MEDINA COUNTY, Texas – Late at night, lights seep in through the windows of Medina County Commissioner Larry Sittre’s home.
These aren’t floodlights from a home next door. Instead, a growing data center has joined Sittre’s neighborhood.
For Sittre, an uneven night’s rest is a small price to pay for what he expects to be big changes in Medina County.
The area is slated to become a hot spot for data centers, with a handful of nearly billion-dollar projects in development, county officials told KSAT.
“Eight (centers) is the number that I’m aware,” Medina County Judge Keith Lutz said.
“I feel it’s close to that, the ones that we know of,” Sittre said. “There has been some other properties that have been bought. There’s construction going on. They don’t come tell us that’s what they are. The neighbors know and the neighbors call us.”
The data centers tend to promise a boost for local economies. They have also garnered controversy due to their extensive use of energy and natural resources in water-stressed areas.
What is a data center?
Data centers contain the physical space needed to store the computer servers and networking systems that power everything from streaming services to banking to national security.
In recent years, the need for non-stop connectivity and the growth of artificial intelligence has only brought about demand for larger, more ambitious data centers across the country.
Of the nearly 5,000 data centers in the U.S., approximately 300 of them are in Texas. With its availability of flat, open land, the state has become prime real estate for these developments.
Many data centers resemble box-like storage units spanning large plots of land. They typically require extensive power to operate and have been known to use lots of water.
In fact, the Houston Advanced Research Center projects that Texas data centers will use nearly 50 billion gallons of water this year. They also expect data centers to account for nearly 7% of Texas’ water use by 2030.
Extensive amounts of water is required to create an intricate cooling system that keeps the always working, always hot computing systems at a low temperature.
“These things are big ice boxes. That’s what they are,” Sittre said. “A big storage unit. Ice, cold storage.”
Why Medina County?
Medina County is considered an attractive location for out-of-state companies for a number of reasons.
For one, the price of the county’s land is substantially cheaper than other viable locations across the country. Sittre said that some companies have also been turned away by the “levels of bureaucracy” seen in counties such as Bexar.
In Medina County, plans can be drawn up in a number of months, the county commissioner said.
“Going through the steps with two people, instead of department after department,” Sittre said. “It’s up to us and a third-party engineer to do some of this engineering.”
Upcoming developments include a cluster of Microsoft locations and a 440-acre center built by Rowan Digital Infrastructure.
In an interview with KSAT, a Rowan Digital Infrastructure spokesperson said the space will host a major U.S. tech company such as Google, Meta or Oracle.
However, the spokesperson declined to identify which of the companies will occupy the data center — either publicly or to county officials.
“A whole lot of these things come in as project names. Microsoft, their first one was called ‘Rafter.’ That’s all we knew. We didn’t know who bought the land. It’s just ‘Project Rafter,’” Sittre said. “They don’t have to tell us what they’re doing with their property, actually, until we got it down to a D.A. (Medina County District Attorney’s Office) agreement.”
Rowan, which is based in Denver, is the latest company to purchase land in Medina County. As property owners, the county and the Edwards Aquifer Authority (EAA) allow Rowan to use local resources and allocated water for their property.
“For us, these data centers do not need us to be here," Lutz said. “They literally can come in. Somebody’s going to sell them the property and, state of Texas, we have property rights.”
“A lot of times people will wonder, ‘Why are you letting all these developments come in?’ And, the answer is, we’re not,” Edwards Aquifer Authority general manager Roland Ruiz told KSAT. “We just don’t have any place in that process.”
Both Lutz and Sittre told KSAT they did not sign a non-disclosure agreement with Rowan or any other developing data center.
Earlier this year, in Arizona, Tucson and Pima County officials discussed how and when non-disclosure agreements should be used for public projects, such as the development of a new data center dubbed “Project Blue.”
Data Center Locations
| Name | County | Size (acres) ↕ | Status/Timeline ↕ | Cost ↕ |
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’There are limitations’
According to Drought.gov, which monitors drought nationwide, Medina County is in the midst of what the monitor described as an “exceptional drought,” one of the most severe in Texas.
Rowan’s spokesperson said that the center, currently called “Project Cinco,” is sourcing its water from the Edwards Aquifer.
According to Ruiz, it is extremely likely that a developing data center in Medina County would be using water from the aquifer.
The EAA was established in 1993 to ensure proper water regulation and the protection of endangered species. Ruiz said the EAA is the most regulated groundwater source in Texas.
“There are limitations,” Ruiz said. “There’s a pumping cap already in place for how much water can be taken from the Edwards in any given year.”
In Texas, the Rule of Capture grants property owners the right to pump groundwater under their property. This doctrine has made it difficult to say “no” to unrestricted groundwater pumping when developers purchase property.
Ruiz said that the Edwards Aquifer has worked to redefine that rule and ensure proper conservation.
“It’ll just be a reallocation of the existing water rights to these new purposes,” Ruiz said.
Between the aquifer authority and the county, there is a constant push and pull between regulation and property rights.
“We work with the permit holders up front to try our very best to make sure they understand what it means to be in compliance, to be conservation oriented,” Ruiz said.
A long-term investment
Both Judge Lutz and Commissioner Sittre believe the data centers will bring economic prosperity never before seen in the county.
Aside from the allure of high-paying jobs, some companies have promised long-term investment into Medina County’s school systems and infrastructure.
“When you talk about one data center is a billion dollars, we have, supposedly, eight,” Sittre said. “That’s the biggest part of your budget you got right there. It’s just a lot of revenue for a lot of different entities within the county.”
While a Rowan spokesperson said that new jobs will offer salaries more than twice the average median income of Medina County residents, some question the validity of these promises.
“They’re claiming, you know, making promises around how they’re gonna mitigate harms. They’re also making claims about how much money, how much revenue, is gonna come out of it, but they’re not beholden to that,” an organizer for the Data Center Action Committee told KSAT.
The committee, primarily based out of the Austin and San Marcos areas, believe that many of these centers are siphoning local resources that it considers more valuable than monetary promises.
In August, the group organized information sessions and a march with the Save Our Springs Alliance (SOSA) ahead of a San Marcos City Council vote that rejected zoning for a proposed data center.
One Medina County resident, who lives within two miles from Rowan’s site, said he and other residents were not given a similar forum to voice their opinions.
Natalia resident Rob Scholes said he was first made aware of the center after the company invited neighbors to an information session just months before construction began.
At that point, the land had already been bought and the plans were moving forward.
Scholes said he moved to Natalia with his family to grow their own produce and live off their own land.
Conflicting reports on data center groundwater overconsumption in other states concerned Scholes about possible regulation in Medina County.
“If the place, a business, that affects all the residents in this area, then yeah, I think we should have some say in what happens and how that happens,” Scholes said.
Moving forward, Scholes hopes there is clearer communication between county officials, the companies and his neighbors.
“I do think there needs to be more transparency up front,” Scholes said. “And with the county government, I will assume that the county has to know about these beforehand and let people know and let us have an opportunity to put some input in before it’s a done deal. Before it’s too late.”
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