A foreign trade zone has been drawn around the power plants Fermi is building in the Texas Panhandle, and the harder decision, on what may be made inside it, has not been taken

Approval came first and the interesting document is the older one.

The Foreign-Trade Zones Board approved Subzone 252B at Panhandle, Texas on August 17, on an application the City of Amarillo filed as grantee of Zone 252 on behalf of Fermi, Inc. Notice went on public inspection at the Federal Register on Tuesday morning and publishes on Wednesday. The approval runs to one page. It carries no acreage of its own, and it is subject to Zone 252's existing activation limit of 2,000 acres.

The acreage sits in the application notice from March, which put the proposed subzone at 988 acres at 688 FM 683, Panhandle. That notice also flagged something separate and larger, in a single sentence: a notification of proposed production activity had been submitted and would be published on its own.

What the zone is meant to build

That notification appeared on June 11 under docket B-64-2026, and its title says what is going up. A modular nuclear power plant and a natural gas power plant.

The finished products, in the Board's own summary, are a constructed nuclear power plant facility and a constructed natural gas power plant facility. The foreign-status component list is long and specific: gas fired turbines, steam turbines, heat recovery steam generators, steel bypass stacks, deaerators, liquid dielectric transformers and the oil that insulates them, switchgear, circuit breakers, disconnect switches, motor control centres, distributed control system panels, cooling towers, diesel generators, heat exchangers, stainless steel pipe and tube in two forms, refuelling machines, fuel elevator modules, spent fuel handling tools, fuel transfer tubes, steam generator boilers.

Against all of that, the duty the zone actually defers is modest. The Board gives the range as duty free to 6.7 percent.

The standing sentence

Then comes a paragraph this desk has now read four times in three weeks, in the same words, on Tesla's battery plants in California, on Intel at Chandler, on a solar module plant at Summerville and here. Certain of the materials are subject to duties under section 122, section 232 or section 301, depending where they are made, and the decisions behind those programmes require the merchandise to be admitted to the zone in privileged foreign status.

Privileged foreign status locks the classification and the rate at the moment goods enter the zone, and the duty falls due when they leave it for American commerce. It is what stops a zone working as a way around a tariff. The reason it is worth repeating on this one is the component list. Transformers, switchgear, steel pipe and stainless tube are precisely the goods those three programmes reach, so the zone works on a rate that tops out at 6.7 percent and stops at the rates that do not.

What has not happened

The subzone exists. The production has not been authorised, and the two are separate decisions on separate dockets. Tesla waited five and a half months between filing and a decision. Fermi filed on June 2, comment closed on July 21, and no authorisation has appeared in the Federal Register since.

Fermi Inc. told shareholders in its quarterly report on August 14 that it is developing its first campus, Project Matador, in Carson County, Texas, integrating approximately 11 gigawatts of private-grid power generation with large-scale AI data centre infrastructure, on roughly 5,236 acres held or to be held under a long-term lease from the Texas Tech University System. Panhandle is the county seat of Carson County. That report, filed three days before the Board acted, does not mention a foreign-trade zone anywhere.