Data center worries drive campaign through West Texas as Democrats stump for the rural vote

From KTTZ:

Texas Democratic candidates rallied in Lubbock on Saturday to present their campaign platforms to West Texas voters, where concerns over the influx of large-scale data centers and their impacts have been top of mind for citizens across party lines.

Riley Rodriguez, the Democratic candidate running for the Texas Senate seat in District 28, said the issue is what got him started on this campaign. Facilities like Stargate, a $500 billion project to facilitate data for future AI data models, brought 6,000 temporary construction workers and sent rents skyrocketing in Rodriguez’s hometown of Abilene.

“I picked this seat because data centers started coming into our communities and wrecking them. Flat out. When Stargate came into Abilene on day one, we had rent hikes,” Rodriguez said. “That ain’t nothing but greed. That’s not West Texas, and that’s not rural Texas, and that’s not the Texas that I grew up in. And when I reached out to our representatives, the answer was ‘that’s progress.’”

Earlier in July, Rodriguez was one of more than 500 people from Lubbock and surrounding areas who attended a forum hosted by the City of Lubbock to gather public input on large-scale data centers. After the City’s meeting, Lubbock’s Texas House District 84 GOP representative Carl Tepper told KCBD in Lubbock that he believes Lubbock is an “economic development town,” and he welcomes the job creation and development from the data industry as an opportunity to bring funding for “our schools, our parks, our hospitals.”

In a recent op-ed with the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Rodriguez’s opponent, incumbent Republican Senator Charles Perry said there are benefits to be had for rural communities with the infrastructure improvements that developers can bring.

“None of this means we should stop asking hard questions,” Perry wrote.

As chairman of the Texas Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Perry brought his own attention to West Texas water resources in the state legislature in 2025, with “generational” investments to the Texas Water Fund. Perry also believes these data center projects could present an opportunity for shrinking rural communities to build new revenue and draw jobs back, but he argued that Texans deserve transparency from developers in the process.

“It is fair to say that without addressing the real issues regarding water, electric and applicable infrastructure capacities, AI data center industry will find itself on the wrong end of the politics,” Perry wrote.

Other West Texas communities in Rodriguez’s district, like the Panhandle community of Childress, have seen issues similar to Abilene.

Citizens in Childress, a town of about 5,700 people, came out to protest in mid-July when rents shot up at a local apartment complex, forcing longtime citizens to vacate. Community advocates linked the situation to data center development like the IREN facility, where operators said construction brought around 2,500 workers to the town.

“When single mothers are getting displaced and put into hotel rooms, the day that their rent goes up, and they’re just trying to get by-that’s not progress, and it ain’t worth it,” Rodriguez said. “When industries come into our towns unregulated, unmitigated, ask for our resources, take our housing, and put our people on the street, it is time for West Texas to rise up.”

Local candidates like Malik Williams, the Democratic nominee challenging incumbent Republican house speaker Dustin Burrows for District 83, joined with statewide runners like Lampasas-native Clayton Tucker, running for Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Austin Democrat Representative Vikki Goodwin, running for Lieutenant Governor, and Gina Hinojosa, a Texas House representative from Austin and the Democratic candidate running for Texas Governor, presenting their platforms as the first part of a weekend tour across Plains and Panhandle communities including stops in Abilene, Amarillo, Plainview, and Big Spring.

For some West Texans, in a region where Republicans have held the majority as a given for nearly 30 years, the recent level of campaign attention from statewide Democratic candidates is unfamiliar.

Primary campaign events by James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett earlier this year, competing closely for the Democratic nomination for Texas’ U.S. Senate seat, each drew hundreds in Lubbock ahead of record-breaking midterm primary voter turnout, with Democrats in their primary outpacing Republicans for the first time since the presidential election year in 2020, and rural voters in Texas casting the highest percentage of votes.

