This last brief is about what happens now, and how residents can participate in the process.

How you participate

• Commissioners’ Court meetings. These are public and open. Watch for agenda items related to data centers, the moratorium, or the CBA. Public comments are welcome.
• Quarterly community update meetings. Once the CBA is in place, the developer is required to hold these. You can attend, ask questions, see the monitoring data, and raise concerns.
• Direct contact with your commissioner. Each Commissioner has constituent contact information available through the County offices. Letters, calls, and emails are read.
• Contact your state and federal representatives. Many state and federal legislators are actively drafting bills for “common sense” regulatory minimums for the protection of unincorporated lands, environmental concerns, water, and waste-energy capture.
• Public records. Annual Compliance Reports filed under the CBA will be published on the County website. You can read them yourself.

What this series did, and what it didn’t

This series was prepared to help residents understand the data center proposals on a factual basis — what they are, how they affect a community, what concerns are real, what protections are being built into the CBA, and how residents can engage with the process.

For transparency — Scope Technology and Manufacturing has offered, under no financial terms, to serve as an independent technical and policy advisor to the County during the moratorium period.

These briefs do not take a position for or against any specific project. The Commissioners’ Court, with public input, will make those decisions. What this series does is make sure those decisions are made by people who have the same facts available — instead of by people who only hear from the loudest voices on either side.

Start of the series

What are data centers? →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

Throughout this series, the Community Benefit Agreement has been referenced repeatedly. This brief explains what it actually is and why it matters.

In plain language

A Community Benefit Agreement is a written contract between a Texas county and any developer who wants to build a data center here. It spells out — in measurable, enforceable terms — what the developer commits to do and not do.

It is not a permit. It is not a zoning rule. It is a contract. That distinction matters, because Texas counties have very limited zoning authority in unincorporated areas. What counties can do is negotiate contractual commitments before a project goes forward. The CBA is that contract.

What the CBA covers

The thirteen articles in the current draft cover:

• Water — sources, caps, cooling architecture, monitoring, drawdown triggers, water-positive offsets.
• Energy and heat — required waste-heat recovery, heat reuse, atmospheric water generation evaluation.
• Air, noise, and light — emissions monitoring, decibel limits, dark-sky lighting.
• Roads — impact assessment, escrow, designated routes.
• Emergency response — funded industrial fire equipment, training, dedicated officer.
• Local hire — targets with claw-back, workforce pipeline funding.
• Behind-the-meter lock-in — protections if the developer later tries to sell power to the grid.
• In-front-of-the-meter transmission — transmission costs and connectivity to the utility district for net MWh.
• Property value protection — baseline study and adjustment mechanism.
• Reporting — annual public compliance report, quarterly community meetings, independent third-party monitor.
• Enforcement — what counts as a breach, what the County can do about it, what security is held.

What makes it different from a press release

Developers often make broad promises in press releases — that they will use advanced cooling technology, be good neighbors, or hire locally. But those statements are not binding contracts and cannot be fully enforced. The CBA turns those promises into enforceable obligations, with specific numbers, deadlines, monitoring requirements, and consequences for noncompliance.

Next in this series

Your voice in the process — and what happens next →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

Developers presenting data center projects usually lead with two numbers: jobs and tax revenue. Both numbers are real. Both are also routinely overstated, often by orders of magnitude, in early presentations. This brief explains what to look for.

Jobs

Data centers create three kinds of jobs, and they are very different from each other.

• Construction jobs. Many — sometimes thousands during peak construction. Temporary, lasting 18–36 months per phase. Most of these workers commute or are housed in temporary lodging, and many travel with the build from project to project. They are real jobs, but they generally do not become Hill County residents.
• Permanent operations jobs. Far fewer — typically 50–150 for the data center per phase, plus 25–50 for a co-located gas generation facility. These are higher paying and more permanent. Whether they go to Hill County residents depends entirely on the local-hire commitments in the CBA and the workforce pipeline built to support them.
• Spillover jobs. Restaurants, hotels, services, suppliers. These are real but modest, and they cluster near the construction phase rather than persisting at scale.

