Project Cosmos • Four Points, Austin
Fifty Megawatts in the Filing. Seventy at the Town Hall.
What the paperwork says about the old 3M building, who is actually on the lease, and what to watch next.
Updated September 25, 2026
If you drive 2222 past River Place, you have watched the parking garage at the old 3M campus come down.
Trucks since February. A sound screen going up where the garage used to be. A building that sat empty for seven years and very much does not anymore.
Nearly 400 of your neighbors packed a room on September 17 to ask what is going in there. My husband was one of them. He came home with a lot of notes and not many answers.
I spent the same few weeks asking the same question a different way, by reading the financial filings instead of the press statements.
Here is the thing that jumped out at me. Every time a new document surfaces, the number gets bigger.
Before we go further: I live and work in this corner of Austin and I sell houses here. I have a stake in how this turns out, which is exactly why I would rather show you filings than opinions, and tell you plainly where I run out of road.
The number keeps moving
In the SEC filing: 50 megawatts of "critical IT capacity."
At the town hall: approximately 70 megawatts total. SB Energy told residents the 50 covers computing and roughly another 20 covers offices and other building uses.
That second number matters, and it is worth understanding why the first one was never the whole story.
SB Energy’s own filing defines critical IT capacity as the power running the data halls and computing equipment, specifically excluding cooling, lighting and other building systems. So 50 megawatts was always the computers, not the electric bill.
None of this means anyone lied. Projects get designed, plans get revised, and a bond prospectus asks a different question than a neighborhood meeting does. But if you have felt like the answer keeps changing, you are not imagining it. It does.
There is a name on the lease, and it is not Graphcore
While everyone was arguing about what to call the building, I went looking for who signed for it.
SB Energy filed paperwork with the SEC on August 31 to take the company public. Buried in the exhibit list is the lease for our building.
The tenant is Silver Bands 3 (US) Corp.
Not Graphcore. Not Arm. Not SB Energy. A company almost nobody has heard of, on the hook for fifteen years and roughly $2.5 billion in rent.
So I went looking for Silver Bands.
What I found was a shelf of empty boxes
Silver Bands 3 has no employees. No website. It does not build anything.
It also has siblings.
Silver Bands 6 is the entity SoftBank used to buy Ampere Computing, a chip maker, for $6.5 billion.
Silver Bands 4 is the entity SoftBank used to take over BALYO, a French warehouse robotics company.
Silver Bands 3 leased a building in Four Points.
A chip company, a French robot company, and our old 3M campus. There is no theme because there is no theme. These are numbered shell corporations SoftBank pulls off a shelf when it needs a signature.
That is not sinister. Every large company does this. But it does mean the name on the lease was never going to tell you who walks into that building in the morning, and it is part of why "who is the tenant" has been such a slippery question all summer.
The order things happened
November 7, 2025. SoftBank signs the fifteen-year lease.
February 2026. Construction starts.
March 20, 2026. SB Energy actually buys the building, for $285.6 million.
April 2026. The neighborhood is walked through what is planned.
September 17, 2026. Four hundred people fill a room.
Read the first three again.
The lease was signed four and a half months before the buyer owned the property, and about five months before anyone around here was briefed.
That is not improper. It is how large commercial deals work. But it answers a question a lot of neighbors have been circling, which is how much of this was ever genuinely open for discussion. By the time the conversation started, the building had a tenant, a term and a rent number.
So is it a data center or an R&D center?
Both, and I can show you the sentence that settles it.
S&P Global, rating the bonds, calls the property a "single-tenant wholesale data center" with 50 megawatts of computing capacity. Five stories. Three data halls, office space, a bench lab, a visitor lab, storage, equipment yards.
And then, about those data halls: "These data halls will be used for R&D for SoftBank’s AI strategy."
There it is. Data center infrastructure, used for research and development.
At the town hall, SB Energy’s Jaime Carlson drew the distinction a different way, telling residents Cosmos will not provide third-party computing services the way their large commercial data centers do. That is a meaningful difference in use. It does not change the infrastructure, which is what determines power draw, cooling and noise.
Both descriptions have been accurate this whole time. A lot of this summer has been two true statements talking past each other.
The part that is genuinely unresolved is not what to call it in a press release. It is who at the City decides how this gets classified, and under what rules, when Austin has no data center land use category at all. Council has directed staff to develop one. It does not exist yet.
What this actually means for your house
Let me be straight rather than reassuring.
Power
Seventy megawatts total, per SB Energy at the town hall.
