Stargate Abilene

What the ground held

Map: Taylor County pasture and northern Abilene before the Lancium campus

Taylor County sits on the southern edge of the Rolling Plains, where the Callahan Divide grades west into the Permian and north into shortgrass country that has grown cotton, grain sorghum, and cattle since the 1880s. Abilene, the county seat, incorporated in 1881 as a cattle-shipping terminus for the Texas and Pacific Railway, and the ranching culture it anchored persists in the names on the deed rolls: Coleman, Breckenridge, Nugent, Clyde. The land north of Abilene that the Stargate campus now occupies was pasture and row-crop ground, held by families whose operations ran to cotton, dryland wheat, and stocker cattle, the kind of agriculture that does not appear in the business pages but sustains a county’s tax base, its cooperative elevator, and its feed store.¹

The population immediately surrounding the campus site is majority white and working-class, tied to the farming, oil-field services, and retail economy that Abilene supports. The census tracts to the south and east carry a significant secondary population: 36 percent Hispanic or Latino across tracts 48441010902 and 48441010901, a figure that reflects Abilene’s agricultural labor heritage and the Mexican-American families who settled the city in the first half of the twentieth century in neighborhoods clustered along South First and South Seventh Streets.² The two populations share the Hubbard Creek and Fort Phantom Hill watersheds; no public body consulted either population formally before the Lancium Clean Campus received its tax abatement.

The water regime that supplied both populations developed across a century of West Texas conflict over scarcity. Fort Phantom Hill Reservoir, impounded in 1938 on Elm Creek east of Abilene, was the city’s first surface-water supply. Hubbard Creek Reservoir, built in 1962 on the Brazos River tributary of the same name in Stephens County, roughly 45 miles northwest, was added to address Abilene’s postwar growth.³ Both reservoirs are managed by the West Central Texas Municipal Water District, which serves Abilene alongside the smaller cities of Albany, Anson, and Breckenridge. Combined storage in these reservoirs stood at 51.8 percent of capacity in early 2026, a figure the WCTMWD publishes on its public FAQ.⁴ West Texas does not run on surplus.

The broader United States context for what arrived in Taylor County in 2025 is visible in the scale of the national data-center inventory. Business Insider, through a year-long investigation by Swearingen and colleagues published in June 2025 and updated with an interactive map in September 2025, identified 1,240 data centers built or approved in the United States by end of 2024 by pulling diesel-generator air permits from all 50 states and the District of Columbia and suing municipalities for public records.⁵ Northern Virginia held 329 of those facilities; Maricopa County held 48. Taylor County, Texas held none. The Stargate campus announced in January 2025 represents not an incremental addition to an established data-center region but a deliberate extension of the AI infrastructure buildout into ERCOT territory outside the saturated Dallas-Fort Worth corridor, where power is cheaper and regulatory review is thinner.

The ERCOT grid, which operates under the authority of the Public Utility Commission of Texas and sits outside the federal interconnection queue administered by FERC, does not require a data-center operator to enter the same multi-year interconnection study process that comparable facilities face in PJM, MISO, or the Western grids.⁶ Texas Senate Bill 6, signed in 2023, created an expedited path for large loads of 75 megawatts or above to connect with minimal public review. The Stargate campus, entering at 1,200 megawatts announced, qualified for this expedited process. The PUCT proceedings that followed were technical and rapid, with none of the community-impact analysis that a federal environmental review would have required.

How the clearance happened

Map: The 1,100-acre Lancium campus acquisition and the Oncor transmission corridor

The Stargate program traces to a January 2025 announcement by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle of a joint venture to build AI infrastructure at scale across the United States.⁷ The three companies committed to $500 billion in infrastructure investment over four years; the first tranche of $100 billion was to be deployed in 2025. Abilene, Texas was the first site named. The facility would be operated by Oracle on a long-term contract with OpenAI, and the campus infrastructure would be built and powered by Crusoe Energy Systems, a Denver-based company that had entered the data-center market from natural-gas flare mitigation in the Permian Basin.

Crusoe Energy had already established a presence in Taylor County through a smaller facility on the same Lancium Clean Campus footprint. The January 2025 Stargate announcement was an expansion of an existing relationship, not a greenfield entry, and the expansion moved quickly.⁸ The company’s executives briefed Abilene city council members and Taylor County commissioners on the investment in late January 2025, presenting figures that described 1,100 acres of converted pasture and row-crop land north of Abilene, an eventual 1,200 megawatts of compute capacity, and an investment basis that the county appraiser would eventually certify at $3.5 billion.

