A data center is moving into a small town. Residents say it will ruin their history

TAYLOR, Texas — When Pamela Griffin was growing up in Taylor, Texas, the plot of land on the edge of her neighborhood was more than an empty field. It was a playground, a baseball field and a makeshift campsite with tents made from old sheets and cardboard boxes. 

Back then, in the 1970s, the land was owned by Frank Rhea Cromwell and his wife, Bonnibel Bland Cromwell, who Griffin said allowed kids to play on the property. Griffin recalls dozens of kids joining baseball games, making mud pies and fishing for minnows in a small creek.

In 1999, the Bland Cromwell family sold the land to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation. The deed stated that the property was “to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas.”

The land changed hands a few more times and was subdivided, but it never developed into parkland. In 2024, the Taylor Economic Development Corporation sold the largest parcel to Blueprint Data Centers. 

Griffin remembers Mr. Cromwell waving at her and the other kids from his tractor. 

“He was a kind-hearted soul,” Griffin told Straight Arrow News. “It brings tears to my eyes that the wishes of that man did not get done.” 

Griffin’s parents owned several properties on First and Second Avenues, next to the 87-acre tract in Taylor, a city of over 16,000 people northeast of Austin. Griffin’s parents put the properties in a trust and passed them on to their five children. When the family first moved in, Griffin said the three-block neighborhood had not yet been incorporated into the city of Taylor, and it was the only area around town where non-white families were allowed to live. 

“We had promised my dad we would stay here,” Griffin said. “When he passed, he said, ‘I’m turning it over to y’all.’ But I didn’t think I would be fighting a data center.”

The data center construction boom

From ChatGPT to AI-generated video tools, the rise of artificial intelligence relies upon enormous amounts of computing power. As Big Tech bets on an AI-powered future, the industry is planning to build hundreds of new warehouses full of computers that train and run artificial intelligence models. But in most places where AI data centers are proposed, they face backlash from existing neighbors wary of changes to their community and potential impacts on their water, electricity and quality of life. 

In August, St. Charles, Missouri, became the first city to pass a yearlong moratorium on the construction of new data centers. Atlanta has banned data centers near public transit stops, and a handful of other cities and counties in Georgia have instituted restrictions and temporary moratoriums. Cities in Texas and North Carolina have rejected specific data center proposals in recent months. And across the country, residents are pushing their cities to do the same.

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There are 79 gigawatts of data centers planned in the U.S., according to real estate company Cushman & Wakefield. It would take 40 Hoover Dams to power them all.

A 2024 Harvard study counted 2,990 data centers across the nation — a number that continues to grow. Data centers can include traditional cloud storage and computing, as well as cryptocurrency mining, alongside the more recent explosion in artificial intelligence.

The real estate company Cushman & Wakefield recently issued a report on U.S. data centers. Instead of tracking the number of data centers, the company measured their impact on the grid in megawatts. One megawatt of electricity is enough to power about 200-800 homes at once, depending on their size and weather conditions. 

Cushman & Wakefield found that U.S. data centers currently have a capacity of 22.2 gigawatts — 22,211 megawatts — enough to power up to 17.8 million homes. Another 10.5 gigawatts of data centers are currently under construction, and 79 gigawatts have been proposed and are in the planning stage. 

The U.S. power grid would need to add as much power as is produced by roughly 40 Hoover Dams to meet the full demand of the proposed data centers. 

“If you are only in this fight to stop what’s in your neighborhood, you’re going to lose because another one’s coming right behind it,” said Elena Schlossberg, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County. The group has opposed data center development in Northern Virginia. 

The water-power problem

Water usage has become a common rallying point for activists trying to stop proposed data centers in their tracks. 

Some data centers use fans to cool their computers, but this method results in higher energy costs and greater noise emanating from the warehouses. Instead of fans, many data centers use water to cool their computers. 

In 2023, data centers consumed 17 billion gallons of water for cooling purposes, according to a study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But policy experts are worried about more than how much water data centers need for cooling.

“The massive footprint of water used by data centers is largely due to the water that is used by generating the electricity for the data centers,” said Melissa Scanlan, director of the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School. 

Conventional power plants heat water and send it through a turbine, which spins to generate electricity. The Berkeley Lab study found that, when water associated with electricity consumption is added, the growing data center industry used 228 billion gallons in 2023. 

“That’s about the amount of water that would be needed for more than 7.6 million Americans,” Scanlan said, which is the population of Arizona. 

“Even in places where water is not scarce, there’s serious questions about everyone else subsidizing this industry and having their electricity and water rates increase,” Scanlan told SAN, adding that the matter required further study. 