For scale, our building is the smallest project in SB Energy’s portfolio by a wide margin. They are building 308 and 445 megawatt projects in Milam County and multi-thousand megawatt campuses in Ohio. Ours is well under one percent of their total.
But portfolio share is not the number that affects you. Seventy megawatts landing on Austin Energy infrastructure near your neighborhood is the number that affects you. Both things are true, and anyone using the first to wave off the second is selling something.
SB Energy said it cannot predict actual consumption because Graphcore’s computing demand will vary. That is probably honest and it is also unsatisfying, because a facility that draws 70 at peak and 20 on a normal Tuesday is a very different neighbor than one that runs flat out.
Austin Energy told residents that large customers pay for the studies and infrastructure upgrades needed to serve them, and that customer-specific usage data is generally confidential. Which means the public may never get a clean number.
Water
This is the one the neighborhood group surfaced, and credit to them for it.
SB Energy said the cooling is closed-loop chillers, with an initial fill of roughly 450,000 gallons that then recirculates. They said annual consumption should be at or below what the former 3M campus used.
Austin Water said 3M used approximately 24 million to 36.6 million gallons a year between 2012 and 2018.
So "at or below 3M" is technically reassuring and practically enormous. It is a ceiling, not an estimate, and the ceiling is tens of millions of gallons. Austin Water is reviewing revised plans and expects to require additional water-use analysis.
Two follow-up questions came up that nobody answered. What is actually in that closed-loop water, since coolant is not just water. And what happens if it leaks this close to the watershed.
Noise is not one thing, and "we will comply" does not say which
This is where I would put my attention if I lived on the near side of 2222.
SB Energy said it will comply with the noise requirements governing the property. I believe them. That still leaves the question that actually determines whether you hear this thing from your back porch.
I am not an acoustician. But the distinctions below are the ones acoustics people make, and knowing them changes what you ask for at the next meeting.
Most noise rules measure the wrong thing for a building like this. Standard municipal limits are written in A-weighted decibels, or dBA. That scale deliberately discounts low frequencies, because human ears are less sensitive to them at low volume. Large mechanical equipment, chillers, pumps, big fans, produces exactly that low-frequency energy. A facility can pass a dBA test at the property line and still produce a low hum that carries into houses. C-weighted measurement, dBC, captures it. Ask which one is being used.
Low frequency travels, and walls do not stop it. High-frequency sound fades with distance and gets absorbed by trees, fences and building materials. Low frequency does not. It is why you hear the bass from a car three blocks away and nothing else. A sound screen around a mechanical yard helps a great deal with the high end and much less with the low end.
A tone is more annoying than a hum at the same volume. Rotating equipment produces narrow-band tonal noise, a distinct pitch rather than a wash. People find that far more intrusive than broadband sound measuring the same number. Some noise codes add a penalty for tonal content. Many do not. Ask whether this one does.
Vibration is a separate thing with separate units. It is not measured in decibels at all. It travels through ground and structure rather than air. A noise ordinance typically does not address it. That is exactly why the 1985 agreement on this parcel matters, because it reportedly covers both.
Our nighttime background is unusually quiet. Out here, next to a preserve, the ambient level at 2 a.m. is very low. An absolute decibel limit written for a general urban condition does not account for that. A sound that would vanish downtown is conspicuous here. Some codes set limits relative to background instead of as fixed numbers. Ask which approach applies.
One detail cuts against the data center framing. S&P notes there are no service-level provisions in the lease, which means this building is not required to maintain the near-constant uptime a commercial data center is. That is a real difference, and it may mean less backup generation than people are picturing. It is still worth asking directly, because generator testing is one of the louder recurring events at a facility like this and nobody has said whether there will be any.
The one real protection you already have
Council Member Marc Duchen pointed out at the town hall that this parcel carries a 1985 Planned Development Agreement with specific noise and vibration standards that are in some respects stricter than Austin’s general rules, and said he expects them enforced.
That agreement is the most concrete leverage residents currently have. Austin has no data center rules yet. The 1985 agreement exists right now and applies to this property specifically.
Somebody should pull that document and post the actual noise and vibration language publicly. Until people can read the standard, nobody can tell whether it is being met.
The studies to watch for
This is the part I would keep an eye on, because the answers will show up in paperwork long before anyone announces them.
An acoustical analysis, if one is required as a site plan condition or under the 1985 agreement. If one gets produced, look at where the measurements were taken, whether they were at homes or only at the property line, whether they were taken at night, whether equipment was modeled at full load, and whether low-frequency and tonal content were evaluated separately.
