Save Abilene — The Real Cost of Stargate

What It's Costing Us

The Real Impact on Abilene

City leaders promised this project would deliver prosperity. Here is what reporting from Time, Texas Monthly, Texas Standard, the Texas Observer, and local journalists has documented since construction began.

$1,000+

Rent Spike

The Housing Crisis Is Real and It Is Here Now

According to Zillow data cited by Time magazine, the average rent in Abilene is now $2,395 a month, up more than $1,000 from a year ago. Long time renters report rents doubling and tripling. The construction boom brought roughly 6,000 out of state workers into a city of just over 100,000 with an already tight housing market. Landlords are filling units with high paid construction crews while vulnerable residents are pushed out.

Time Magazine — February 2026

Worst

Homelessness

Families Are Showing Up at Homeless Encampments

The executive director of Abilene Habitat for Humanity told Time that for the first time entire families, not just individuals, are arriving at the city's homeless encampments because landlords have doubled their rent. A community worker who has been in Abilene for more than a decade told reporters the homelessness situation is the worst he has ever seen it. A man with a walker told a Hope Haven worker outside the office that the AI plant took all the housing and he could not execute his housing voucher.

Time Magazine, Hope Haven, Habitat for Humanity

85%

Property Tax Abatement

A 10 Year Discount for a $3.5 Billion Project

The City of Abilene and Taylor County approved an 85% property tax abatement on the Stargate site over a 10 year term. The same project straining housing, traffic, and emergency services pays a small fraction of what it would otherwise contribute to the local tax base. Oracle, as sub lessee, has already filed a formal protest to lower its $200 million assessed valuation even further on top of the abatement.

Texas Standard, Business Insider, Que Onda Magazine

357

Long Term Jobs

Slightly More Than a Walmart Supercenter

Crusoe is contractually required to create just 357 full time permanent jobs after construction. There is no requirement that those jobs go to Abilene residents. Nathan Jensen, a professor of government at UT Austin, told Texas Monthly that data centers are not job creation engines and that giving an 85% tax abatement makes no sense if a city needs revenue. The Development Corporation of Abilene estimated a $4 billion economic impact over 20 years but has refused to share its methodology with journalists who asked how it arrived at that number.

Texas Monthly, Texas Standard, UT Austin

People Spoke Against

The Vote Happened Before Most of Us Knew

Few Abilene residents knew the deal was happening until it was nearly finalized. The Abilene City Council voted unanimously at a sparsely attended special meeting in February 2025 to lay the groundwork for the 85% tax abatement. Only two members of the public spoke during public comment and only one of them, Samuel Garcia, opposed the project. Project Ludicrous, the internal name for the Abilene site, is a fitting one.

Texas Monthly, Abilene City Council records

Environmental and Public Health

The Grid, The Air, The Water.

Data centers are not light industry. They are heavy industrial loads that consume electricity, water, and clean air at a scale Texas has never tried to support before. The numbers below come from ERCOT itself, the Texas Observer, the Harvard School of Public Health, and peer reviewed research. None of it is speculation. Some of it is already happening.

218 GW Projected Peak Demand by 2031

ERCOT's own forecast, up from 85.5 GW in 2023. The PUCT sent the forecast back calling it inflated. Even the revised version still shows demand exploding.

226 GW Interconnection Requests

As of December 2025, ERCOT is monitoring 226 GW of large load interconnection requests, up from 63 GW just one year earlier. About three quarters of those requests come from data centers.

80% Blackout Risk Estimate

ERCOT's January 2025 Monthly Outlook for Resource Adequacy estimated an 80% chance of rolling blackouts if a storm similar to the deadly 2021 Winter Storm Uri hit Texas again.

1.6M Tons Permitted GHG Emissions / Year

The on site gas plant at the Abilene Stargate campus has been authorized to emit 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases and 14 tons of hazardous air pollutants annually, according to the Texas Observer.

210 Gas Generators in Shackelford

At the Frontier Campus data center just one county over, energy partner Voltagrid has been approved by the TCEQ to operate 210 industrial gas generators, which emit nitrogen oxides and hazardous pollutants.