Taxes

A hyperscale campus can be the largest single addition a county has ever seen to its property tax roll — in absolute terms. But Texas has structured significant tax incentives for data centers that reduce what stays local:

• Texas sales tax exemption for qualifying data center equipment — the servers themselves, the largest cost item, are exempt from state sales tax.
• Chapter 312 property tax abatements — counties commonly grant 50–100% abatements for 7–10 years on the data center improvements.
• School district recapture (“Robin Hood”) — large new valuations in property-poor school districts increase recapture payments to the state, reducing the local school benefit.

After abatements and recapture, the net revenue retained locally in the first ten years is often a fraction — sometimes a small fraction — of the headline number. The full revenue arrives only after the abatement period ends.

What the CBA does

• Local-hire targets with claw-back. If the developer doesn’t meet the targets, they pay into a workforce development fund.
• Workforce pipeline investment. Funded curriculum at Hill College for welding, controls, millwright, and field-service trades.
• Road impact escrows. Pavement consumption is paid before construction, so the cost doesn’t fall on the county budget after the fact.
• Industrial Fire Officer position. A specialist hire that volunteer fire departments cannot otherwise afford.

Next in this series

What the Community Benefit Agreement does →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

When residents talk about what they value, they often mention things that don’t show up on engineering diagrams: dark skies, quiet evenings, the sound of cattle rather than turbines, the feeling that you can see the stars and hear the wind. These aren’t sentimental concerns. They are real, measurable, and protectable — if the CBA is written to protect them.

Where the noise comes from

A hyperscale campus with on-site gas generation produces three kinds of noise, each different in character:

• Cooling fans on the data hall. Continuous, low-frequency hum. Audible at long distances on still nights. This is the sound most associated with data centers. Mitigation: directional, sound-diverting industrial dampeners.
• Gas turbines and engines. Louder, broadband mechanical noise. The technology to muffle these (acoustic enclosures, exhaust silencers) exists and is mature. Additional mitigation can include gensets built inside a confined, acoustically engineered high-walled structure with dampening technology, or alternatively within a medium-subgrade structure much like a below-street-level parking garage. The question is whether this is specified in Phase 1 procurement.
• Construction traffic. Heavy trucks, concrete deliveries, and crane equipment. Concentrated during the 18–36-month build of each phase. This eventually ends, but it dominates the early years.

Where the light comes from

Three sources of light pollution: 24-hour security lighting around the perimeter; required aviation obstruction lighting on tall stacks and structures; and parking lot lighting. The total effect can be a visible glow on the horizon for miles, washing out the dark sky.

The fix is mature technology: full-cutoff fixtures that direct light downward, lower color temperatures (warmer tones that scatter less), motion sensors, and curfew controls. Aviation lighting cannot be eliminated but can use red flashing rather than continuous white.

What the CBA does

• Property-line noise limits — measured, not promised. Specific decibel limits for day and night, with continuous monitoring at the property boundary and monthly public reporting.
• Construction noise hours — restricted to specific weekday windows; no Sunday construction; no holiday construction without explicit approval.
• Dark-sky lighting standard — full-cutoff fixtures required for all exterior lighting except FAA-required aviation lighting.
• Color temperature cap — 3000 Kelvin maximum, to reduce blue-light scatter that affects the night sky.
• Property-line illumination limit — measurable in foot-candles.

Next in this series

Jobs, taxes, and what the local economy actually gets →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

Data centers are large electricity consumers. Some proposed projects include their own on-site natural gas power plants, designed to serve the data center loads directly. This raises a specific set of questions about what happens to your electricity bill and to the broader Texas grid.

Two paths

Data centers either connect to ERCOT (the Texas grid) and buy electricity like any large industrial customer, or they build their own “behind-the-meter” generation and produce their own power. The Hill County projects are taking the second path.

If a project draws from ERCOT

When a large new load connects to ERCOT, it has two effects. First, the wholesale price of electricity rises as more demand competes for the same supply. Second, the costs of building new transmission lines to serve the load are usually spread across all ratepayers under current Texas rules. Both effects show up on residential electricity bills, often months to years after the data center comes online.