The revised site plan, submitted days before the town hall. Austin Water is already reviewing it. It is a public record once filed, and it is the document that will show what actually changed.
Austin Energy’s load and interconnection study. Large customers pay for these. It will describe the infrastructure needed to serve 70 megawatts, which tells you where equipment lands and how close to neighborhoods.
The City’s land use determination. Somebody at the City decides how this gets classified. Council has directed staff to develop data center rules, though none exist yet. What gets adopted, and whether it applies to a project already under construction, is worth following.
Balcones Canyonlands Preserve. Residents raised the preserve’s seasonal restrictions on noise-generating activity near the caves and asked how those apply to a site next door. I have not verified what those restrictions say, or whether they reach this parcel, which sits beside the preserve rather than inside it. It is a good question with an answer somewhere in the City and County files.
A single daytime sound reading at the property line will satisfy a checklist and tell you almost nothing about what your house sounds like in February at two in the morning. If you push for one thing, push for continuous monitoring at homes, after the equipment is running, with results made public.
Your home value
People ask me this constantly, so here is the honest answer: it is too early to see anything in the numbers.
What I am watching is not the data center headline. It is whether substation work creates visible infrastructure near neighborhood entrances, whether the sound screen does its job, whether low-frequency noise turns out to be real, and whether a Phase 2 shows up. Those are the things that change how a buyer feels standing in a driveway. A building full of engineers is not.
I will report what I actually see in the market rather than what I assume.
What still is not answered
The town hall closed some gaps and opened others. Still outstanding:
- What the facility will actually draw day to day, not just at design capacity.
- Whether the computing operation can grow well beyond Graphcore’s initial needs.
- What the revised site plan, submitted days before the town hall, actually changes.
- Whether the earlier site plan really did state no change in use or water demand.
- What is in the closed-loop coolant, and what the spill plan is.
- Whether noise compliance will be measured in dBA or dBC, and at the property line or at homes.
- Whether the applicable standard includes a penalty for tonal noise.
- Whether the facility will have backup generators at all, and how often they would be tested.
- Whether an acoustical analysis has been required, and whether it will be public.
- What the 1985 agreement’s noise and vibration provisions actually say.
- What fire suppression looks like next to the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve.
- Whether the preserve’s seasonal noise restrictions reach this parcel at all.
- Whether there will be independent monitoring once operations begin.
- Whether there are any limits on the time of day testing happens.
- Whether Graphcore works under the Silver Bands 3 lease or a separate agreement.
None of that is a reason to assume the worst. It is a reason to ask for specifics.
Where Graphcore fits, as best anyone can tell
SB Energy confirmed in August that Graphcore, a SoftBank-owned chip company, is putting its U.S. engineering headquarters here, with about forty people already on site.
Graphcore is not mentioned anywhere in the SEC filing. It is not a party to the lease.
What the documents establish: Silver Bands 3 is the tenant. The financed building is single-tenant. Graphcore is a SoftBank company that SB Energy confirms is on the campus.
What they do not establish: whether Graphcore occupies under the Silver Bands 3 lease or a separate one, whether it sits inside the financed building or elsewhere on the property, or which other SoftBank companies might follow.
My read: Silver Bands 3 holds the building and Graphcore is one of the SoftBank companies using it. That is what a shell tenant is for. You can move your companies around without reopening a fifteen-year lease.
The documents do not prove that. I emailed these questions to SB Energy on September 18 and will publish their answers here when I have them.
Some summaries of this project, including AI-generated ones, describe Graphcore as the physical tenant occupying under the Silver Bands lease. That may well turn out to be right. No public filing says it.
It connects to the question I think matters most long term, which the neighborhood group also raised: what happens if Graphcore’s needs change, or a different tenant ends up in the building. The lease structure is built to make exactly that easy.
What you can actually do this week
The neighborhood coalition has a community survey open through October 5. It is anonymous, and it is how the issues residents care about get documented for the City. If you have five minutes, that is the highest-leverage five minutes available right now.
If you have technical background in acoustics, mechanical systems or utility engineering, this is a moment where that matters. Most of what happens next turns on documents that are hard to read and easy to wave through, and very few people are going to read them carefully.
SB Energy has also put up a site for the property at highpoint2222.com.
The documentation, for anyone who wants it
What I read and what I did not. I read SB Energy’s S-1 filing and S&P’s ratings report directly. I read the exhibit list naming the lease and the filing’s description of its terms. I have not read the lease agreements themselves. They are referenced in the filing, not published in it. I did not attend the September 17 town hall. Details from that evening come from my husband’s account and the written recap circulated by the neighborhood coalition.