~6X Faster Demand Growth Than Historical Norm

From 2000 to 2024 ERCOT peak demand grew 1 to 2 percent per year. The current forecast represents growth roughly six times that rate, almost entirely from data centers.

The grid problem is not theoretical. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri killed at least six people in Taylor County and over 200 statewide. The ERCOT grid failed because demand exceeded supply during a cold snap. Stargate's Abilene campus alone will draw 1.2 gigawatts of continuous load on that same grid. ERCOT is now warning that data center demand is growing faster than new generation can be built, and is asking the Texas legislature for thousands of miles of new transmission lines at a cost projected to exceed $30 billion. Under Texas's existing cost allocation rules, those transmission costs get socialized across all ratepayers. That means your electric bill goes up to pay for the infrastructure being built to deliver power to Stargate.

The air pollution is local and it is unprecedented. Stargate Abilene is being powered in part by a $500 million on site natural gas plant. The Texas Observer reported in July 2025 that the plant has been authorized to emit 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases and 14 tons of hazardous air pollutants annually. Nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and fine particulate matter from gas turbines are linked by the EPA to increased rates of respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. Harvard's School of Public Health analyzed a comparable on site gas plant for a data center in Virginia and estimated $53 to $99 million in annual health damages, including 3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths per year from one single facility. The Harvard researchers found the people most affected were those with high social vulnerability, high asthma rates, and lower household incomes. That is Abilene.

The water is closed loop until it isn't. Stargate uses closed loop cooling, which is genuinely better than the old open evaporative systems. But the initial fill alone is roughly one million gallons per building, eight buildings on the Abilene campus, plus continuous top offs for maintenance and additional draws during expansion. Across Texas, data centers already in operation use approximately 25 billion gallons of water per year, equivalent to roughly 230,000 American households, according to Texas Monthly. Abilene sits in one of the most drought prone regions of the state. The decision to allow this much industrial water draw was made without a public water impact study being shared with residents.

The Bottom Line

ERCOT itself is sounding the alarm. The grid operator that is paid to keep the lights on is telling Texas that the current pace of data center growth threatens reliability and shifts costs onto residential ratepayers. When the people running the grid are warning you, listen to them.

In response, the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 6 in June 2025, which gives ERCOT the authority to curtail large load customers like data centers during firm load shed events. In plain English, when the grid is overloaded, ERCOT can now shut Stargate off before it cuts power to your house. That is good. It is also an admission that the projects were approved before the grid could handle them.

From The People Building It

Even They Are Afraid Of It.

The case against Stargate is not just being made by activists, journalists, or residents. The CEOs of the companies building this technology have publicly said, in their own words and in their own signed statements, that the thing they are constructing in our backyard could end human civilization. Read these slowly. Then read them again.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

2023 Open Letter Signed by Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), and 350+ AI researchers

The bad case, and I think this is important to say, is, like, lights out for all of us.

Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI, on the worst case scenario for the technology his company is building

Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.

Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI, before founding OpenAI

I have not met anyone in AI labs who says the risk from training a next generation model is less than 1 percent of blowing up the planet.

Jaan Tallinn Lead investor at Anthropic, co-founder of Skype

AI has the potential of civilizational destruction.

Elon Musk Co-founder of OpenAI, founder of xAI

This is an existential risk.

Geoffrey Hinton Nobel laureate, Turing Award winner, "Godfather of AI." Left Google in 2023 specifically to warn the public.

AI could decide that humans are a threat.

Bill Gates Co-founder of Microsoft, which owns roughly half of OpenAI

So here is the situation.

The people building this technology are publicly saying it could cause human extinction. They signed a letter comparing it to nuclear war. Then they are building the biggest one of these facilities ever attempted in human history on the outskirts of Abilene, Texas. They are doing it with an 85 percent tax abatement, an on site gas plant that pumps 1.6 million tons of pollution into our air, a 1.2 gigawatt draw on a grid that already killed Texans once, and a promise of 357 jobs. If even the CEOs say there is a real chance this technology destroys the world, the absolute least Abilene deserves is to not be the first place sacrificed to find out.

