The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) is looking to convert three offices into a data center.
In a posting listed by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, the TWC aims to complete "renovation/alteration" works at 12312 N Mopac Expressway in Austin, Texas.
Estimated to cost $479,000, the project will see three existing offices renovated to become one data room spanning 700 sq ft (65 sqm).
Construction is set to begin on May 1, 2025, and be completed by September 1, 2025. The design firm working on the project is CLK Architects & Associates.
The Texas Workforce Commission is a state agency that oversees and provides workforce development to employers and job seekers in the state.
The offices set to be renovated are owned by the TWC, having been used as an employment center, though they no longer seem to be listed on the TWC website.
TWC's headquarters are located at 202 E 15th Street in Austin, Texas, around 11 miles south of the newly planned data center conversion.
The TWC's 2026/2027 Legislative Appropriates request, published in September 2024, includes an Unemployment Insurance (UI) data center consolidation project. The request states that its mainframe hosts the TWC UI benefits and tax systems, and serves more than "700,000 claimants annually, processing nearly 800,000 unemployment insurance claims over seven million individual claim weeks and dispensing $2.9 billion in unemployment insurance benefits," while the tax system supports 670,000 employer accounts.
TWC notes that these systems are typically supported by federal funds, but funding has decreased and TWC is asking for $11 million in appropriations to support its operations.
The request also notes that many of TWC's "new automation projects" will be deployed in cloud environments "in addition to existing systems within the traditional data centers."
Austin has several data centers, with operators including Switch, Lumen, Digital Realty, CyrusOne, SkyBox, and LightEdge in the area. The city is also home to Tesla's 50,000 GPU Cortex supercomputer, which went live at the end of last year.
A former Department of Labor data center is currently up for sale in Austin, Texas.