The exhibits:
Exhibit 10.29, Cosmos Lease Agreement, dated November 7, 2025, between SE Cosmos, LLC and Silver Bands 3 (US) Corp.
Exhibit 10.30, First Amendment to that lease, dated March 25, 2026, same parties, with SoftBank Group Capital Limited joining for specified provisions.
The terms:
| Term | Detail |
|---|---|
| Landlord | SE Cosmos, LLC, indirectly owned by SB Energy |
| Tenant | Silver Bands 3 (US) Corp. |
| Guarantor | SoftBank Group Capital Limited |
| Signed | November 7, 2025 |
| Term | 15 years, plus one 10-year option at the tenant’s election |
| Structure | Triple-net, operating expenses passed to the tenant |
| Expected rent | Roughly $2.5 billion over the initial term |
| Annual escalation | 3% |
| Guaranty exposure | Roughly $2.9 billion anticipated |
| Rent starts | Earlier of December 11, 2026 or the phase entering service |
| Critical IT capacity | 50 MW |
| Total design capacity | Approximately 70 MW, per SB Energy at the September 17 town hall |
The purchase:
$285.6 million total, from Karlin River Place, LLC. That is $1 million earnest money, a $19 million deposit on March 5, and $265.6 million at closing on March 20. Earnest money had been put down during 2025.
The financing:
About $999 million in senior secured notes due 2031, plus roughly $182 million in equity, refinancing a $342 million bridge used to buy the property and start construction. S&P calls SoftBank Group Capital "a material and irreplaceable revenue counterparty," meaning the project’s credit rides on SoftBank rather than on how the building performs.
The build:
Turner Construction under a guaranteed maximum price contract. Austin Energy upgrading the substation in phases. First major phase expected complete spring 2027.
The portfolio:
| Project | Critical IT | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cosmos Technology Campus | 50 MW | Travis County, TX | Construction |
| Milam County 1 | 308 MW | Milam County, TX | Construction |
| Milam County 2 | 445 MW | Milam County, TX | Construction |
| PORTS-Pike Buildings 1 to 9 | 4,248 MW | Pike County, OH | Contracted |
| PORTS-Pike Buildings 10 to 17 | 3,776 MW | Pike County, OH | Contracted |
| Total | 8,827 MW |
The Milam County buildings are leased to Orion DC I, LLC, which the filing calls "an affiliate of OpenAI." Ours is the only project in the portfolio with a SoftBank affiliate as tenant instead of an OpenAI one.
What I am not claiming
I am not an acoustics professional. The noise distinctions above are general principles, not an analysis of this facility. Nobody has published measurements or a study for this site, and until someone does, all anyone has is the standard and the questions.
I reviewed S&P’s report directly. Residents have also cited Fitch Ratings describing Cosmos as a data center. I have not read the Fitch report and am not characterizing it here.
The phrases "silicon development bench spaces" and "rack halls" appear in some coverage of this project. I could not find that language in either public S&P document I reviewed.
Campus size is in dispute. SB Energy has said 156 acres. Press reporting on county records says 107. I have not pulled the deed, so I am not using either number.
I have seen a per-megawatt cost figure described as a rent cap. The arithmetic does not support that reading, so I am not publishing the number.
The 1985 agreement governing this property has been described both as a Planned Development Agreement and as a site development agreement. I have not read it. Its noise and vibration provisions are worth someone pulling and posting in full.
And a correction to my own earlier work: I previously described Graphcore and Silver Bands 3 as holding two separate leases. The filing and the ratings report both describe a single-tenant lease with Silver Bands 3 as the tenant. Graphcore is not a party to it. I got that wrong and I have corrected the earlier post.
How I will keep this current
I check SB Energy’s SEC filings and the City of Austin permit record for this site monthly. Every update gets dated at the top of this page and noted here.
Sources
SB Energy, Inc. Form S-1, filed with the SEC August 31, 2026. S&P Global Ratings, Research Update: SE Cosmos LLC’s Senior Secured Notes, April 30, 2026. Data Center Dynamics, September 9, 2026, which first reported the Silver Bands 3 name. SoftBank Group Corp., Completion of Acquisition of Ampere Computing Holdings LLC, November 2025. Business Wire, Public Buy-Out Offer Followed by a Squeeze-Out on the Shares of BALYO Initiated by Silver Bands 4 (US) Corp., December 4, 2025. Four Points News, August 25, 2026. Community recap of the September 17 town hall circulated by Linda Bailey, Eowyn Gorman, Jennifer Oeltjen and River Place residents.