If a project is behind-the-meter (the Hill County case)

A behind-the-meter data center does not draw from ERCOT for its primary load, so the first two effects above are largely avoided. But three secondary effects remain:

• Natural gas demand. A large gas-fired plant consumes very large quantities of natural gas. That demand puts upward pressure on regional gas prices, which raises the cost of gas-fired electricity throughout Texas, which raises bills.
• Backup connections. Even behind-the-meter sites usually have some grid connection for backup or supplemental power, and those connections can require infrastructure paid partly by ratepayers of the local utility supplier.
• Future conversion. A behind-the-meter project can later seek to sell electricity into ERCOT (becoming a “merchant generator”). When that happens, the dynamics revert to the first case. The CBA includes a “behind-the-meter lock-in” with a financial obligation if this conversion occurs, to protect the County’s interests.

What the CBA does

• Requires waste-heat recovery on the on-site gas plant. This captures 8–12% of plant output that would otherwise be vented — reducing the amount of fuel needed to deliver the same data center load.
• Locks in behind-the-meter operation for a defined period.
• Sets a Conversion Payment if the developer later sells power to ERCOT.
• Requires emissions monitoring and air-quality reporting under Article 5.

Next in this series

Noise, light, and the feel of where we live →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

Water is the issue residents raise most often, and it is the issue most worth understanding in detail. The water footprint of a data center is not fixed — it varies enormously with the cooling architecture the developer chooses. The same megawatts of computing power can be cooled with five million gallons of water per day, or with effectively zero, depending on which technology is selected at the design phase.

Where the water goes

Most data center water is used for cooling. The two largest uses are:

• Server cooling — Pulling heat away from the servers and their chips (CPUs and GPUs). Older designs do this with evaporative cooling towers (water evaporates into the air, taking heat with it). Newer designs circulate liquid in sealed loops, with much less evaporation.
• Power plant cooling — If the data center has its own on-site gas-fired power plant, that plant also needs cooling. This is a second, separate water load that can be larger than the server cooling itself.

Why the design choice matters so much

The capital cost difference between the worst and best water designs is meaningful but not prohibitive — typically 10% to 30% on the cooling portion of the project, with payback through reduced operating costs. At AI-class compute densities, modern liquid cooling is often cheaper, not more expensive, than older designs.

What a county CBA does

The CBA contains specific water provisions:

• Open evaporative cooling is prohibited as the primary cooling method for either the data center or the on-site gas plant.
• Environmental catch basins or process discharge basins, installed, properly lined, and monitored.
• Water sources must be used in priority order: rainwater first, recycled water second, treated municipal effluent third, brackish groundwater fourth, freshwater last.
• A volumetric cap is set on freshwater withdrawal.
• Monitoring wells around the site, paid for by the developer, with quarterly public reporting.
• A “drawdown trigger” — if water levels in the monitoring wells decline beyond agreed thresholds, additional construction phases must pause.
• Water-positive offsets: the developer funds projects (aquifer recharge, agricultural efficiency, conservation) that compensate for any freshwater used.

Next in this series

Power, the grid, and your electric bill →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

Texas knows about industrial development. Oil and gas built this state — the income, the jobs, the schools, the universities, the highways. Texans are generally not anti-industrial. But Texans also know what it looks like when an industry moves faster than the rules can keep up. The oil and gas experience offers useful lessons for how to think about the data center wave — both what worked and what didn’t.

This brief is not a criticism of oil and gas. It is a comparison of two industrial waves that have arrived in Texas under different rules.

The water comparison

The most direct comparison is water use. Both industries are large, growing water consumers in a state that is becoming drier.

Two things stand out from this comparison. First, the data center wave is on a trajectory to be larger in water use than oil and gas within a decade. Second, both industries have followed a similar pattern: rapid growth ahead of regulation, voluntary commitments to reduce freshwater use, and a delayed state planning response. Texas’s 2027 State Water Plan does not specifically account for data center growth.

Where oil and gas regulation got there eventually

Texas oil and gas operates today under a substantial regulatory framework — Railroad Commission permits, TCEQ air permits, produced water disposal rules, well integrity standards, earthquake monitoring after the Permian seismic events, and so on. Most of that framework was built reactively, after the activity was already widespread. Communities that lived through that pattern remember the costs of waiting — pollution events, contaminated groundwater, infrastructure damage, and lawsuits that took years to resolve.

