• Moratorium now!

• Not critical infrastructure

• Data centers are a military target

• Health effects are serious and lethal

• Increase of utility costs

• Drought

• Tax abatements

• Transparency

• We have to deal with this locally, now, not hope we can solve it next year through legislature

Moratorium Now!

The clearest path to exercise local control is a data center moratorium: a formal, legal pause on development.  The Caldwell County Commissioners Court passed a resolution on 5/14/26 with the following language, but it is only possible to enforce this language with an actual moratorium:

“No future data center project should proceed without a rigorous, independent assessment of:

A. Impacts on ERCOT grid reliability and transmission capacity;

B. Impacts on regional water availability and drought contingency planning;

C. Impacts on agricultural lands, rangelands, wildlife habitats, natural drainage patterns, and potential habitat

fragmentation, including effects on prime farmland, soil integrity, and stormwater runoff; D. Long-term infrastructure costs borne by taxpayers; and

E. Effects on surrounding residential, agricultural, and commercial land uses.”

Lawyers have different opinions on whether counties ‘can’ pass a moratorium. 

Hill County, outside Fort Worth, passed a data center moratorium. It takes courage to make moves in this confusing and overwhelming time. We should follow Hill County and put a moratorium on data center development now! 

Hill County Lawsuit: On 5/28/26 a data center developer launched a lawsuit to bully the Hill County Commissioners Court. We will continue to monitor the situation.

Slowing data center development is stopping data center development.  AI is overvalued and sooner or later there will be a market correction, with investment slowing. For this reason, even if a moratorium is eventually revoked by Abbott, the process is the point. Standing up to developers will likely scare investors and entire projects could go up in smoke. These projects are built using borrowed money based on promises of infinite AI market growth - this isn’t how the market works. The best way to slow development is directly, with a County moratorium.

From reporting on Hill County:

Commissioner Jim Holcomb : “The data center folks have found a sweet spot in the state that has limited regulations, limited enforcement…and they've come even faster than we can keep up with. I think it's imperative, given the empirical evidence of the data centers that have been developed here before, that we tap the brakes and we get our arms around what we're faced with and we do the research."

Holcomb, who voted for the pause, said the move was in “no way, shape or form a push to impair anyone’s right to do with their own property what they want to do with it.”

Before commissioners voted, County Attorney David Holmes cautioned them that they risk being sued by passing a moratorium. “You’re damned if you and damned if you don’t,” Holmes said.

Robert Paterson, a University of Texas at Austin professor who specializes in land use and environmental planning [...] said the county is on “good grounds” legally because its moratorium has an end date and county leaders expressed a need to study data centers’ potential risks to public health and safety.

Brassel said the court still felt a responsibility to put guardrails in place during what he called a “land rush” — even if it meant being the first county to test the limits of Texas law. He said he has talked to many county judges and they were waiting for someone to take this step first.

“Our hope and prayer was that [state leaders] take that vote as not a sign of defiance of the law, but as a plea for help to get some regulations in place to help protect our citizens.”

Not Critical Infrastructure

• The overwhelming majority of basic internet functionality, including essential services, are supported by existing data center infrastructure.

• Developers want regular people to believe their needs will be met by new data centers, but the current boom is fueled by speculative investment in dangerously-underregulated AI technologies being pushed by a handful of billionaires for their questionable objectives.

• Behind shell development companies, investment for data centers is typically Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon, or major AI firms

• Much of the technology being foisted on us is not desired by communities.

  • Ex. automated license plate readers, automatic facial detection and other privacy-eroding technologies, automated kill chain targeting

Data Centers are a Military Target

• But if it were “critical infrastructure”, a Caldwell County data center cluster as large as the so-called “data center capital of the world” outside of Washington DC could make our area a military target. 

• As seen during the US War on Iran, data centers have become a major bombing target in international war

Health effects are serious and lethal

The Caldwell County resolution mentions the health effects of data centers, below - how does Caldwell County plan to enforce these concerns without a formal moratorium or other concrete steps?

“[Caldwell County] opposes any data center development that fails to incorporate adequate safeguards to protect county resources and residents.

Counties…bear responsibility for protecting public health, safety, infrastructure integrity, and natural resources within their jurisdiction

[Caldwell County] opposes any data center development that fails to incorporate adequate safeguards to protect county resources and residents.”

More Information on Data Center Health Concerns:

• Heat Island

  • Recent research (University of Cambridge) shows data centers raise surface temperatures by an average of more than 3 degrees; in extreme cases, temperatures were more than 16 degrees higher

  • Data center heat islands can extend for more than 6 miles from the site

  • Heat stress is a major cause of death for livestock; increased temperatures would make farming and ranching more challenging in our region.

• Air Pollution

  • Living near a cluster of data centers is even worse for human health than living next to a gas-fired power plant (Virginia Commonwealth University); Caldwell County residents could be getting both.

  • Increase in smog and heat raises suicide risk (University of Utah)

  • Multiple data center projects in Caldwell Co. plan to build their own gas plants; Tract’s would generate twice the power of the largest gas plant in Texas.

  • On-site power plants at Caldwell County data centers would likely result in catastrophic health outcomes for residents.

    • Analysis of the onsite power generation from a 135 MW data center in Northern Virginia estimates up to $99 million of health damages each year from premature mortality, respiratory and cardiovascular disease.

  • Diesel generators - the dirtiest form of combustion, meant for actual emergencies

    • Back-up generators are tested regularly and used when the grid is strained, which could be quite often given that our current grid infrastructure cannot support so many large loads from data centers.

    • Generators emit fine particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and volatile organic compounds (VOC).

    • These pollutants cause asthma, heart attacks, dementia, cancer, lung disease.

