layton Tucker’s family has owned a cattle farm in Lampasas, Texas, for four generations. In Texas, cattle prices are linked to rainfall, Tucker explained. In particularly bad drought years, like 2021-2024, there’s less hay. The price of cattle plummets.
“The closest hay we could find was five hours away, and that forced everyone to start selling off half of their herds,” Tucker remembered. “We had to sell off a significant number of our head of cattle. There just wasn’t enough water, wasn’t enough grass, wasn’t enough hay.”
Tucker is a 35-year-old Central Texas farmer, which is becoming something of a rarity these days. Growing up in a rural community, Tucker watched as local farmers were pushed out by large meat, veggie, and dairy corporations. John Deere and monopolizing product processors have price-gouged small farmers into not being able to afford the essentials, he said.
And now that Texas faces climbing annual temperatures, ever-worsening drought, and irrigation and livestock water demand already outpacing available supplies, a generation whose parents were farmers are now considering other careers.
“A lot of farmers are wanting to get out,” Tucker said. “To be frank, when farming is no longer affordable, when it’s no longer a middle-class way of life, people have to get out.”
Texas lost nearly 18,000 farms between 2017 and 2022 and 2,000 farms in 2025 alone, the highest loss that year out of any U.S. state. Tucker, who serves as the secretary of the Texas Farmers Union, noted that many family farms used to be around 30 acres. “Now the average farm is, I want to say, about 400 to 500 acres,” he continued. “It’s a sign that our system has failed small farmers.”
Now that he’s running for Texas commissioner of agriculture, Tucker is trying to warn farmers about yet another rising threat to the dwindling water and land availability for agriculture: data centers – buildings that store global tech giants’ data on rows of whirring, hot server racks. The campuses can span hundreds to thousands of acres.
Now, over a hundred more data centers are coming to Texas in an attempt to keep pace with artificial intelligence’s demand for data storage. The server racks need to be constantly cooled to prevent overheating and fire, and most data centers rely on local water supplies to do that. In Texas, data centers used 25 billion gallons of water in 2025, a number projected to balloon up to 161 billion gallons by 2030.
On the energy side, in an April filing to the Texas Public Utility Commission, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas projects that peak demand on the grid could climb to about 367,000 megawatts by 2032, largely because of data centers’ requests to plug into the state grid. ERCOT’s current record for peak demand is roughly 85,000 MW.
As data centers rapidly emerge, Texas is on track to overtake the world’s current largest data market region, Northern Virginia, by 2030. And within the state, Central Texas is rising as a data center hot spot, with over 30 data centers being developed right now across Bexar, Comal, Hays, Travis, Caldwell, and Williamson counties, according to a community-maintained tracker.
Why is Texas attractive to data center developers? There are a few different factors. They’re looking for huge swaths of open land that municipalities and private landowners are willing to sell, and generous water and energy grid access.
Plus, they get significant state sales tax breaks that help cover electricity and cooling systems, server hardware, and other costs as passed by the Texas Legislature in 2013. Texas will grant data center operators $1.3 billion in tax exemptions in 2026 and lose $3.2 billion over the next two years, according to the comptroller’s office, The Texas Tribune reported in early April.
In other states with desirable land availability for data center developers, like Florida, Wisconsin, and California, some municipalities have hit the brakes on how many data centers they allow to be built, concerned about the drain on local resources.
But even as Texas considers desalinating water from the Gulf of Mexico for our future drinking water supply, Gov. Greg Abbott is welcoming the largest data centers in the country to the state. “Texas is the epicenter of AI development,” Abbott touted after Google invested $40 billion in part toward new data centers in Texas last November.
“If all these states that are much more wet than Texas don’t have the water, then why do we have the water?” Tucker asked.
And water use in Texas is changing. Roland Ruiz is the general manager of the Edwards Aquifer Authority, which has long granted groundwater pumping permits to farmers across Medina, Uvalde, Comal, and Hays counties. He told the Chronicle that a lot of water that was once allocated for agricultural use is now being switched to municipal or industrial use.