The lesson is not that oil and gas were wrong. The lesson is that an industry on this scale needs rules of the road, and the rules work better when they are written before the buildout, not after.

Where data centers differ

Data centers do not pose the same risks as oil and gas. They do not produce “produced water” — the salty, contaminated wastewater that the Permian generates at the rate of 22 million barrels per day. They do not cause earthquakes from injection wells. They do not release benzene or other carcinogens during operation. The continuous noise and 24-hour lighting profile is, in fact, different and in some ways more intrusive than oil and gas — but the chemical and air-quality risks are lower.

What this comparison suggests

If you have lived through an industrial boom in Texas, you know what “too fast, too unregulated” looks like. The data center wave does not have to repeat that pattern. The Community Benefit Agreement framework being developed is precisely the kind of up-front, written, enforceable structure that the oil and gas era largely lacked at its start.

Supporting careful regulation of data centers is not anti-industry. It is what Texans learned to wish for from prior industrial waves.

Next in this series

Water: the real picture →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

When data centers are proposed in rural and small-town communities — in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona, and elsewhere — residents tend to raise the same concerns. Some of those concerns are well-founded. Some are overstated. Some are understated. This brief sorts through them honestly.

“They’ll drain our water”

Partly true. An older-design hyperscale campus using open-loop evaporative cooling can consume 3–5 million gallons of water per day — comparable to a small city. But cooling architecture is a design choice, not a given. Modern designs (hybrid wet/dry, direct-to-chip, dry-cooled) use 70% to 90% less water. The risk is real if no CBA is in place; the risk is substantially manageable if one is.

“My electric bill is going up because of them”

Partly true — and complicated. Data centers connected to ERCOT do affect statewide electricity prices over time as they push up demand. Data centers that build their own power plants behind-the-meter — as proposed in Hill County — do not directly raise your retail electricity rate. But large gas-fired plants do move regional natural gas prices, which affects the cost of gas-fired electricity statewide. The effect is real but indirect.

“They’ll ruin my property value”

It depends, and unevenly. Studies of completed data center developments are mixed. Properties immediately adjacent to a large industrial facility usually do see value pressure, especially if there is noise, exhaust plume, or view impact. Properties farther away — even within the same county — sometimes see no effect or modest gains from regional economic development. A standard CBA includes property-value protection mechanisms, but no contract can guarantee market outcomes.

“They’ll bring jobs and tax money”

True, but smaller than the marketing suggests. Hyperscale data centers create real construction jobs (hundreds, sometimes thousands) for the duration of the build. Permanent jobs are smaller — usually 50–200 per phase for the data center itself, plus 25–50 for any co-located generation. Tax revenue is substantial in absolute terms, but Texas’s data center sales tax exemption, property tax abatements, and school district recapture significantly reduce what stays local in years 1–10.

“Nobody’s been told what’s coming”

Largely accurate. Texas counties do not have zoning authority in unincorporated areas, and developers are not required to disclose plans to the county. Some counties are making an effort to slow projects down enough to establish disclosure and review processes that don’t currently exist.

“They’ll keep coming until everything is built up”

Possible — and that’s why the CBA matters. Up to eight data center projects are reportedly being scoped in Hill County. The CBA framework being developed sets out the conditions any of them must meet. If the conditions are durable and consistently applied, only the developers who can meet them will proceed. The CBA is the County’s tool to make sure the conditions don’t erode over time.

Next in this series

Lessons from oil and gas: a Texas comparison →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

A data center of the size of those proposed in Hill County and others is, in practical terms, a large industrial facility. It is not loud or visually intrusive in the way a refinery is, but it is still a substantial physical presence with measurable impacts on the area around it. The impacts fall into six categories.

1. Water

Data centers use water to cool their computers. How much water depends entirely on the cooling design — a topic covered in detail in Brief 5. A hyperscale campus using older cooling technology can consume three to five million gallons of water per day, comparable to a small city. A campus using modern closed-loop or dry-cooling designs can use 70% to 90% less.

2. Power

Data centers consume electricity continuously. Where the power comes from matters: data centers connected to the grid (ERCOT in Texas) add load that affects everyone else’s electricity prices. Data centers that build their own power plants on site — as the Hill County projects propose to do — don’t draw from the grid, but they do introduce their own environmental footprint from those on-site plants. This is covered in Brief 6.

3. Land and roads

A hyperscale campus typically occupies 200 to 1,000 acres. During construction, which lasts 18 to 36 months per phase, thousands of heavy trucks deliver equipment, materials, and modules. Farm-to-market roads are not built for industrial traffic and wear out quickly. Brief 3 and Brief 8 cover this.

4. Air and noise

Data centers with grid-supplied electricity have minimal air emissions on site. Data centers with on-site gas generation produce continuous turbine exhaust — regulated, but real. The noise comes from cooling fans (continuous), the gas turbines (loud, broadband), and construction traffic. Brief 7 covers this.

5. Property values and rural character

A 24-hour industrial facility next door changes the character of a place. Some residents see adjacent property values rise (because of nearby development); others see theirs fall (because of noise, view, or traffic). The honest answer is that effects are unevenly distributed, depending on distance, line of sight, prevailing winds, and other factors such as existing buildings or infrastructure.

6. Tax base and jobs

A hyperscale campus is typically the largest single addition a county can imagine to its property tax roll. But Texas data center tax incentives — abatements, sales tax exemptions, school district recapture — significantly reduce the net revenue in the first ten years. Permanent jobs are real but limited: usually 50 to 200 per phase, far fewer than the construction-phase numbers developers emphasize. Brief 8 covers this in detail.

Next in this series

What residents typically worry about — and what’s accurate →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026

A data center is a building — or a campus of buildings — filled with computers, often thousands of them, running nonstop, 24 hours a day.

It is the physical infrastructure behind the digital world. The emails you send, the videos you stream, the banking transactions you make, the weather forecasts you check, and the map apps you use all rely on servers housed on shelves inside real buildings.

In other words, the “cloud” is not abstract. It is physical, and it exists somewhere.

Most of those buildings have been invisible to most people for the past twenty years because they were small, scattered in cities, and didn’t make headlines. That has changed. The reason it has changed is artificial intelligence.

The AI difference

AI systems require enormous amounts of computation. Training a large AI model can consume as much electricity in a few months as several thousand homes use in a year. Running those models for everyone who wants to use them requires even more. To meet that demand, the companies building AI — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle, and many others — are building data centers far larger than anything that existed before.

There is also a physics reason for this scale. AI training is spread across thousands of chips that must constantly exchange data with each other, and even light itself takes measurable time to travel through fiber and switching equipment. At smaller scales, those delays are manageable. At frontier-model scale, they become a real performance penalty. That is why AI developers concentrate massive compute clusters inside hyperscale campuses with ultra-high-bandwidth, ultra-low-latency internal networks: the closer the machines are to one another, the faster they can train together.

The old data center was 20 to 50 megawatts of electricity demand — about the size of a small town. The new “hyperscale” AI data centers are 500 to 2,000 megawatts, with some proposed sites in Texas reaching 7,000 megawatts (7 gigawatts). For comparison, the largest single power plant in Texas before this wave was about 3,800 megawatts. Some of the new data center campuses, including the ones proposed in Hill County, build their own power plants on site to serve their own loads.

Why Texas

Texas has been a magnet for data center development for three reasons: land is available; the state grid (ERCOT) is independent and faster to interconnect to than most others; and Texas has been politically welcoming to large industrial customers. By early 2026, Texas had more than 400 data centers in operation or under construction — second nationally only to Virginia.

The current proposals in Hill County are part of that wave. Two are particularly large: a roughly 612-megawatt project near Hillsboro and a roughly 7.2-gigawatt project near Hubbard. Up to six other projects are reportedly in earlier stages of discussion.

What this brief does not address

This first brief explains what data centers are. The next briefs in the series cover how they affect water, power, noise, taxes, jobs, and rural character — and what the a Community Benefit Agreement could be structured to protect.

Next in this series

How do data centers affect the places where they operate? →

County Community Education Series · Prepared by Scope Technology and Manufacturing as advisor to Texas residents of unincorporated counties · May 2026