The tax abatement was the mechanism of public consent. Taylor County and the Abilene Independent School District, acting under Chapter 403 of the Texas Government Code, the Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act that replaced the expired Chapter 313 program, approved an abatement of 85 percent of property taxes on the certified investment value for ten years.⁸ At a $3.5 billion assessment, the full property-tax bill across county and school district would approach $50 million annually at current rates; the 85-percent abatement reduces that figure to roughly $7.5 million per year, forgoing approximately $42 million annually that would otherwise flow to roads, schools, and county services for a decade. The abatement was approved without a formal fiscal note that translated the forgone revenue into per-pupil or per-household terms for Abilene ISD families.¹

Oncor’s grid alone could not solve the power problem. Oncor Electric Delivery, the regulated transmission and distribution company serving Taylor County, had the transmission infrastructure to deliver 300 to 400 megawatts to the campus in the near term; the 1,200-megawatt eventual capacity required new transmission investment that could not be online before the first compute racks needed power.⁶ Crusoe solved the gap the same way that xAI had solved it in Memphis: on-site gas generation. The company permitted a 360-megawatt natural-gas plant on the campus through the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state agency with Clean Air Act permitting authority under EPA delegation.

The emissions permit that TCEQ issued for the gas plant is the document whose consequences are most legible. The permitted facility is authorized to emit 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent per year and 14 tons of hazardous air pollutants per year.⁹ The hazardous air pollutants include nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde, the same pollutants that the Southern Environmental Law Center documented at the xAI Memphis facility. At 1.6 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent per year, the Stargate Abilene gas plant emits more greenhouse gas annually than the entire residential sector of a mid-size Texas city. The Texas Observer, which assigned a reporter to cover the Stargate Abilene facility in 2025, documented the emission figures and the community opposition at commissioners court.

Crusoe drew water for the initial cooling fill from the municipal supply that the West Central Texas Municipal Water District delivers to the City of Abilene from Hubbard Creek Reservoir and Fort Phantom Hill Reservoir.⁴ The campus uses a closed-loop cooling system that limits steady-state consumption; the initial fill drew an estimated eight million gallons from the municipal system at a moment when the combined reservoir capacity had fallen below 52 percent.⁴ Closed-loop cooling is a genuine improvement over evaporative cooling towers, which consume water continuously, but the initial fill figure is not trivial for a reservoir system under drought stress, and the closed-loop claim depends on operational discipline that TCEQ carries no current mandate to audit.

The land conversion itself was accomplished through direct purchase, not condemnation. Crusoe acquired the parcels from willing sellers, and the legal mechanism was straightforward. What was not straightforward was the context: Taylor County had approved an abatement that made the land far more attractive to an industrial buyer than to the next generation of a ranching family. Taylor County offered the abatement to attract the investment; the county did not extend it to the ranching families whose tax-supported roads, schools, and water systems had made the land worth buying. The land transfers did not require an analysis of which families sold under financial pressure and which sold freely, because no state or local statute required one.

What the community could see and what it could not

Map: Hubbard Creek and Fort Phantom Hill Reservoirs relative to the Lancium campus

The information asymmetry at Stargate Abilene was structural, not accidental. The commissioners court hearings where the abatement was approved were public, and local reporters attended them. The Taylor County Action Network, an informal network of Taylor County residents who began tracking the Stargate campus in early 2025, organized sign-on letters and public comments that named the emissions figures, the water draw, and the abatement terms. The Abilene Reporter-News covered the commissioners court proceedings.

What the public record did not contain was a cumulative-impact analysis: a document that placed the 360-megawatt gas plant’s emissions alongside the existing air quality in the census tracts surrounding the campus, or that modeled what combined reservoir drawdown would look like under a sequence of low-rainfall years while a 1,200-megawatt campus drew water for initial fill and emergency cooling backup. The TCEQ permit was evaluated on the facility’s own footprint. The PUCT proceedings on SB 6 large-load infrastructure focused on cost assignment, not environmental impact. No federal nexus triggered a National Environmental Policy Act review.

The organizers who engaged the TCEQ permit process faced a specific problem that the Boxtown coalition did not face to the same degree: the Abilene area had no legacy environmental justice designation, no formal EPA-flagged nonattainment zone, and no prior-permit record that established the cumulative burden. The airshed was relatively clean by West Texas standards before the Stargate campus. The argument that the emissions permit should carry a higher standard of review because the community already bore a disproportionate industrial load was harder to make from the permit record, because the load had not previously been documented systematically.