Scanlan said data centers that choose renewable energy and batteries will have a lower overall water footprint.

What are potential community benefits of data centers? 

The Blueprint Data Center facility in Taylor will use a closed-loop cooling system. This type of system recycles cooling liquid, so it does not need to continuously use water. For electricity, the data center will connect to the grid run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is mostly fueled by conventional gas power plants, along with some coal, nuclear, wind and a fast-growing fleet of solar panels and batteries. 

Data centers offer communities a lucrative source of tax revenue. 

Ben White, President and CEO of the Taylor Economic Development Corporation, told SAN that attracting data centers allows the city to “diversify” so that “all your eggs are not in one basket.” Taylor is already home to a $17 billion investment for a Samsung semiconductor manufacturing facility. 

White said that over 10 years, the Blueprint Data Centers project will provide $25-35 million in tax revenue for the city of Taylor and another $20-25 million for the local school district. 

“So you want improved parks? We need more police officers, we need another fire station, we need more firefighters, we need improved roads, we need improved water,” White said. “These are the revenue sources that help with that.”

White acknowledged that data centers do not create many full-time jobs. That, he argued, is an advantage for the community because it receives increased tax revenue without increased expenses needed to accommodate new residents. 

“You’re not building new roads. You’re not having to hire new police or fire. You’re not having to build new schools. You’re not having to hire new teachers,” White said. 

Are local governments ready? 

Griffin doesn’t buy into those potential benefits. Over the summer, she took her concerns to the Taylor City council. 

“You work for us,” she told them. “You need to try to help us fight this.”

In the end, she said, she walked away feeling like the council didn’t care. 

Amid the growing unease about incoming data centers, Scanlan told SAN she has observed a new, troubling trend: the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that keep the public in the dark. 

“That just leads to greater distrust,” Scanlan said, with a result of “more people opposing an industry that could be actually potentially very positive.”

In Virginia, Schlossberg encountered NDAs when Amazon proposed a data center in her community. Schlossberg told SAN that the local government officials working on the project had all signed NDAs. Schlossberg and other activists only learned of the project’s Amazon roots when they found job postings from Amazon for a data center in the area and put the pieces together. 

“The local governments that are the most vulnerable are those in rural areas,” she told SAN. 

The researcher in Wisconsin echoed that sentiment from Virginia. 

“There’s a big power imbalance and information imbalance,” between data center developers and local governments that have “no experience in the scale and speed of projects,” Scanlan said.

“It makes for a very difficult situation for the community to know that they are being protected,” Scanlan added. 

What will happen in Taylor? 

White said he is hopeful that Taylor residents who oppose the data center now will change their minds once it is built and a few years have gone by.

“We feel like we did everything correctly,” he told SAN. 

However, neighbors like Griffin haven’t given up the fight. Griffin and her siblings sued Blueprint Data Centers, seeking an injunction to stop any construction at the data center. They also asked the judge to enforce the alleged deed restriction that designated the lot as parkland. 

At a hearing in late September, lawyers for the data center company pointed out that there is already a park on the other side of Griffin’s neighborhood. However, Griffin said the park was built over a landfill, so her family didn’t use it. 

“My dad and my mom didn’t really want us to go play on that land, because that land wasn’t safe, and they didn’t want us to catch anything,” Griffin told SAN. 

Lawyers for Blueprint Data Centers also argued that the Griffin family lacked standing to enforce the deed because their name is not on it. And they said the Griffin family’s properties are far enough from the data center because the city of Taylor owns a small parcel of land — a few hundred feet wide — in between the neighborhood and the data center site. 

In early October, a Williamson County Judge denied the injunction request and dismissed the case, ruling that the Griffins lacked standing without determining whether the Bland Cromwell deed could be enforced.

Blueprint Data Centers did not respond to a request for an interview. 

When asked by SAN whether he was aware of the deed stating the land should be a park, White said he never was, and he doubts whether it can be enforced after the land has changed hands so many times. 

“That’s why you have title insurance companies review everything. You have attorneys review everything,” White said. In that process, he said, the 1999 document “never came up.”

Griffin’s lawyer, Chris Osborn, told SAN he intends to file an appeal at the Third Court of Appeals in Austin. 

For Griffin, the data center is an existential threat to the neighborhood’s future that could destroy its history as a haven for Taylor’s Black and brown communities. 

“Nobody wants to lose their history,” Griffin said. “Once this data center comes up, it’s going to be hard for me and my sisters and brothers to stay here.”

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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief