Dallas Exurb Hits Pause on Data Centers in Rare Texas Rebuke

A small Texas county outside Dallas approved a one-year moratorium on new data center and energy storage developments, pushing back against the growing number of large-scale projects fueling the artificial-intelligence boom across the state.

Hill County had been approached by several data center builders in recent weeks, and feared the potential impact to local water supplies and quality of life, County Commissioner Jim Holcomb said in a meeting Tuesday. The County Commissioners Court passed the pause after hours of negative testimony from people at the meeting.

“The data center folks have found a sweet spot in a state that has limited regulations, limited enforcement, limited code, and they’re coming faster than we can keep up with,” Holcomb said during the proceedings. “This is a public health, public safety matter that the Commissioners Court needs to take on.”

The moratorium amounts to a rare rebuke in growth-friendly Texas as lawmakers and Governor Greg Abbott position the state as a leader in the data center boom. OpenAI’s and Oracle Corp.’s flagship Stargate campus is being built in Abilene, adjacent to a 700-megawatt data center that will be leased by Microsoft Corp.

Hill County’s move appears to be a first for Texas, according to The Texas Tribune, which reported on it earlier. Abbott’s office declined to comment.

Legislators in at least 14 states are considering moratoriums on data centers, and a proposal from Senator Bernie Sanders and US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would put data center development on hold nationwide.

In Utah’s Box Elder County, protests against a proposed 40,000-acre (16,200-hectare) data center project have led to raucous protests and death threats against county commissioners, according to local news outlet KSL. The project is backed by Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary and planned on mostly desert land used for cattle grazing.

Texas stands in contrast to Florida, another business-friendly state, which has nevertheless pushed back against data center development. Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, has called for stricter regulations on the projects.

“This technology threatens to upend key parts of our economy in ways that can leave many Americans out of work and with consumers footing the bill for the cost of power-intensive data centers,” he told Florida lawmakers in January.