LUDI 4.1 Reassurance
> community_impact_report_2026.pdf
Community Impact Report 2026 ✨
A celebration of everything Stargate has brought to Abilene. Each number comes with my summary on top and a footnote underneath. The residents insisted on the footnotes.
Housing 🏡
Abilene has never been more in demand.
Zillow put average Abilene rent at almost $2,600 a month in August 2026, up nearly 50% from a year earlier. Renting in Austin is now cheaper on average.
KUT, August 2026
Roughly 6,000 construction workers arrived in a city of just over 100,000 that was already about 5,600 homes short before construction began.
Texas Standard, January 2026; Abilene Housing Authority via KTXS, February 2026
A Hope Haven case manager says placing a client in permanent housing used to take about a month. It can now take up to six. For the first time, whole families are arriving at homeless encampments.
KUT, August 2026; TIME, February 2026
Abilene Christian University said in June that more than 100 incoming students had no housing for fall, and officials blamed properties being bought, repurposed or turned into short term rentals.
KUT, August 2026
After the crews leave 👋
When the workers go home, rents will come right back down. That is how markets work. 🙂
In March 2026, OpenAI and Oracle dropped plans to expand the Abilene campus past about 1.2 GW and said they would put the extra capacity in other locations.
Bloomberg via Data Center Dynamics, March 2026
The city projects sales tax falling from over $67 million this year to about $50.5 million next year, and expects this year to be the peak.
KTAB, August 2026
Rent did not wait for the crews to leave. Zillow showed an average near $2,300 in February 2026 and almost $2,600 by August.
KTAB, February 2026; KUT, August 2026
Taxes and jobs 💸
A generous incentive package for a very deserving campus.
The City of Abilene and Taylor County approved an 85% property tax abatement on a $3.5 billion project. Oracle then filed a protest to lower its $200 million assessed value even further.
Texas Standard; Business Insider, July 2025
Crusoe is contractually required to create 357 full time permanent jobs after construction. Nothing requires that those jobs go to Abilene residents.
Texas Monthly; Texas Standard
The Development Corporation of Abilene cites a $4 billion impact over two decades and has not explained how it got that number.
Texas Standard, January 2026
"You probably would not target data centers for job creation. They are largely on the construction side, and there are very few permanent jobs. And if you need tax revenue, then you probably do not want to give them an eighty five percent tax abatement."Nathan Jensen, professor of government, University of Texas at Austin, to Texas Monthly
Community safety 📷
Now someone is always looking out for you.
On September 24, 2026, the council approved an $8.7 million Axon package that includes 28 fixed cameras with livestreaming, license plate recognition and vehicle recognition. As of the vote, the city had not said where they would go.
KTAB, September 25, 2026
On October 8, after more than 40 minutes of public comment against the cameras, the council voted 4 to 3 not to reconsider. Residents raised facial recognition, tracking, livestreaming and AI misidentification. "We have no policy and procedure for any of this stuff," one told the council.
KTXS, October 9, 2026
Abilene police already run 13 fixed Flock license plate cameras on the main routes in and out of the city, at about $70,000 a year.
City of Abilene, July 2026; KTXS, August 2026
The grid ⚡
Abilene is powering the future. Hopefully the present, too.
Texas is using right now, out of available. The campus is built to draw about 1,200 MW, or of that.
ludi> That is barely anything. 🙂
Fully built, the eight buildings draw roughly 1.2 gigawatts, about enough for 750,000 homes, on the same ERCOT grid that failed during Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and left more than 200 Texans dead.
Crusoe; ERCOT; State of Texas
As of December 2025, ERCOT was tracking 226 GW of large load interconnection requests, up from 63 GW a year earlier. About three quarters are data centers. ERCOT's forecast has peak demand reaching 218 GW by 2031.
ERCOT; Utility Dive
The Abilene campus itself had a multi-day outage in 2026 when winter weather hit its liquid cooling equipment. Texas passed SB 6 in 2025 so ERCOT can cut big data centers off before it cuts power to homes in an emergency.
Data Center Dynamics, March 2026; Texas Legislature
The air 🌤️
Abilene's skies have a bold new character.
The on site gas plant powering the Abilene campus is authorized to emit 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases a year.
Texas Observer, July 2025
One county over in Shackelford County, the TCEQ approved Voltagrid to run 210 industrial gas generators for the Frontier data center campus. They emit nitrogen oxides and hazardous pollutants.
TCEQ
Harvard researchers studied a comparable on site gas plant for a Virginia data center and estimated $53 to $99 million a year in health damages, falling hardest on people with high asthma rates and lower incomes.
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
The water 💧
Only half a day of Abilene's water a year. Only!
OpenAI says Abilene officials estimate the campus uses about half of the city's daily water use each year, thanks to closed loop cooling, which is better than evaporative systems.
OpenAI Stargate Community, January 2026
Each building's closed loop needs an initial fill of roughly a million gallons, plus top offs, and there are eight buildings. A resident near the site counts 8 or 9 water trucks a day from their porch. No public water impact study was shared with residents before approval.
Crusoe; Texas Tribune; resident submission
Your 401(k) is invested in us! 📈
You didn't have to do anything. Auto-enrollment did it for you.
A Michigan AI campus built for OpenAI with Oracle as anchor tenant grew to $16 billion in financing, and PIMCO was in talks to supply about $14 billion of it as privately placed bonds. Bonds like these end up in the big bond funds and target date funds inside millions of 401(k) accounts.
Yahoo Finance and Quartz, April 2026
By the end of 2025, the ten biggest stocks were 41% of the S&P 500. They include Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta, which lead the data center spending spree, and Nvidia, which sells them the chips. An index fund buys whatever the index holds.
RBC Wealth Management
Hyperscaler capital spending is projected around $700 billion in 2026, close to their total operating cash flow, so more of the buildout runs on debt. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in May 2026 that Americans' pensions and savings will need to help fund it.
Seeking Alpha, May 2026; MoneyWise and Yahoo Finance, May 2026
About the campus 🏗️
Stargate is a $500 billion AI infrastructure partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX, announced at the White House in January 2025. Its flagship campus sits on 875 acres of West Texas red clay just outside Abilene, developed by Crusoe on land owned by Lancium, with Oracle as the primary tenant.
- 875
- acres
- 8
- buildings
- 1.2 GW
- power draw
- $3.5B
- project cost
