On the surface, a recently proposed data center in Bastrop County is planning to do everything right.
The developer isn't requesting an outrageous amount of water, according to conservation experts. They're a building a power plant. They're constructing in a rural area, out of the way of most neighborhoods.
And yet, at an Aug. 20 town hall meeting in Rockne, more than 100 people crowded around long tables in a church community hall to oppose the development.
Data centers have become public enemy No. 1 in Texas. Residents across the Austin-area have held protests, passed out anti-data center fliers and pushed city council meetings past midnight opposing projects. A Facebook group created just three months ago called Texans United Against Data Centers already has over 43,000 members.
As data center development picks up, Texans are wondering how they can be built more sustainably and be better neighbors to the communities they build in.
Enough propaganda
Even as developers work to respond to concerns, issues with transparency and honesty have degraded public trust.
Bastrop community members want to know what kind of work the proposed facility will do and who will operate the facility once it's built. Some are also frustrated with ways that the data center has been advertised. On a billboard posted on the side of Highway 71, an image of a firefighter is accompanied by text that reads "tax revenue from data centers help fund his salary."
But in fact, most of the firefighters in the region are volunteers, according to data collected by Texas A&M last November.
"It's just propaganda," Natalie Aboudaoud, a community business owner said. " What's really happening is just dishonest and definitely would be detrimental to this community."
Community members were also upset with proposed tax cuts that the development would receive. But just hours before the town hall, developers dropped those tax break requests.
Some residents think that's a sign of how developers have misjudged the residents of Bastrop and the strength of their opposition to data centers.
" They've totally misunderstood and underestimated Bastrop, and we've shown it here," Jeanette Shelton, a Bastrop resident, said. "We're only getting started."
Residents aren't opposed to development or blind to the potential tax benefits, but they don't want it in their backyards. Even with developers promising "smarter infrastructure" and "transparency" locals still feel like they're not being heard.
Water wishlists
Data centers can use millions of gallons of water a day, but they don't have to.
Margaret Cook, the vice president of water and community resilience at the Houston Advanced Research Center think tank, said data centers being built in water-scarce areas like Texas can limit their water use for things like air conditioning and flushing toilets if they use a closed-loop system paired with air chillers.
Cook said data centers would use less water if state leaders created regulations and incentives for developers such as requiring them to pay the cost of hooking up to a local water system, use non-potable water when possible and ensure local communities have enough water for residential use before a data center moves in.
Above all, the policy change Cook is fighting for is requiring data centers to be transparent about their water use. She said not knowing how much water data centers are demanding from Texas lakes and aquifers could cause communities to overestimate their supply.
"The issue is not that there are other water users," she said. "The issue is that those water uses already exist, and we're adding data centers on top of them, and we're adding them at a rate that we've never seen before. And we need to have the information to be able to plan for that."
The state tried to get estimates of water usage from data centers, but the majority of them didn't reply to the survey.
But some companies, including the tech mammoth Google, say they are trying to be more transparent in their sustainability efforts.
"Communities deserve to know how much water data centers use and water planners need to know how much water data centers use,"
Speaking to lawmakers at a June hearing for the Texas House Committee on Natural Resources, Ben Townsend, Google's global head of infrastructure strategy and sustainability, said water should not be a "black-box" topic for data centers.
"Communities deserve to know how much water data centers use and water planners need to know how much water data centers use," he said.
Townsend said Google began disclosing that data publicly in 2022 — at which point the company reported using 93.3 million gallons of water for its Texas data center projects. That number jumped to 135.8 million gallons in 2023.
Google has not publicly disclosed its Texas water usage for 2024 or 2025 yet, nor did it respond to requests for that information.
Townsend also said communities should feel empowered to bring a water "wishlist" to developers looking to build data centers in their neighborhoods.
"They have room in their budgets to also help fund public water infrastructure and positive water outcomes for communities," he said.