People Fighting Back

Voices on the Ballot.

Two candidates running in 2026 have made the real cost of Stargate central to their campaigns. They are not taking corporate development money. They are saying the quiet part out loud.

Texas State Senate — District 28

Riley Rodriguez

A working class Abilenian who has cowboyed, worked the oilfield, and run a small business in the heart of District 28. The first Hispanic Democrat to run for this seat in 30 years. He decided to run because of what Stargate is doing to the place he has called home his entire life.

"This is corporate profiteering and it's rampant in our state legislature, all done under the guise of economic development. In reality working Texans bear the infrastructure costs and suffer while tech oligarchs get rich by avoiding property taxes and receive taxpayer grants. It's not economic development. It's mal-development."

Riley Rodriguez — Candidate, TX Senate District 28

Photo Coming Soon

Texas House of Representatives — District 71

Diana Luna

Born and raised in Abilene. Nearly 20 years in nonprofit advocacy managing government grants for refugee services, health insurance, and community programs. A native Abilenian who has been organizing her community long before she decided to run for office.

"What happens is that, because of the amount of electricity these things need to run, the cost gets passed on to the taxpayer. There are so many things that have been either hegemonic in our economy or completely unregulated that we end up footing the bill as just regular citizens."

Diana Luna — Candidate, TX House District 71

This Is Not Just Abilene

What Happened to Other Towns.

Abilene is the newest chapter in a story already playing out across the country. Other communities that took the data center deal first are now living with the long term consequences. Some are fighting back. Their experience is our warning.

Loudoun County, Virginia

The Data Center Capital of the World

About 200 data centers occupy 30 million square feet in this DC suburb. Residential bills are projected by Dominion Energy to rise from $142.77 today to $315.25 by 2039, primarily because of data center demand.

Loudoun's data centers used over 1 billion gallons of water in 2023. Carbon emissions are up over 50 percent attributed to data centers. 8,910 generators have been approved across Virginia. There has not been a single day in 14 years without data center construction.

Source: Sierra Club Virginia, Piedmont Environmental Council

Memphis, Tennessee

Boxtown vs. Elon Musk's Colossus

Elon Musk's xAI Colossus supercomputer sits next to Boxtown, a historically Black neighborhood. The Southern Environmental Law Center documented that the facility operated dozens of methane gas turbines for months without air pollution permits.

Permits exist for only 10 turbines but the facility has been running as many as 35. Harvard School of Public Health analysis of the proposed Colossus 2 expansion estimated tens of millions in annual health damages, with the heaviest burden falling on residents with high asthma rates and low household incomes.

Source: NRDC, Harvard SPH, SELC

College Station, Texas

The Vote That Said No

In September 2025, hundreds of residents packed the College Station city council meeting to oppose a proposed data center land sale. The council ultimately voted the project down.

This is the proof of concept that organized community pressure works in Texas. When residents show up in large numbers, councils respond. When they do not, deals like Abilene's get approved unanimously at near empty meetings.

Source: Texas Monthly

San Marcos, Texas

Three Projects in a Three Mile Radius

Residents of San Marcos are currently fighting three separate data center proposals within three miles of each other. The cumulative impact on water, power, noise, and traffic in a college town of similar size to Abilene has galvanized organized opposition.

Multiple Texas localities are now refusing to roll over. The pattern is consistent. Residents win when they organize early and lose when the project is signed before they hear about it.

Source: Texas Monthly, local reporting

Pittsylvania County, Virginia

The Largest Gas Plant Ever Proposed in Virginia

The proposed Balico Tech Campus would build a 3,500 megawatt fracked gas power plant to feed two new data centers. That is nearly three times the size of any existing gas plant in Virginia. It will tap directly into the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

This is the future Texas is being set up for. Off grid, behind the meter gas plants serving data centers that avoid grid rules and air quality oversight. Multiple Stargate sites in the southwest are already following this model.

