FTZ 252 Hands Fermi 988 Acres in the Texas Panhandle

FTZ News: Last week, in the middle of a hot afternoon in the Texas Panhandle, the Foreign-Trade Zones Board put out a short notice that probably fewer than a hundred people read carefully. Subzone 252B for Fermi, Inc. was approved. 988 acres at 688 FM 683, in the small town of Panhandle. The formal approval came on August 17 and appeared in the Federal Register two days later. The site falls under FTZ 252 in Amarillo and remains subject to the zone’s long-standing 2,000-acre activation limit.

To an outsider, it looks like routine paperwork. To the people who live in Carson County, the story is a little more complicated.

The Land and the Real Numbers

988 acres isn’t much by Texas standards. But when an entire FTZ is capped at 2,000 activated acres, handing nearly half of that capacity to one company means something. Fermi has been pushing Project Matador for years—a large data-center campus with natural-gas and modular nuclear power plants on the same ground. The idea is to build something like a private power grid that can handle the heavy load of artificial-intelligence computing.

Under agreements signed last year with Carson County and the Panhandle Independent School District, the first phase is expected to draw about one gigawatt of power. Three 500,000-square-foot data-center buildings. Instead of regular property taxes, the company will pay the county $3 per square foot of improvements, plus between $2,500 and $2,750 per megawatt of generation capacity. A Texas Commission on Environmental Quality clean-air permit for roughly six gigawatts of natural-gas generation was finalized earlier this year—one of the larger single-project authorizations issued in the Western Hemisphere.

Put those figures next to the national ones. In 2024, U.S. foreign-trade zones received nearly $963.8 billion in merchandise, exported $133.5 billion, and supported about 543,000 jobs. Roughly 82 percent of those jobs were in production, not simple warehousing. Texas has long ranked near the top in both merchandise value and employment.

What a Subzone Actually Delivers

A subzone doesn’t erase tariffs. It only changes when you pay them. Turbines, heat-recovery steam generators, transformers, switchgear, and dozens of other components can come in, sit in storage, or even be assembled without immediate duty payments. If they are re-exported, the duties stay at zero. If they enter the U.S. market for domestic use, the bill comes due. For a project that will import a large share of its equipment—much of it subject to Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs—the difference in cash flow can matter.

Fermi also filed a separate notification of proposed production activity for building modular nuclear and natural-gas power plants. The list of foreign-status components is long. Many of them will have to enter in privileged foreign status so the duty rate is locked in at the moment of admission. Subzone approval still doesn’t equal production authority, but at least the land is now cleared on the customs side.

Daily Life in Carson County

Carson County doesn’t have many people. The town of Panhandle itself is under 2,500. The nearest real labor market is Amarillo—about 131,000 nonfarm jobs and an unemployment rate hovering around 4 percent. Manufacturing employment has been soft in recent months. In a place like that, any project that promises construction work and then permanent jobs gets taken seriously.

Local officials have been careful. The school district signed an indemnity agreement so that if the tax breaks hurt school revenue, Fermi has to make up the difference. County commissioners weighed the abatement against those substitute payments. They know that if the project stalls, they’ve only added paperwork. If it moves forward, it could bring a tax base and jobs that have been scarce here for years.

The Bigger Pattern

The Fermi approval is one of dozens of actions the FTZ Board processes every year. In the same stretch of weeks the Federal Register carried similar subzone approvals in Puerto Rico and production notices in Illinois and Michigan. The FTZ program has been around since 1934—a response to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Ninety-two years later it is still one of the few federal tools that can be activated relatively quickly at the county level.

What has changed is the kind of projects asking for the designation. Earlier decades were mostly auto assembly and refineries. Now large data centers and dedicated power plants for artificial intelligence are in the queue. The Panhandle site is unusual because it openly pairs power generation with the computing load on the same piece of ground. Whether it actually delivers the “private grid” Fermi talks about is a question for engineers and investors. The FTZ stamp only removes one administrative hurdle.

For the people in Carson County the math is simpler. 988 acres by itself won’t transform the local economy. But in a region where population growth has been slow and steady manufacturing jobs hard to come by, every new industrial designation feels like another chance. The Federal Register notice is dry and bureaucratic. On the ground it reads more like a bet—on acres, megawatts, and the years ahead./.