The water record was somewhat clearer. WCTMWD publishes reservoir capacity figures publicly, and the Texas Water Development Board maintains a statewide monitoring database for surface-water reservoirs.³ A community member with access to those databases could calculate, in a spreadsheet, what an eight-million-gallon initial fill meant against a reservoir system at 51.8 percent capacity. The Taylor County Action Network produced exactly this analysis and delivered it to commissioners court as a written comment. The commissioners approved the abatement without commissioning an independent water-impact study.

The ERCOT interconnection queue tells a related story about information that was formally available but not translated into public terms. PUCT Project 58481 opened in 2026 to implement the SB 6 rules governing how large-load infrastructure costs would be assigned across the transmission system.¹⁰ Sierra Club Lone Star filed at the docket. Public Citizen Texas testified that the cost-assignment methodology, which spread new transmission costs across all Texas ratepayers rather than assigning them to the large-load customers who triggered the investment, would produce invisible per-household costs that no ratepayer could identify on a utility bill.⁶ The proceeding was technically open but practically inaccessible to a working farmer in Taylor County who lacked the time to follow PUCT dockets.

The gap between the formal openness of the process and the practical accessibility of the information is where the three major harms reside. The emissions permit was approved by an agency; the ratepayer cost was assigned by a rulemaking; the water draw was covered by a municipal contract. Each approval was lawful. Taken together they represent a public subsidy, a public emissions burden, and a public water draw that were never presented to the public in a single document that named all three.

Who organized and what they built

Map: Organizing nodes in Taylor County and the ERCOT regulatory grid

The organizing response to Stargate Abilene was faster than Taylor County’s institutional precedent would have predicted. The Taylor County Action Network had no formal organizational history before early 2025; it formed as a loose coalition of ranchers, retired educators, and environmental advocates who had been following the Crusoe facility before the Stargate announcement. When the January 2025 announcement named Abilene as the first Stargate site, the network acquired a focal point and began coordinating with statewide organizations.

Sierra Club Lone Star, founded in 1965 and carrying the longest environmental advocacy record in Texas, filed at PUCT Project 58481 on the SB 6 large-load cost-assignment rulemaking.¹⁰ The filing argued that the current rulemaking framework, which did not require data-center operators to demonstrate that the transmission infrastructure their load required was cost-justified for the general ratepayer, violated the statutory mandate that the PUCT protect the public interest in the electric system. The Sierra Club filing was paired with a public educational campaign in Taylor County that translated the docket-level arguments into terms a commissioners court voter could apply.

Public Citizen Texas, the 1984-founded state affiliate of Ralph Nader’s national consumer organization, testified in PUCT proceedings on the Texas Energy Fund, a state program that subsidized new gas generation for grid reliability.⁶ Adrian Shelley, the director of Public Citizen Texas, made the argument that the Texas Energy Fund’s subsidies to new gas plants, including the Stargate Abilene gas plant, exposed Texas ratepayers to stranded-asset risk if AI demand projections proved incorrect. The argument was not novel, because the same organizations made it about coal plants in the 2010s, and it was correct then too.

The Texas Observer, the Austin-based investigative newsweekly that has covered Texas political economy since 1954, assigned a reporter to the Stargate Abilene story in 2025 and produced the only sustained investigative work on the emissions permit that reached a statewide audience.⁹ The Observer’s reporting documented the gap between the permit’s authorized emission levels and the TCEQ’s actual monitoring capacity for a new facility in a county that had not previously required this level of industrial air-quality surveillance. Texas Monthly covered the economic dimensions of the Stargate announcement for a general Texas readership.¹

The coalition that formed around Stargate Abilene did not stop the campus; the first compute racks came online in 2025 and the gas plant began operating that same year. What the coalition built was a documentary record: the emissions permit language, the reservoir capacity data, the abatement terms, the PUCT docket filings, and the commissioners court comments, gathered in a form that a future renegotiation or a future legal challenge can use as a foundation. The Taylor County Action Network, unlike the Boxtown coalition, does not yet have a permanent organizational home or a litigation partner. The gap is the gap that every rural organizing effort faces: the legal infrastructure that the Southern Environmental Law Center provides in Memphis does not have a direct equivalent in West Texas.

