A Texas county southwest of Dallas this week passed what may be the state’s first county-level moratorium on data centers, seeking to buy time for lawmakers to soften the blow of development sweeping across rural areas.
Hill County's Commissioners Court voted 3-2 Tuesday to put a yearlong moratorium on data center and power plant construction in unincorporated areas, citing an influx of as many as eight data centers planned there, many of which could have their own power plants.
“I’m not trying to break the law, I'm not trying to thumb my nose at the governor or the Legislature, but my constituents, my people, are literally begging for help right now, and I have no other mechanism but this,” County Judge Shane Brassell, a Republican who leads the commission and voted for the ban, said in an interview Thursday.
Opposition to data centers is spreading in regions led by both Democrats and Republicans, as politicians try to balance economic development with increasingly vocal landowners who want protections. In Missouri, one small town unhappy over its city council's approval of a data center voted last month to oust all four incumbents running for reelection. In North Carolina, Gov. Josh Stein (D) has made a point of saying that sales tax exemptions for data centers cost the state up to $57 million every year.
Texas has hundreds of data center locations operating or in development, second only to Virginia among U.S. states. The growth has stirred pushback from environmentalists and rural residents who worry about the effects on water supplies, the electric grid and their quality of life. Officials in states across the country are starting to have second thoughts about data centers, and some are looking to roll back tax incentives.
Hill County is the first county government in Texas to act to slow down data centers and their associated power plants, said Robert Paterson, an associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who specializes in land use and planning.
County governments in Texas generally don’t have zoning authority and most counties have only limited authority to impose public safety and floodplain regulations for construction.
“They’re pretty well hamstrung, which is why all the data centers and the battery energy storage systems are locating in the unincorporated areas,” Paterson said.
President Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) have both made artificial intelligence — which relies on power hungry-data centers — an economic priority. Abbott's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Hill County on Thursday.
But opposition to data centers appears to be hardening, and politicians are paying attention. A Gallup poll conducted in March showed 71 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t want to live near data centers, with 48 percent strongly opposed.
At least one other Texas county, Hood County southwest of Fort Worth, has considered a moratorium on data center projects.
But officials there voted against it earlier this year after getting pushback from a state legislator. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican, posted a letter on social media asking Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton if counties had the right to block data centers.
The question has cropped up before, Bettencourt said in an interview Thursday, and the answer has always been "no."
“If they had this power, we would have already had a patchwork quilt in 254 counties, and literally have, effectively, 254 mini-states on development in Texas,” he said.
The answer for Hill County and other rural areas is to wait for the Legislature, Bettencourt said. The Texas Senate’s Business and Commerce Committee held a hearing in April on how to allocate the electric costs generated by data centers.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who leads the state Senate, said in March that he wants lawmakers to study the water and electric needs of data centers, along with how to balance the industry’s benefits against “the impacts on landowners, private property rights, water infrastructure, and community integrity.”
Like Hood County, Hill County is close to the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, and it has easy access to natural gas pipelines and electricity that make it attractive to data center developers.
Dozens of residents urged the Hill County commissioners Tuesday to slow down development, saying they’re worried about road damage and water use, along with intangibles. The meeting was broadcast online.
One man, who lives 1,100 feet from one of the proposed projects near Blum, Texas, said he can see the stars from his back porch and wondered if he’d lose his view of the night sky if the project is built.
“If we don’t do something to tap the brakes, it’ll be too late,” Commissioner Jim Holcomb said.
Developers who spoke at the Hill County meeting said they want to be good neighbors, and that the projects would boost local tax revenue with minimal downsides.
Water use at one planned data center would be the equivalent of five households and the noise would be the equivalent of a home refrigerator, said Pervez Siddique, chief development officer at Prime Power, which builds electric plants for the data industry.
“We’re honest, hardworking people that are really just trying to deliver electricity to power the needs of our digital society,” he said during Tuesday’s meeting.
Siddique said the moratorium “would be a real hit to the economic activity and the tax revenue base of Hill County.”
Brassell, the Hill County judge, said he started receiving lawsuit threats within 24 hours of the vote, which makes it harder to believe the developers’ good-neighbor pledges. He said he was looking forward to state lawmakers weighing in. Texas lawmakers meet in Austin for a regular session every other year, and they’re set to return in 2027.
“We’re gonna get sued,” he said. “Ultimately, I hope that in January, when the session starts, the Legislature will pick it up and maybe take some heat off of us.”
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