Source: Sierra Club Virginia

Nationwide

$64 Billion in Projects Blocked or Delayed

Data Center Watch has documented $64 billion in proposed data center projects nationwide that have been blocked or delayed by organized local opposition. The resistance is bipartisan and growing.

Communities are winning when they show up early, file public records requests, attend zoning hearings, and refuse to be the empty room at the city council meeting. The model is repeatable.

Source: Data Center Watch

The Trade

What They Got vs. What We Got

What Oracle, Crusoe, and OpenAI Got

An 85% property tax abatement for 10 years on a $3.5 billion project
875 acres of West Texas land with abundant power and wind capacity
A 1.2 gigawatt grid interconnect fully approved by ERCOT
Permits to emit 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gas per year on site
A unanimous city council vote at a meeting almost no one attended
An active appeal to lower their tax bill even further on top of the abatement
A federal political environment fast tracking approvals nationwide

What Abilene Residents Got

Rents up more than $1,000 per month in a single year
Families showing up at homeless encampments for the first time
The worst homelessness one local worker has seen in over a decade
Traffic gridlock and reported vehicle collisions near the site
A natural gas plant in our air shed authorized to emit hazardous pollutants
Strain on the same ERCOT grid that failed and killed Texans in 2021
A contractual promise of just 357 long term jobs with no local hiring requirement

Hit Them Where It Hurts

Boycott OpenAI.

OpenAI is the primary tenant of the Stargate project that is reshaping Abilene. Without their demand, the buildout does not exist. The fastest way to make corporate executives feel a decision in their bones is to make them feel it in revenue. There is already a national movement doing exactly that and it is working.

The Movement

QuitGPT

QuitGPT is a grassroots boycott of ChatGPT and OpenAI products launched in February 2026. According to MIT Technology Review and Tom's Guide, over 700,000 people pledged to cancel their ChatGPT Plus subscriptions in the first weeks alone. ChatGPT app uninstalls surged 295 percent in a single weekend. The campaign was driven by OpenAI president Greg Brockman's $25 million donation to MAGA Inc., OpenAI's Pentagon contract, and the company's lobbying for unregulated data center expansion that prices ratepayers out of their own electricity. Sound familiar? Learn more and sign on at quitgpt.org.

Cancel Your ChatGPT Plus

If you pay for ChatGPT Plus, cancel it today. Settings → Account → Manage Subscription → Cancel. If you subscribed through the Apple or Google Play store, cancel through that store instead. Pulled subscriptions hit OpenAI directly in their revenue line.

Delete the App

Free tier ChatGPT still counts as active users, which feeds OpenAI's valuation. Delete the mobile app. Stop visiting chatgpt.com. App store uninstall numbers are public and they get reported in tech press, which puts pressure on the board.

Switch to Alternatives

If you actually need an AI tool, switch. Anthropic's Claude publicly refused the Pentagon's request for unrestricted access in 2026 and is widely considered the leading ethical alternative. Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and open source local models are all options. Avoid Grok by Musk's xAI.

Tell People Why

Cancellation only works when it is loud. Post that you canceled. Tag the company. Tell your friends, your coworkers, your family. The campaign succeeds when individual choices become a public movement.

Pressure Companies

If your employer pays for OpenAI's enterprise products, raise it as a concern. The QuitGPT campaign specifically asks workers to push their companies to drop OpenAI contracts. Enterprise revenue is where the real money lives.

Connect Stargate to the Boycott

Most people boycotting OpenAI nationally have no idea Abilene exists. Tell them. Share what Stargate is doing to housing, the grid, and our air. The national movement gets stronger when it has a local face. Abilene can be that face.

What You Can Do Locally

This Is Your City. Fight Like It.

The deal is done but the story is not. Other Texas towns have successfully blocked or delayed data center projects when residents organized. Abilene can still push back. Here is how.

Vote Out Anyone Who Took Corporate Development Money

Follow the campaign finance reports for every city council seat, county commissioner seat, and state representative. It is all public record. Any official who took money from data center developers, real estate trusts, or related corporate interests does not represent residents on these decisions. Vote accordingly and tell every neighbor exactly why.

