Just what the South Plains needed: more digital infrastructure to power the global supply of AI-generated slop while our actual, physical infrastructure hangs on by a thread. Aligned Data Centers has officially moved forward with “Project Caprock,” a massive $425 million data center campus spanning 313 acres just up the road off FM 54 in Abernathy. The project broke ground in April and plans to open its first facility by early 2027 to satisfy the world’s insatiable hunger for cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Local residents politely pointed out during community meetings that our local electric grid already wheezes and drops dead the minute everyone turns on their air conditioning in July. Naturally, developers hand-waved those concerns away by claiming the project is designed with “sustainability” in mind, which is tech-bro code for “please stop asking questions about the electricity.”
But Abernathy isn’t alone in sacrificing its utility grid to the tech gods. A new report from the Environmental Integrity Project reveals that Texas is leading the entire nation in building fossil-fuel power plants explicitly to keep these data centers from overheating. Out of 74 planned natural gas plants nationwide, 32 are right here in the Lone Star State, threatening to pump millions of tons of greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants into the air. Why Texas? Because we have cheap land, virtually no regulations, and a particular lack of air quality monitoring out here in West Texas, making it the perfect place to dump pollutants that cause respiratory illnesses. Right now, data centers make up a staggering 89% of all future power demand requests submitted to ERCOT.
Meanwhile, Governor Greg Abbott is performing some Olympic-level mental gymnastics to protect his political flank. After happily pocketing over $2 million from tech and AI donors and bragging that Texas is the “epicenter of AI development,” Abbott suddenly noticed that rural Republican voters—who are watching their water tables drop and their electric bills skyrocket—are absolutely furious. Now, Abbott is suddenly grandstanding at campaign stops, calling for a total ban on AI data centers in “rural neighborhoods” to protect “Texas values.” It’s a beautiful, chaotic flip-flop, but it’s a little late for Hale County, where the bulldozers are already turning West Texas dirt into a giant, power-sucking monument to Silicon Valley.
But hey, look on the bright side: when the grid inevitably collapses next August and your AC cuts out in 105-degree heat, you can rest easy knowing that a server bank in Abernathy is successfully using maximum horsepower to help a college student cheat on their midterm.
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