“You’re seeing farming operations being pushed further out into more rural areas … at least in close proximity to San Antonio, it’s moving further out west,” Ruiz continued.
Ruiz has noticed that some farmers in the region are taking advantage of a profitable exit from the agricultural industry: selling their farmland to data center operators.
“I know people who had farmland, and they farmed it for generations, and they made the decision. And I’m sure it was a hard decision to sell their farmland to, let’s say, a data center operator, be it Microsoft or whomever,” Ruiz said reflectively. “But they decided it was time to retire from that way of life, and that was a way out for them.”
“Now, their neighbors are left with the reality that there’s now a data center next door, so that’s kind of the rub,” Ruiz continued. “It’s changing their way of life. It’s changing their rural landscape. I think we’ve seen decades of urban sprawl, and these data centers are just the latest form of that.”
Data centers are also often sources of noise and air pollution for the local residents. An October 2025 study notes that they emit “fine particulate matter” that can enter the lungs – mostly from fossil fuel and diesel-powered electricity generators – and estimates U.S. data centers could contribute to approximately 600,000 asthma cases in 2028. Their generators, fans, and turbines can hum 24/7 at over 90 decibels. Exposure to over 65 decibels is proven to damage health.
Tucker emphasized that data centers can also affect the quality of the soil and local water sources for farming. “Where they built a lot of these things, wells ran dry. And the ones that didn’t became toxic with nitrates, with heavy metals,” he said. “It diminishes water health, diminishes soil health, and diminishes even food nutrition itself.”
Beyond pollution, data centers are heating up the land itself, preliminary findings from a March University of Cambridge study show. Surface temperatures near existing data centers increased by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and in some cases as high as 16.4 degrees, raising temperatures up to 6 miles away. Summer heat is already a major cause of death for Texas cattle.
In a generation when Texas farmers are leaving the industry, data center developers are buying up farmland, and climate change continues to cause severe drought, Tucker worries that data centers could spell a bleak future for Texas agriculture and those who depend on it.
“Because the farmers are able to produce less, that means food prices at the grocery store will continue to inflate,” Tucker said. “It creates a vicious feedback loop where farmers make less money, grow less crops, and then the food that is produced becomes more expensive, less healthy, and less nutritious.”
Despite Abbott’s enthusiasm for AI infrastructure, the Texas Farmers Union has called for an “immediate halt” to new data center construction until the state adopts stronger regulation of their public water and power usage, and supports stripping their tax subsidies.
“We realize that if these data centers come up, they’ll drain Texas dry,” Tucker continued. “And agriculture will be the sacrificial lamb. First up for slaughter.”
Uhland, Texas, is a little rural town just 30 miles southeast of Austin, full of single-family homes, quiet suburban streets, and grazing cattle on sprawling open fields. Fernando and Wendy Tristan have called Uhland, and the 7-acre farm they own, home for nearly three decades.
But at an open house called on April 6, PowerHouse Data Centers brought Uhland residents a proposal to build a 500-acre data center campus directly next door to the Tristans’ farm.
The developers were met with heavy resistance from the Tristans and other Uhland locals. “Our property is literally a stone’s throw away,” Wendy told the Chronicle on April 11. “I asked [the PowerHouse representative’s] partner directly, ‘Would you live next to this data center?’ He couldn’t answer. He looked us straight in the face and couldn’t answer.”
The day after the open house, April 7, Uhland City Council was set to vote to rezone the 800-acre tract of land for industrial use, allowing the data center to be built. But that afternoon, Council Member Guadalupe Garza announced on social media that she had received word from PowerHouse that their proposal on the agenda was “no longer in play.” At the meeting, council members didn’t even vote on the item.
The initial reaction from Uhland residents to the announcement was relief, until community leaders pointed out that PowerHouse could still apply to extract the land from the city of Uhland’s extraterritorial jurisdiction and zoning regulations, which would place their development proposal under Caldwell County’s jurisdiction and approval.
