, who represents District 7, told reporters the city could not pass retroactive zoning to force changes at a project that was already permitted before the ownership and use questions became public. His colleague Marc Duchen, whose District 10 includes the site, has since asked Austin Energy for more visibility into how the city tracks large commercial and industrial power customers, and has called for closing what he described as a gap in how projects like this get classified before construction starts rather than after residents notice the dust.
What a Site Plan Revision Does Not Require
Here is the detail that matters most if you live within a few miles of River Place Boulevard. According to Austin Development Services, site plan revisions do not require public notice. SB Energy submitted a revised site plan to the city the week before the September 17 town hall, and Austin Water confirmed it was still reviewing that plan and expects to require a water benchmarking application, a process used to project water demand and identify conservation opportunities. But that review happens inside city departments, not at a public hearing. The town hall residents organized through the 2222 Coalition of Neighborhood Associations was a community-driven event, not a formal step in the permitting process. Nothing about attending it or not attending it changes what SB Energy is entitled to build.
That is the mechanism worth understanding, more than the R&D-versus-data-center debate. The company's water and power use will be scrutinized by Austin Water and Austin Energy as part of routine utility processes, and residents will learn what is happening largely through local reporting and neighborhood associations rather than through a city-mandated comment period.
What the Numbers Actually Say
Two figures came up repeatedly at the town hall: water and electricity.
| Measure | Historic (3M, 2012–2018) | Projected (SB Energy, Cosmos) |
|---|---|---|
| Water use | 24 to 36.6 million gallons per year | At or below historic levels, per SB Energy; closed-loop chiller system with an initial fill near 450,000 gallons, then recirculation with periodic top-offs |
| Power capacity | Not applicable, office/lab load | 50 megawatts of critical IT capacity, enough to run roughly 40,000 households, plus an additional 25 megawatts for office use |
An earlier estimate circulated by a local group tracking the project, the Lake Austin Collective, put total power capacity near 70 megawatts, a figure that lines up closely with the 50-plus-25 breakdown SB Energy later gave residents directly. The water comparison is the one SB Energy has leaned on to reassure neighbors: if the company holds to 3M's historic range, the campus would not represent a net increase in demand on Austin Water's system, though the benchmarking review now underway is what will actually confirm that.
The bigger number came from Texas House District 47 Representative Vikki Goodwin, who attended the town hall and put the project in a statewide context.
"The state gave out $1 billion worth of tax incentives in 2025 to data centers, which is expected to increase to $3.5 billion over the next few years if this subsidy continues."
Goodwin also noted that Texas counties currently have little authority over data center land use decisions, a gap she said needs legislative attention alongside stronger disclosure requirements for energy and water sourcing.
What This Means If You Live Nearby
Construction is confirmed underway, first reported by the Austin Business Journal, with the first phase expected to finish by spring 2027. That gives River Place and Four Points residents roughly two more construction seasons before Graphcore's engineering teams move in. In the meantime, the most reliable way to track what changes at the site, whether that is truck traffic patterns, revised site plans, or new tenant announcements, is through 2222 CONA and continued coverage from Four Points News rather than waiting on a formal city notice, since none is required for most of what happens next.
The city itself is still catching up. Austin has only begun exploring citywide rules specific to data centers, and statewide, the Public Utility Commission's 2025 survey of 258 pending data center proposals got responses from just 17 percent of them, according to the Texas Tribune. Cosmos is not an outlier in that respect. It is one of the more visible examples of a pattern playing out across Texas, where the permitting and disclosure framework was built for a different kind of tenant than the one now arriving.
None of this changes what River Place looks like today. It does mean that the most accurate answer to "what's going up behind my neighborhood" is neither "just an R&D center" nor "just a data center," but a building whose classification depends on which document you are reading, built under a permit that predates the debate, on a site plan process that was never required to ask residents what they thought.
If you are weighing what a nearby development like this means for a home you own or one you are considering in River Place, Thompson Real Estate Group can walk through what is actually known, what is still in review, and how it fits into a longer-term view of the neighborhood. Initiate a Private Consultation when you are ready to talk specifics.