What present organizers should borrow

Map: Atlas historical parallels: Cabrillo Village and Chavez Ravine

The atlas’s California entries offer two transferable tools. The Cabrillo Village cooperative purchase in Ventura County is the more direct fit. In the 1970s, the Garcia family and other Cabrillo Village farmworker families faced the sale of the land they occupied to a winery operation that would not have retained their housing. The families organized a cooperative purchase, obtained financing through a combination of federal rural housing programs and California housing assistance, and acquired the land outright from the seller before the winery transaction could close.¹¹ The mechanism was not political pressure; it was property acquisition. The families became landowners, which meant that no subsequent sale could displace them without their consent.

The parallel for Taylor County is not exact, because the Stargate parcels were sold before the cooperative model could have applied. The transferable lesson is the timeline: the Cabrillo Village families began organizing before the sale was complete, using the period of uncertainty to secure financing and build the cooperative structure. In any future Taylor County land-assembly situation, whether driven by a second data-center campus or by a transmission corridor condemnation, the window between announcement and closing is the window for cooperative organization. The Sierra Club Lone Star chapter and the Taylor County Action Network are the organizations positioned to open that window quickly the next time a large-scale land acquisition is announced.

The Chavez Ravine entry carries a second lesson, less about property acquisition and more about the public record. The Dodgers Stadium clearance of Chavez Ravine, documented in this atlas through the Arechiga family evictions of 1959, was possible in part because the displacement was administered across multiple agencies, multiple legal frameworks, and multiple years, so that no single document ever named all of what was being taken. The Arechiga evictions were the last act of a process that had been running since the 1949 public housing proposal; by 1959 the institutional memory of the original promise was dispersed across court files, housing authority records, and the memories of residents who had been displaced in earlier rounds. The lesson the Chavez Ravine entry identifies for present organizers is documentation that persists across phases: a single archive that tracks every agency action, every land transaction, and every public promise across the full duration of a displacement process, not just the dramatic final act.¹²

The Taylor County Action Network, operating informally in 2025 and 2026, is producing documentation of the Stargate first phase. If a second campus, a transmission corridor, or a pipeline crossing of the Hubbard Creek watershed follows, the network needs an institutional structure that preserves that documentation after the individuals who gathered it depart. The Boxtown parallel is relevant here: Memphis Community Against Pollution formalized after the Byhalia Connection victory specifically because the organizers recognized that the next fight would come before they were ready, and they needed a structure that could absorb new members and transmit institutional memory. The Taylor County Action Network faces the same structural challenge.

The PUCT SB 6 proceeding also offers a tool that is rare in rural organizing contexts: a statutory forum with discovery powers. PUCT Project 58481 is a formal rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act. Any person who files as an intervenor in a PUCT contested case has the right to conduct discovery, submit expert testimony, and cross-examine witnesses on the record. Sierra Club Lone Star and Public Citizen Texas have both used this process. The Taylor County Action Network, if it formalizes as an incorporated nonprofit or joins as a coalition partner to one of the existing filers, could submit testimony specifically documenting the Taylor County communities that bear the costs of the transmission buildout the Stargate campus requires.¹⁰

The water fight runs through a different forum. The Texas Water Code gives the WCTMWD board authority over the allocation of water from Hubbard Creek and Fort Phantom Hill reservoirs. The board’s meetings are open to the public and subject to the Texas Open Meetings Act. A community group that documents the Stargate initial fill draw, establishes baseline reservoir-capacity data, and presents projections of combined campus demand against the WCTMWD system’s drought-year performance is making precisely the argument that moved the Memphis Sand Aquifer into Protect Our Aquifer’s litigation record. The technical capacity for that analysis exists: the TWDB provides reservoir monitoring data at no cost, and the WCTMWD FAQ is already the best-maintained public record the district produces.³

Public Citizen Texas has argued in PUCT proceedings that every dollar of transmission infrastructure triggered by a hyperscale data-center campus should be charged to the large-load customer, not spread across the general ratepayer pool. The same argument applies to the water system: every gallon of initial fill, every gallon of emergency backup cooling, and every capacity reservation for the Stargate campus represents a draw on a public resource whose scarcity is real and whose replacement cost, in a second drought year, would fall on municipal water customers across a four-county service area. The WCTMWD board has the authority to require a large-customer water impact analysis as a condition of a new large-supply contract. The Taylor County Action Network and its allies could request that the board exercise that authority as a condition of any future Stargate capacity expansion.⁴

The atlas records what the ground north of Abilene held: ranching operations that carried a community’s tax base, a Mexican-American agricultural workforce whose Abilene neighborhoods share the same reservoirs as the campus, and an airshed that was, before 2025, one of the cleaner in Texas. The atlas also records what the ground holds now: a 1,200-megawatt campus on converted pasture, a gas plant permitted for emissions that dwarf anything the county had previously authorized, an 85-percent tax abatement whose beneficiary is a joint venture between three of the most capitalized companies in the world, and a water draw from a reservoir system that is running below half capacity.