“There is no zoning in the county. The applicant intends to de-annex from the City of Uhland ETJ, they will be able to build the data center on the existing location,” the city wrote to the Chronicle.
Caldwell County Commissioner Ed Theriot, whose precinct includes a part of Uhland, confirmed to the Chronicle on April 28 that PowerHouse has contacted the county inquiring about the proposal submission process.
Within Central Texas, Caldwell County is emerging as a data center hub, with multiple massive data centers in the works: Colorado-based Tract is already building a 3,000-acre data center just south of Uhland. Connecticut-based Edged Energy was approved by the Caldwell County Commissioners Court on April 9 to build a 330-acre campus in Maxwell, Texas.
Dallas-based Prime Data Centers plans to build a 205-acre center in Lockhart, Texas, with a 384-megawatt capacity. And now, Caldwell County residents are waiting to see if PowerHouse is still on the table. (As of publication, Edged Energy and Tract have not responded to interview or statement requests. PowerHouse declined an interview for this article.)
Moreover, the Tract “mega campus” being developed near Uhland is on track to be one of the biggest in the state, covering not hundreds but thousands of acres that were bought bit by bit, with a city-scale electric capacity of 4,000 megawatts. That’s enough to power about 800,000 homes, according to ERCOT.
“I’m not against businesses, corporations, something that’s going to have a positive impact for our community,” Wendy said. “But this isn’t a positive impact.”
On April 11, over 50 neighbors from across Caldwell County gathered at a public library in Lockhart, concerned about the data centers already being developed in their communities and hoping to learn more. Many felt betrayed by their local officials who approved the data center proposals.
“I am very disappointed in our commission,” one local resident said aloud. “I can’t understand why you take supposed economic need for an excuse to attack our water, our air, our electricity. I don’t know about anybody else, but my natural gas has gone up twice.”
Si Frede, an advocate with the Data Center Action Coalition, pointed out that data centers are often not transparent about their future usage, and often footed by tech companies whose profit model is based on personal data collection and surveillance. Data centers are also being disproportionately built in the South and next to historically Black and brown neighborhoods.
“[Data centers are] frequently referred to as ‘mission critical infrastructure,’ and I think it’s important that we interrogate: Whose mission is it? What is it critical for?” Frede continued.
One resident asked if data centers actually create any local jobs or not. DeeDee Belmares, a clean energy advocate at Public Citizen, replied that apart from initial construction jobs, skilled workers are often brought in for the tech roles, and the local community ultimately sees few permanent jobs. “Most of those are … custodial, groundskeeping, or security jobs,” Frede added.
![“[Data centers are] frequently referred to as ‘mission critical infrastructure,’ and I think it’s important that we interrogate: Whose mission is it? What is it critical for?”
– Data Center Action Coalition advocate Si Frede](https://i0.wp.com/www.austinchronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/DataCenters_Quote-2.png?resize=780%2C297&ssl=1)
Another resident expressed concern about Prime Data Centers’ plan to use the local Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative to power their Lockhart data center, worried their own utility bills would go up. Prime told the Chronicle that the choice was made to keep “energy dollars local.”
“We pay our full, fair share of energy costs. To avoid placing any incremental burden on the community grid, Prime will develop and fund its own supplemental power generation for any capacity needs beyond what the cooperative can readily supply over the next 24 months,” the data center operator wrote in a statement.
Garza, who voted in favor of Prime, told her neighbors that many local leaders aren’t well-informed about the impacts of data centers when they vote on these proposals, and aren’t aware of what other data centers are being proposed in other municipalities.
“At the time Tract was presented to Council, I was not aware of Prime. I was not aware of PowerHouse,” Garza admitted to the room. “This is what we need more of. Because if I had this information last year, I would not have voted for Prime.”
Eddie Rowe, a San Marcos resident, used to work at a large data center in Northern Virginia. Even though the walls were soundproofed, he could still hear the whir of the server farm through the walls into the office portion of the building.