    • Less than 1 GW of diesel generators inflict >%150 million in health costs in the “data center capital of the world” (Piedmont Environmental Council)

• Water contamination

  • Data centers use proprietary cocktails of chemicals to cool servers.  Coolant chemicals are kept secret with nondisclosure agreements, however they frequently contain hazardous substances; 

  • water discharged can carry harmful carcinogens (PFAS, glycol, and heavy metals).

    • PFAS are persistent, bioaccumulating poisons which are not removed by wastewater treatment..

• Noise

  • Data centers produce constant noise, which can reach 80-90 decibels

  • Persistent noise, even frequencies imperceptible to human hearing, can damage health; children and elderly are even more vulnerable

  • Chronic exposure to noise can cause or exacerbate cardiovascular disease; type 2 diabetes; sleep disturbances; stress; mental health and cognition problems, including memory impairment and attention deficits; childhood learning delays; and low birth weight. 

  • Livestock and other creatures are also sensitive to noise pollution.

Increase of utility costs

• Power bills near data centers go way up. A 2025 Bloomberg study showed that in areas with significant data center development, wholesale electricity costs rose by up to 267%! 

• New York City uses 5.5 GW of power on average.  If all five projects are constructed, the data centers in Caldwell County would use more electricity than the most populated city in the United States!

• TX grid capacity would need to more than double in the next few years to accommodate data centers. Due to large loads, ERCOT has proposed a new 765-kV transmission plan that will cost Texas just over $32 Billion; this cost would be passed off to ratepayers.

Drought

• Closed-loop cooling isn’t the issue: most water consumption in data centers is from power generation.

• How much water are these massive power plants going to use?  HARC (Houston Advanced Research Center) estimates 207 gal/MWh, which would amount to about 5 million gallons each day for a 1 GW data center.

• Some data center developers claim water consumption is a “security” secret and will not disclose their onsite use.

• New research from the University of Texas estimates data centers could use up to 9% of Texas’ water by 2040.

• Most of Texas’ river flow is effluent during much of the year.  Calling it ‘wastewater’ or ‘reclaimed’ confuses the issue - overdrawing and misusing will dry up local water either way.  Suggesting data centers use this water for their operations is not a solution.

Tax abatements

• City and County officials should not encourage data center developers when the people who elect them don’t want these projects in their community.

• Tax abatements matter for data center developers’ decisions to proceed. In April, representatives from Cloudburst Data Center admitted to the Guadalupe County Commissioners that their financing is borderline & they may not be able to proceed without tax abatements.  Denying tax abatements may be enough in some cases to stop a project.

• Prime and Edged have been offered tax abatements of millions of dollars.  Mustang Ridge is in the early stages of negotiation.  We don’t know if Caldwell is negotiating with Powerhouse.

• Caldwell County has consistently repeated a misunderstanding of municipal tax law, claiming that billions in improved property on the tax roll would paradoxically force the county into insolvency.  Giving data centers gigantic corporate handouts by asking them to pay a steeply discounted “Payment in Lieu of Taxes” rate is a supposed solution to this problem. This is based on a misunderstanding about the minutiae of state tax law.

  • .: Others threw cold water on Haden's claim. Despite the law's constraints, the influx of investment should still result in additional revenue outside of those limits based on how the law is structured, one tax expert said. If the tax base grows dramatically, the rate can lower dramatically, but that lower rate applies to a much larger base. Some are calling on the County to be more transparent about those cash-flow projections.

    “Texas’s 3.5% voter-approval limit is not a blanket cap on all new revenue, and new property value is treated differently under the no-new-revenue calculation. If the county is claiming that fully taxing new data centers would create a cash-flow crisis, it should show the tax-rate worksheet and a month-by-month cash-flow projection," Anthony Elmo, who works with Washington D.C.-based corporate and government accountability organization Good Jobs First, said in an email.

• Caldwell County government has refused to give a simple, dollar figure amount of county revenue that is set to be given away over the projected lifetime. Before any agreement is approved, the county should provide a plain-language “GASB 77-style” disclosure table showing, by project and by year:

  1. Estimated appraised value;

  2. Estimated taxable value without the abatement;

  3. Estimated county taxes that would otherwise be owed;

  4. Percent and dollar amount abated;

  5. PILOT amount expected;

  6. Net fiscal impact to the county;

  7. Required company performance obligations;

  8. Enforcement and clawback provisions.

• If the real purpose of tax abatements is to secure environmental, water, road, and operating standards, then the public should be able to evaluate whether giving up 50% of county taxes is the least-cost way to obtain those protections. A clear GASB 77-style accounting would also help residents understand the real cost of the abatement, rather than seeing only the PILOT revenue side of the transaction.

• Closed loop cooling is often presented as the primary example of data center developers’ concessions.  But all AI data centers being proposed in Texas already use closed loop cooling.  It’s the common standard.  This is just bad negotiation.

Transparency

• City and County governments are often the first to hear about development projects, and need to share what they learn with their community.  Why have most of us not heard about Mustang Ridge from the County Commissioners, when they are already in negotiations with them?

• People deserve to not be scrambling and overwhelmed. We need our elected officials to share information with the public, not signing NDAs.

We have to deal with this locally, now, not hope we can solve it next year through the legislature

Every elected official in Caldwell County should be publicly demanding the Texas Legislature to call for a Special Session to provide regulatory relief for local governments.

At the same time, it is simply not true that the only way to address things is through state-level policy. Everyone knows the State has primary regulatory power – and that they are unlikely to do anything serious about data center development, especially anytime soon.  Hill County has made it clear that some county officials believe that local people should have control over their own communities.  Caldwell County and its cities should do the same.  We need to make things happen here, now – not far away, at some point in the future.