Around 286 people were counted attending the recent rally at The Garden in downtown Lubbock’s Depot District, according to event staff. Democrat Kyle Rable, who’s running against Republican Tom Sell for Texas’ District 19 seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, formerly served as secretary for the Lubbock County Democratic Party. He remarked on the number of new faces at Saturday’s rally, both on and off the stage, as a sign of confidence.

“We took the entire statewide slate almost, and they came out to Lubbock, Texas,” Rable said. “That proves two things: that we are together in this fight, but also that rural Texas is on the radar for us.”

‘Big fights happening’: data centers around the table in Lubbock

Ahead of the rally, Gina Hinojosa sat down at a roundtable with community members to talk about data centers.

“I know that y’all are leaders in this community, and you have big fights happening, and I hear you’re winning,” she told the group.

The discussion included leaders from the Save Lubbock petition– which is currently collecting signatures to put an 18-month moratorium on data center development before the city council – from the advocacy group Lubbock Compact, and others from the surrounding area who have been outspoken on the issue of large-scale data centers.

Stephen Sanders, who has led multiple campaigns for city office, most recently in the race for mayor of Lubbock in May, joined with Southland-native Hallie Bertrand as the primary public figures for the Save Lubbock effort. If their petition collects enough signatures before the deadline on July 28, the moratorium will go before the City Council. If voted down there, it could be placed on a ballot for Lubbock citizens to vote on.

Bertrand, whose fiancée works as a rancher in West Texas, said she came to the data center conversation out of concern for the potential impacts on agriculture.

Stephen Sanders has advocated for the Save Lubbock petition, which is currently collecting signatures to put an 18-month moratorium on data center development before the city council. July 18, 2026. Brad Burt / KTTZ

The large-scale data processing campuses can take up thousands of acres, with the potential for significant energy and water needs scaling as the campuses grow, which has left farmers and ranchers across the country feeling pressure with tech companies like Google and OpenAI to compete for resources that have already seen strain, from demand on the energy infrastructure with population growth and years of drought across the state.

“Agriculture is, in most of the rural areas and a lot of Lubbock as well, our number one industry. And so, if that is being decimated by these out-of-state data centers, there’s nothing left for us here,” Bertrand said. “If we don’t have agriculture… we have nothing.”

More than 10 years ago, state lawmakers approved a tax break to draw in new development with facilities like large-scale data facilities, but an April study from the Texas Tribune in data from the Texas Comptroller’s office estimates the annual value of that break could reach $1.8 billion by fiscal year 2030.

In June, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a letter to state regulators with his own recommendations to place more of the infrastructure cost on developers, and called for a ban on data center development in rural parts of the state. This is a sharp reversal for Abbott, who in 2025 called Texas “the centerpiece for AI data centers for Google in the entire world.”

Hallie Bertrand brought the concerns of farmers and ranchers in West Texas to a roundtable with Rep. Gina Hinojosa, as part of the Save Lubbock effort to petition a moratorium against data centers. July 18, 2026. Brad Burt / KTTZ

Brooklyn Duvall, a 15-year-old from Idalou who sat at Hinojosa’s roundtable, said the issue of data centers feels similar to another volatile political issue that has drawn citizens’ attention to state leadership.

“We could talk about public school vouchers taking our taxpayer money and basically giving it to private entities, it’s the same game here,” she said. “Abbott is bringing these data centers. That’s not going to benefit us. It’s going to benefit the billionaires.”

A similar sentiment was shared by Josh Chavez, a Shallowater business owner and HVAC technician. He said that the conversation of large-scale data development is “not a political issue. This is a class issue.”

In January, the developers Texas Solarworks, LLC, requested zoning changes over 936 acres of land southeast of East Municipal Drive and northeast of Northeast Loop 289 in Lubbock to build a hyperscale data center.

The request was to change the land use to General Industrial from what is currently largely low-density residential.

Members of the North and East Lubbock Coalition and Lubbock’s chapter of the NAACP came to the Planning and Zoning Commission meeting in January to advocate against the development, particularly in what has long been structured as industrialized residential districts, carrying on the consequences of historic racial redlining. The Planning and Zoning Commission voted against the Texas Solarworks project, and the developers withdrew the proposal before it reached the city council for another vote.

