Tom Green County Targeted, San Angelo Partnering

Three data centers have targeted Tom Green County for possible sites.  Beacon Data Centers is the only one to identify itself.  They hope to build a giant data center in Dove Creek.  Residents told them to go away.

The City of San Angelo has been far more accommodating, working a land deal/annexing the area (March 2005), changing the zoning to allow data centers (January 2026) and approving zoning regulations relative to data center development (May 2026).  Developer Skybox/Emergent promotes the project as "built for speed" and having "exceptional municipal support."  

Data Centers are needed for AI and are being brought to us by the same people that created addictive and harmful social media and other predatory apps.  

Our leaders want the public to trust the developer any potential AI occupant.  

No thank you.  Developers are backed by big money intent on making bigger money.  Promises mean nothing.  The project is intended to make bank for its private equity underwriter (PEU) sponsor.  If so, it will be flipped in a few years and the people who brought the project to our area will be gone.

It could middle along, in which case the developer has to hold onto to the project, tweaking it for regular cash siphoning.  

The project could fail miserably and its keys be handed back to creditors.  If creditors don't want it, it becomes the city's problem as an abandoned piece of property with lots of toxic heavy metal equipment and tainted cooling water.

Tom Green County residents need a government champion, whether it be local, regional or state, to level the imbalance of power and advantage.  Texas, like most states, is set up to encourage such development via layers of tax breaks, fast tracking permits and even direct subsidy.

San Angelo residents need brakes to stop the oncoming train so its engine defects can be examined and fail safe's installed that actually protect residents.  There needs to be significant monetary penalties for failed promises and actual community harm.

The developer would say "we are just the building."  That building will use the energy of 750,000 homes and house unreliable, even dangerous AI. 

I speak for many when I say our area does not need or want hyper-scale data centers with their voracious power and water needs, their inflation boosting impact on goods and housing and their profit obsessed PEU owners/funders.  

Someone owes us a square deal, not one where we pay and pay and pay, both in money and loss of quality of life.  

Update:  Lake Tahoe communities are facing the prospect of no electricity due to a supplier redirecting its power to data centers.

The data center boom is rapidly sucking Nevada’s power grid dry, with an estimated 22 percent of the state’s total electricity generation capacity going toward the behemoth computing centers in 2024.

Texas, are you listening to the rapidly sucking sound to our west?