The Cabrillo Village families bought their land before the window closed. The Chavez Ravine families did not, and the archive of what happened to them is what remains. The Taylor County Action Network is in the window. The tools exist, the statutory forums are open, and the statewide organizations are already filing. What the network needs most is the institutional structure that makes the documentation survive the first fight long enough to inform the second.

Footnotes

1. Texas Monthly, “Abilene, Stargate, and Artificial Intelligence,” 2025. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/abilene-stargate-artificial-intelligence/. Cited for the ranching and row-crop character of the Taylor County parcels, the community economic context, and the general description of the Stargate campus development. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, 2023. https://data.census.gov/. Cited for the 36-percent Hispanic or Latino population in census tracts 48441010902 and 48441010901 surrounding the Lancium campus. ↩

3. Texas Water Development Board, “Hubbard Creek Reservoir,” 2026. https://www.twdb.texas.gov/surfacewater/rivers/reservoirs/hubbard_creek/index.asp. Cited for Hubbard Creek Reservoir’s construction history, storage monitoring data, and below-normal capacity levels in 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. West Central Texas Municipal Water District, “Water Supply FAQ,” 2026. https://www.wctmwd.org/f-a-q. Cited for the combined reservoir capacity at 51.8 percent, the four-city service area, and the closed-loop cooling water-draw figures. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Business Insider, “See where data centers are across the US on our interactive map,” September 2025. https://www.businessinsider.com/data-center-locations-us-map-ai-boom-2025-9. Cited for the 1,240-facility national data-center inventory established through air-permit research and public-records litigation, the 329-facility Northern Virginia concentration, and the 48-facility Maricopa County figure. ↩

6. Mayer Brown, “Important Texas Regulatory Updates for Data Centers,” July 2025. https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/important-texas-regulatory-updates-for-data-centers. Cited for the ERCOT large-load interconnection process under SB 6, the 75-megawatt threshold for expedited connection, and the ratepayer cost-assignment methodology in PUCT proceedings. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Crusoe Energy Systems, “Crusoe Expands AI Data Center Campus in Abilene to 1.2 Gigawatts,” 2025. https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/newsroom/crusoe-expands-ai-data-center-campus-in-abilene-to-1-2-gigawatts. Cited for the January 2025 OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle joint venture announcement, the Abilene first-site designation, and the 1,200-megawatt campus confirmation. ↩

8. KTXS Big Country, “Lancium and Crusoe Executives Brief Abilene Leaders on Major Northside Investment,” 2025. https://www.bigcountryhomepage.com/news/local/lancium-crusoe-executives-brief-abilene-leaders-on-major-northside-investment. Cited for the commissioners court and city council briefings, the 85-percent property tax abatement over ten years, and the $3.5 billion investment certification. ↩ ↩²

9. Texas Observer, “Abilene, Texas Stargate Natural Gas Plant Harms,” 2025. https://www.texasobserver.org/abilene-texas-stargate-natural-gas-plant-harms/. Cited for the 360-megawatt gas plant emissions permit, the 1.6 million metric tons CO2-equivalent authorized emission, the 14 tons hazardous air pollutants, and the community opposition record. ↩ ↩²

10. Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, “PUCT Project 58481 SB 6 Rulemaking: Sierra Club Lone Star Filing,” 2026. https://www.sierraclub.org/texas. Cited for the Sierra Club Lone Star intervention at PUCT Project 58481, the large-load cost-assignment arguments, and the public educational campaign in Taylor County. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Cabrillo Village Cooperative, organizational history and farmworker cooperative purchase record. Referenced as an atlas entry documenting the Ventura County cooperative land purchase; Cabrillo Village is covered in the atlas’s Ventura County place essay. ↩

12. Chavez Ravine / Arechiga family eviction record, 1959. Referenced as an atlas entry documenting the multi-phase Chavez Ravine displacement; the eviction record is covered in the atlas’s Los Angeles Chavez Ravine place essay. ↩