Hinojosa praised the community for mobilizing and said that allowing decisions to be made on the local level, by elected officials who know their communities, means more accountability than when control is held at the state level, like the governor’s office.

“We should be investing in people. What if we were to instead invest in small businesses who employ people from the community and who are Texans, right?” Hinojosa said. “I think we need a clean slate and fresh start. I think where we start, and because what I’ve seen in the Texas House, is that we are all paying into a system that is working against us. I’m sorry to say, that’s where we are.”

She said that her hope with the conversation was to hear what the path forward could be for regulation and oversight on these projects.

Abbott’s recent recommendations have not included any further decision-making power for local and county governments, which critics in Lubbock and other counties say is an essential step in slowing the expansion of the data center industry, particularly in more rural and sparsely populated regions.

While some state lawmakers are plotting out bills to address the data center issues in the 90th regular legislative session, opponents on both sides of the political aisle are saying that wouldn’t be fast enough.

‘We need to deal with this now’: state regulation, local accountability

After Hinojosa’s roundtable Saturday morning and the rally in the afternoon, Democratic candidates Rep. Vikki Goodwin and Clayton Tucker came back together Saturday evening at Lubbock’s Clapp Park, this time joining with outgoing Republican Ag Commissioner Sid Miller.

The group spoke with Save Lubbock to advocate for signatures on its moratorium petition, and to call on Abbott to declare a 30-day special session to address data centers.

Miller, who lost the GOP nomination to return as Ag Commissioner in this year’s primary to Hill Country businessman Nate Sheets, has been an outspoken opponent of data center expansion. Miller told reporters that waiting for the state’s response through the regular session would leave time for data center developers to solidify legal responses of their own.

“The [legislators] start in January, they finish in June, and the new laws won’t take effect until September 2027. That’s over a year away,” Miller said. “We don’t have 14 months. We need to deal with this now.”

Miller has served as the state ag commissioner since 2015, and has been a key Texas supporter of President Donald Trump. This is not the first time that Miller has appeared with Democratic Ag Commissioner nominee Clayton Tucker, who has made opposition to data centers a focal point of his campaign. Miller has stated that the appearances are not a bipartisan endorsement of Tucker, but instead calling for state action on data centers is something he feels is “the right thing to do.”

Rep. Goodwin has been campaigning in the race for Texas’ Lt. Governor seat since May of last year and confirmed her place as the Democratic nominee to face incumbent Republican Dan Patrick after a successful runoff two months ago. Goodwin said while it probably wouldn’t help her schedule between now and November, she’s joining the call on Abbott for a special session.

“As a representative who is busy on the campaign trail, I don’t particularly want to take the time to go into session. But this is such a critical issue that I think it is imperative that we address it now,” Goodwin said.

Like Miller, Goodwin said there are still many unknowns about the scale of resources that expanding data center facilities need, and what they will need in the future. Lawmakers in Texas were looking to the results of an industry survey in June, but response from companies was not required and only a small portion submitted data, so the information was read as incomplete. Goodwin said she believes these are the kinds of regulatory gaps that need to be addressed at the state level.

“That’s the whole point of calling a special session, to talk about [how] we need transparency from these companies to understand how much water and how much electricity they’re going to be using,” Goodwin said. “We need to set in place some regulation to make sure that they aren’t pushing the cost of the new infrastructure to bring that water and energy onto us in our homes.”

In more densely populated areas, localized community efforts have seen small steps forward. In June, San Marcos became the first Texas city to ban data centers outright. In Granbury, citizens have filed recall petitions against their mayor and four city council members over their handling of area data centers.

County governments, however, do not have the same regulatory control as city offices. Commissioners have tried to enact moratoriums and been met with lawsuits from developers and warnings from state lawmakers. Without zoning authority, county-based developments remain largely unchecked.

KTTZ’s Samantha Larned contributed to this report.

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