Townsend said all of Google's data centers being built in Texas will be cooled with air instead of water. But by saving water, data center developers are running into a new problem: finding the power.
Demystifying the 'BYOG' promise
Texas politicians are wary of the strain data centers will put on the state's grid. Gov. Greg Abbott is telling data centers to "bring their own power." That's part of what motivated the developers in Bastrop County to propose a power plant for the data center.
But Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, said the "concept of BYOG or bring your own generation" can be a bit complicated.
"It's not as simple as, you know, just going down to Home Depot and buying a generator or something like that," Rhodes said.
That's because developers need to ensure that whatever power source they choose is reliable enough to support their data center operations.
"In the industry, we call [it] 'five nines' of reliability — like 99.999% of the time, they want to get power," Rhodes said. "Any given power plant is not going to be that reliable, and so if you want to completely serve your own systems, you might need to build not one, but two, maybe three power plants the same size.""
Rhodes said building these power plants can also be a challenge. As the demand for data centers grows, so does the demand for power generating technologies. That has caused backlogs for some companies that produce gas turbines and transformers, including GE Vernova.
"If you're not already in line for a power plant, GE Vernova says you're not getting one till the 2030s," Rhodes said. "So it's kind of being stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of the grid can't move fast enough — maybe I'll try to go get my own power plants. Well, everybody else wants to buy power plants."
All the proposed data centers in Texas are collectively asking for more than 400 gigawatts of power. In the next five years, the first batch of data centers want to bring 200 gigawatts of power online.
UT Austin engineering professor Michael Webber said adding that much capacity to the grid is "impossible, implausible and unnecessary," because delays in raw materials will slow data center growth down.
But that doesn't mean data center development will come to a screeching halt.
Webber thinks developers are going to throw a bunch of money at the grid to start generating new power as fast as possible, which means more oil drilling, natural gas production, solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines.
“In fact, [they] might enhance our grid. And I would say that's the goal. Let's get the rich companies to pay to upgrade the grid.”
That will mean more pollution, noise, and tearing down green spaces and interrupting wildlife, he said.
Despite all that, he said he's hopeful.
"If we install a lot of data centers and they are efficient and they use closed loop dry cooling, they will not hurt our grid or our water resources," he said "In fact, [they] might enhance our grid. And I would say that's the goal. Let's get the rich companies to pay to upgrade the grid."
Just like Townsend, the sustainability representative from Google, Webber said communities should negotiate with developers that want to build data centers in their neighborhoods.
"We're at a magic moment where data centers are in a rush and have a lot of money, and we have a lot of needs, and we could trade on that where we say, 'Here are the needs we'd like you to fulfill in exchange for letting you move quickly,'" he said.
A little regulation goes a long way
Dan Stanzione, director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, said it's possible for data centers to be better neighbors by using more sustainable practices.
Many servers inside the TACC are cooled using water from a million-gallon storage tank that was filled in 2012 and hasn't been refilled since, Stanzione said. TACC is also experimenting with cooling some of its servers in mineral oil — which doesn't use any water.
Stanzione said power usage is a "real concern" for all data centers, but TACC is offsetting its carbon footprint by purchasing renewable energy credits, which ensure the data center is run on wind and solar power. TACC also stores chilled water in a tank underground so it doesn't need to cool the water on hot afternoons, when the state's grid is under the most stress.
TACC is smaller than many of the data centers being actively built in Texas. But Stanzione said even big projects don't have to be resource intensive — as long as they don't build "as cheaply as possible."
"I think a lot of the sort of really bad perceptions of data centers is there were a lot of ones that were built fairly irresponsibly in the cryptocurrency mining era of data centers," Stanzione said.
Stanzione said he's hopeful Texas lawmakers will pass data center regulations next session and stop allowing "the worst practices to proliferate."
"I'm not saying there are no issues with building a lot of big data centers. I'm just saying that a little regulation might go a long way," he said. "How do we shape the market so that it serves us instead of exploits us?"
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