Texas
Taylor County
Stargate Abilene converted 1,100 acres of Taylor County pasture into a 1.2-gigawatt AI campus under an 85-percent tax abatement, while a 360 MW on-site gas plant drew on an ERCOT grid and reservoirs serving a region already in intermittent drought.
Taylor County, Texas, anchors the Concho Valley on the edge of the Llano Estacado, about 150 miles west of Fort Worth. Abilene, the county seat, built its economy on farming, cattle, and three Christian universities, and the land north of the city carried pasture and row-crop ground that ranching families had worked for five generations. Census tracts surrounding the Lancium Clean Campus, where the Stargate supercomputer complex now sits, carry a 36-percent Hispanic or Latino population tied to agricultural labor networks that stretch north to the High Plains and south toward the Permian Basin.
In 2024, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank designated Abilene as the first site of the Stargate AI infrastructure program. Crusoe Energy acquired the 1,100-acre campus under a City of Abilene and Taylor County tax abatement that waives 85 percent of assessed property taxes over ten years on a $3.5 billion investment basis. Oncor extended high-voltage transmission to the site. A 360-megawatt on-site natural-gas plant received an ERCOT permit authorizing 1.6 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions and 14 tons of hazardous air pollutants per year, drawing from a county airshed that serves Abilene’s residential neighborhoods to the south and east.
The water constraint is structural. The West Central Texas Municipal Water District, which serves Abilene, Albany, Anson, and Breckenridge, held combined reservoir capacity at 51.8 percent in early 2026 and declining. The Hubbard Creek Reservoir and Fort Phantom Hill Reservoir both carry below-normal storage. The campus uses closed-loop cooling that mitigates steady-state municipal draw, but the initial eight-million-gallon fill still came from city supply, and the campus’s cooling-tower makeup flow depends on continued municipal allocation during multi-year drought cycles.
The essay under this county documents the land conversion, the tax and emissions terms of the deal, the water-supply exposure, and the organizing by Sierra Club Lone Star and Public Citizen Texas at the Public Utility Commission of Texas.