“And as soon as you open the door, it’s very, very loud fans – a lot of cooling. There’s endless long hallways, and it’s all dark. And as you walk through, the motion sensor lights turn on just where you are,” he recalled. “There’s a lot of energy-saving things about it.”
When it comes to a data center’s water use, which systems it uses for cooling and electricity generation matter, Rowe added.
Most data centers being built now, including those by Edged Energy and Prime in Texas, are using what is called a “closed-loop” water system to cool their server racks: The water passes over the server racks and removes heat, and then cycles through a cooling process to remove the heat from the water again, ideally reusing much of the same water over and over. While the process often loses some amount of water to evaporation, some third-party cooling system companies, like Edged Energy’s partner, are touting “waterless,” “AI-ready” solutions.
Prime told the Chronicle that after initially filling their closed-loop cooling system with an unstated amount, daily water consumption will be roughly 900 gallons per building.
“For the campus’ four data centers, this is comparable to the annual consumption of nine average U.S. homes,” Prime wrote. “We connect to the same municipal water system others in the area use, with no groundwater depletion and no specialized discharge.”
Margaret Cook, a water expert at the Houston Advanced Research Center, told the Chronicle it is possible to build a data center that’s “not very thirsty.”
“They are improving these technologies, and one of the reasons that they’re doing that is public concern,” Cook continued. However, water usage can significantly vary between different “closed-loop” data centers depending on what kind of cooling system they’re using, she emphasized.
Dry coolers and air-cooled chillers, which use cold air instead of more water to remove heat from the closed loop, use little to no water, Cook said. If the campus has an external cooling tower (which evaporates heat out of the water) or a water-cooled chiller to remove heat from the closed loop, that would use much more water.
“That’s part of why I get a little bit frustrated when they say, ‘We’re using closed loop.’ Well yeah, that’s better than completely just dousing your facility and letting it evaporate. But at the same time, there’s still a water demand … depending on what your cooling technology is externally,” Cook continued.
While dry cooling and AC-powered cooling uses less water, it still uses more electricity. More data center operators are building their own power plants on-site to supply enough power to the data center and avoid blackouts. Those have their own significant water bill.
Yet another issue is that water is still more attractive to operators than AC because it’s cheaper. “Electricity [is] still going to be more expensive per unit,” Cook said. “You’re going to try to conserve as much energy as possible and use more water.”
And in a hot state like Texas, water is just a more efficient way to cool a server off than air. “On a hot summer day, you’re going to cool off faster by jumping into a swimming pool,” Cook pointed out.
As someone now working in tech here in Texas, Rowe knows data centers have the ability to be, to a point, more sustainable. And while some operators are being pushed by local communities in that direction, others are quietly sticking with the cheaper, water-thirsty route.
“And I’m frustrated that the people who do have billions of dollars, like Meta, Amazon, Google, and BlackRock, to make sustainable data centers, they’re pinching pennies,” Rowe continued. “It’s destroying environments that have been here for thousands of years.”
The most recent Texas State Water Plan, from 2022, projects a widening gap between how much water the state needs and how much it actually has. And that calculation doesn’t even take existing or future data centers into account, Cook emphasized.
Without significant intervention by state legislators, municipalities, and local communities to force data center operators to be better stewards of local resources, the water deficit will only widen.
“Our 2026 Regional Water Plans also don’t include that information, and the 2027 [state] plan is based on that, so it won’t either,” she added. “We do make some estimates on population growth, but as far as [projecting] the water use for industry in general, they base that on historic water use.”
Despite the spring storms that have fallen over Central Texas this past month, the region is still a year’s worth of rainfall behind where we should be. As of October 2025, Barton Springs-Edwards Aquifer Conservation District has declared its territory to be in Stage 3 Exceptional Drought. The portions of the Edwards and Trinity aquifers they oversee supply drinking water to nearly 100,000 residents in the Austin area.
While the state’s hydrologists, the Lower Colorado River Authority, and the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance devise creative ways to get Texas more water for the future – such as desalinating marine water and harvesting water out of the atmosphere – data centers are an additional problem to solve.
