Lambda Picks Oklahoma for a Data Center With Up to 1,000 Construction Jobs

Lambda, the AI cloud provider whose customers include Microsoft and Anthropic, said on September 27 that it will build a data center at the MidAmerica Industrial Park in Mayes County, Oklahoma. The company and local officials put the project at up to 1,000 construction jobs and roughly 100 permanent positions once it is running.

The site sits about 47 miles east of Tulsa, inside one of the largest industrial parks in the country and near the Google data center that has operated there since 2011. Electricity will come from the Grand River Dam Authority, the state-owned utility that manages more than 2,500 megawatts of hydroelectric, gas, coal, wind and solar generation. Lambda did not disclose the facility's electrical capacity, its construction budget, or a start date. Mayes County officials estimate about $500 million in tax payments over the next decade at current rates. It is Oklahoma's second major data center announcement this year, after Meta broke ground on a Tulsa campus in April.

GRDA chief executive Dan Sullivan said Lambda will fund the upfront infrastructure required to serve the project so that those costs are not passed on to other customers. That arrangement moves the interconnection work, meaning substation construction, medium-voltage feeders, protective relaying and switchgear, into the project's own scope rather than the utility's capital plan, which generally means it is bid and built by contractors working for the developer. Lambda also committed to running as a flexible load able to shift or reduce computing during peak demand, and to closed-loop cooling that keeps the mechanical plant on the same distribution system.

Oklahoma licenses electricians through the state Construction Industries Board. An unlimited journeyman license requires 8,000 verifiable hours of supervised experience, of which at least 4,000 must be commercial or industrial work, with up to 2,000 hours creditable from formal electrical education. A residential journeyman license requires 4,000 hours and does not transfer to this kind of job. Data center construction counts toward the commercial and industrial half, which is the practical reason these projects pull travelers and registered apprentices into counties that have never carried a workforce this size.

The announcement was framed around Oklahoma's Data Center Customer Ratepayer Protection Act of 2026, codified at 17 O.S. sections 900 through 906 and effective July 1. The statute covers new data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations and facilities whose primary function is artificial-intelligence computing that contract for 75 megawatts or more per facility, or in aggregate behind a single point of interconnection. It requires a developer buying land outside an industrial park or municipality to notify the Corporation Commission, county commissioners and adjacent property owners by certified mail within 60 days, and to file a state attestation form before the facility opens. The MidAmerica site is inside an industrial park.

Capacity, budget and schedule remain undisclosed, so the size of the electrical scope is still an estimate. The construction headcount is the one number on the table.