So goes the battle to have some control over data centers.
This is just the beginning of the data center revolution in Hood County, a rural community of 62,000 people about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. Developers have proposed eight data centers spanning over 7,600 acres, or 12 square miles. While it’s unclear how much power all of the facilities would require, the Comanche Circle data center, plus two other smaller projects from the same developer, could use up to 3 gigawatts of electricity at full capacity, according to its developer — enough to power about 3 million homes. Some of the power could be generated by a new on-site gas plant, and some will likely come from the state’s power grid, according to the project’s concept plan.
Comanche Circle will need an initial one-time “flush and fill” starting next year of 95 million gallons of water for its seven-year buildout, and then 150,000 gallons per day — equivalent to the average use of 500 U.S. households, according to the minutes of the local water district board meeting where the developer made its request. In an email to The Texas Tribune, the developer said that the number submitted to the district board was incorrect and his three data centers combined would use “less than 50,000 gallons per day of groundwater” at full build out.
Hood County locals are relentless in their fight against the data centers, packing county meetings and town halls and voicing their fierce opposition to the facilities threatening to transform their charming, small-town community.
But, county officials say their hands are tied in their ability to stop or slow development. Two efforts by Hood County commissioners to pass a moratorium on data centers failed, as a state lawmaker warned they were acting outside of their authority. And the county has been sued twice by developers — after the commission rejected one data center’s concept plan, citing a lack of information about critical considerations like where they’d get their water from, and then tabled a vote on another.
“I was elected by the people to represent their opinion,” Kevin Andrews, a Hood County commissioner who has lived in the county for two decades, said in an interview. “But I also have to follow the law … and not get the county sued.”
Data center developers are more frequently choosing rural, unincorporated areas like Hood County because it’s an easier path to build, experts say. In Texas, counties typically don’t have the power to block development — unlike city officials who wield zoning authority.
“Texas has always viewed counties as rural toddlers that can’t be trusted with full powers,” said Robert Paterson, a professor at UT-Austin who specializes in land use and environmental planning.
Nearly half of the planned data centers in Texas are set to be built in unincorporated areas, free of city regulations, according to an analysis by the Tribune. This marks a shift as most existing data centers are clustered in cities and only 12% are currently in unincorporated areas.
At least one county, which appears to be the first in Texas, recently placed a one-year pause on data center construction, moving ahead despite the legal risks. The action has already prompted a lawsuit against Hill County and its three commissioners by a data center developer seeking $100 million in damages.
Today, Hood County has the sixth most planned data centers among Texas counties; per square mile, it ranks third. It’s been a magnet for developers because of the cheap land, available power, fiber lines and, importantly, its lack of local business restrictions.
“We love liberty and love a lack of regulation,” said Greg Harrell, chair of the Hood County GOP, at a town hall earlier this year. “Data centers are taking advantage of it… They saw an opportunity.”
[…]
The explosion of development is driven by the newest wave of data centers, known as “hyperscalers,” designed to support artificial intelligence computing facilities with thousands of servers, which are much bigger than current data centers that were largely built for cloud storage. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Open AI are behind planned projects in West Texas and Central Texas.
“Texas is a great state to do business. All of that really has come together to help make Texas, again, one of the national leaders in digital infrastructure,” said Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy with the Data Center Coalition.
Data center developers say their projects will bring billions of dollars of new property on the tax rolls, work training opportunities, job creation and private investment in communities. One company told Hood County commissioners it could potentially increase the county’s tax base anywhere from $5 billion to $20 billion.
However, some commissioners and residents remain skeptical, saying the benefits are uneven, and data centers create few permanent jobs after their labor-intensive construction is finished. For example, one Hood County data center proposal shows a peak construction workforce of 2,000 dropping to a permanent workforce of 220, according to the project’s concept plan.
Hood County Commissioner Dave Eagle said there are “too many unanswered questions” about data centers, and they’re being asked to greenlight plans with incomplete information about their impact on the community.
The Tribune reviewed hundreds of pages of concept plans, lawsuits and reviewed hours of testimony from commissioners court meetings to piece together information about the projects. All but one of the seven data center proposals submitted to Hood County omitted estimates for power use; only four noted a potential power source. Just five of the concept plans included projections for water consumption and six listed options for where they would get their water. The eighth project was annexed into the City of Granbury, which had not received any development plans, according to a spokesperson.
Despite the backlash from residents, some Hood County commissioners are increasingly convinced there’s little they can do to stop data centers as more proposals roll in.
“[Data centers] snuck up on us,” Eagle said at a town hall meeting in February. “We don’t understand it and we need more information.”
There’s a lot more, so read the rest. I’ve been writing about data centers for awhile and the various ways their construction has caused disruption and discontent. A lot of this is happening in red rural counties, which is an obvious political problem for Republicans. It’s worse for counties than for cities, which have more legal leeway, at least for now. It’s also happening in the same places where cryptomining has been causing more problems. The residents in these places have a very legitimate complaint about not being heard.
I continue to see this as an issue for Democrats to run on. In this story, some of the resistance is coming from the local Republican Party Chair and from the Republican candidate for County Judge, who is aiming to succeed the retiring incumbent. But it’s the Legislature and its uncaring outsiders like the ubiquitous Paul Bettencourt that are putting the boot on them – while providing big tax breaks to the rapacious data center owners – and the best they can get from the likes of Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick is some vague talk about looking into the issue. I really want to see the big three of Talarico, Hinojosa, and Goodwin showing up in places like Hood County to say “the current crew isn’t listening to you and only cares about the big money interests that want to bulldoze all your land, but we hear you and we will work with you”. It’s an opportunity that we can’t afford to miss.
Given that one Hood County community defeated an incorporation election to give itself more powers to defeat a cryptomine, I wouldn’t hold my breath on this being a winning tactic for state lege Democrat candidates, or gov candidates, instead.
A lot of those people will remain fine with bitching about crypto, and now data centers, and Democrats. And wind farms causing cancer.