Without state-level intervention, local groundwater conservation districts (GCDs), like the Edwards Aquifer Authority that Ruiz directs, don’t have tools to prevent data centers from moving into their communities and obtaining groundwater pumping permits.
“I’ve heard from [GCD] folks that they feel a little like their hands are tied,” Cook said. “They’re bound to allow water users in their area, and … they can’t necessarily prevent a data center from coming in, or prevent a municipality from providing water to a data center because of a lack of groundwater availability.”
On April 9, the Texas Committee on State Affairs met to consider the AI boom’s impact on water supply and grid reliability – where the major data center tenants, according to Haynes Strader of Skybox Datacenters, are Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and Meta.
Pablo Vegas, president and CEO of ERCOT, told legislators that they’re receiving “dozens and dozens” of requests from “new projects” to connect to the grid every month, with about 87% coming from data centers. Texas needs to establish a “high bar” for data centers to plug into the state grid, Vegas stressed, proposing a system where data centers can essentially buy a spot in line to connect to the grid within the following few years.
Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition, a group of major tech corporations, told legislators that the U.S. must remain a global leader in AI. “Texas … [is] one of the strongest places in the world to do business. And data centers are playing a central role in supporting the Texas economy,” Diorio said, claiming that data centers generate significant local revenue and rely on local skilled electricians, plumbers, and technicians to operate.
In July, the Texas Senate Committee on Finance will convene to reconsider the state tax breaks being granted to data center operators, with the money being lost through those subsidies projected to only pile higher through 2030.
But at the local level, when data center operators come to Commissioners Court and City Council meetings with a proposal, Cook said local leaders and their constituents can ask them more questions and demand greater transparency. What is their basic plan for water use? What is their plan for drought? What would their peak water and wastewater demand be?
“Are you doing any on-site reuse, or rainwater harvesting? Can you use an alternative water supply?” Cook continued, emphasizing the need to ask the same questions of their accompanying power plant and infrastructure.
What else could be done? Cook said one solution that has been proposed are voluntary Public Utility Commission surveys to regularly track data centers’ resource use, but worries that only the “good” operators would complete them.
“The good actors are likely going to be those lower water users who may want to brag about their systems,” Cook said. “I think we’re less likely to get the folks that would be more important to plan for.”
Texans like the Tristans are currently fighting data center proposals across the state. San Marcos residents managed to block a 200-acre data center from being built in their community in February. Nonetheless, some Caldwell residents aren’t feeling heard in the same way by their elected officials, both locally and at the state level.
“The reality is, [San Marcos] has a commission that cares about the environment, the water in the community. I don’t think we do,” one resident told her neighbors at the Lockhart community meeting. “It seems like Caldwell County has become the place to put every type of development that threatens the environment, our health, and our community.”
From his conversations with Central Texas farmers, Tucker hasn’t spoken with many people staunchly against development. But when it comes to the massive data centers that store the world’s Google searches, Meta social media accounts, and Amazon purchases, no one – regardless of political party – wants to feel like they’re getting the short end of that stick.
“We’re building these things literally next to neighborhoods, literally across the street from schools, and it’s just a massive health risk,” he pressed. “These things shouldn’t be in anyone’s backyards.”
The collective digital footprint has to be stored somewhere, data center operators argued to Texas legislators earlier this month. But to Wendy, it seems like that burden is falling all too heavily on rural Texas farmers and residents.
The tech developers don’t live in Uhland – they live elsewhere, she said. If PowerHouse is approved to build next door, it would change her home forever. “They don’t care. They’re inside the city of Austin. They think, oh well, that’s where our future data will be stored. They’re not going to live with the constant humming 24/7,” she continued.
When her grandson was 7 years old, Wendy said, he asked if he could inherit the family’s farm one day. “My grandson said, ‘Grandma … can I have your land?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’” she remembered. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “But he’s not going to want this land now.”
This article appears in May 1 • 2026.