Report Illegal Short Term Rentals Aggressively

Short term rentals operating outside zoning rules are eating Abilene's housing supply at exactly the moment we cannot afford it. Report every Airbnb and VRBO operating in a residential zone for too many occupants, parking violations, noise, trash, and code violations. Do it every time. These platforms have complaint thresholds and enough reports trigger real investigations.

Show Up to Every Public Comment Period

Stargate had one public comment period before the abatement was approved and one person spoke against it. Do not let that happen again. Every utility rate filing, every PUC proceeding, every zoning change, every rezoning hearing has a public comment window. Track them. Show up. Bring your neighbors. The room being empty is what got us here.

Leave Reviews on Every Public Platform

Oracle, Crusoe, Lancium, and the Development Corporation of Abilene all have Google business profiles, Glassdoor pages, Indeed listings, and LinkedIn presences. Tell your story on all of them. Loudly, repeatedly, and legally. These reviews reach investors, future employees, and journalists.

Call Their Corporate Offices Regularly

Save the corporate office numbers for Oracle, Crusoe, and Lancium in your phone. Call during business hours as a concerned Abilene resident with questions about water use, air quality, and the impact on your neighborhood. Perfectly legal. Do it often.

File Public Information Requests

Texas has strong public records laws. Submit Open Records Requests to the City of Abilene, Taylor County, and the Development Corporation of Abilene for every communication between officials and Crusoe, Oracle, Lancium, OpenAI, and SoftBank. Request the underlying methodology for the $4 billion economic impact estimate that the DCOA has refused to share with journalists. Make it public when you get it.

Demand Independent Air Quality Monitoring

Loudoun County activists raised over $30,000 to install their own PurpleAir air quality monitors because the state would not require data centers to report emissions. Push for independent air monitors near the Stargate gas plant and the Shackelford generators. Make the data public.

Engage Every Time a Local Politician Posts Online

Not just their data center posts. Every post. Birthday wishes. Lunch photos. Ribbon cuttings for other projects. Calmly and factually remind people in the comments which officials voted to approve the abatement and what those decisions have done to housing in this city.

Connect With Other Communities Fighting Back

The Piedmont Environmental Council in Virginia, the Loudoun Climate Project, the Southern Environmental Law Center in Memphis, the Texas Observer, MediaJustice, Good Jobs First, and Environment Texas are all tracking this fight nationally. Abilene is not alone. Share strategy with the people who came before us.

Get In Touch

Tell Us Your Story.

Media Inquiries

Journalists and Reporters

SaveAbilene.com is actively documenting the impact of the Stargate project on Abilene residents. If you are a journalist working on this story, we can connect you with residents willing to share their experiences, provide data and documentation, and offer background on what is happening on the ground.

We are the people of Abilene. We have receipts.

Impacted Residents

Share What Happened to You

Has your rent been raised dramatically? Been priced out? Lost your housing? Working in the housing sector and seeing what is happening firsthand? We want to hear from you. Your story matters and it will be treated with care.

All submissions go directly to saveabilene@gmail.com. Nothing is published without permission.

Receipts

Where The Facts Come From

Every number on this site comes from named journalists, public records, or peer reviewed academic and policy researchers. Look it up yourself.

Time Magazine How the AI Boom Sparked a Housing Crisis in One Texas City — Andrew Chow, Feb 2026

Texas Monthly In Abilene, Stargate AI Is Turning Horse Pastures Into Data Farms — Jan 2026

Texas Observer In Abilene, Stargate Project Puts AI Boom Ahead of Human Health — July 2025

Texas Standard / KUT Stargate Data Center Drives Housing Crisis in Abilene — Feb 2026

ERCOT Long Term Load Forecast and Monthly Outlook for Resource Adequacy — 2025

Harvard School of Public Health Air Pollution Health and Economic Risks from AI Data Centers — 2026

Center for AI Safety Statement on AI Risk: Extinction Letter — May 2023

MIT Technology Review A QuitGPT Campaign Is Urging People to Cancel ChatGPT Subscriptions — Feb 2026

QuitGPT.org The Boycott of OpenAI — 2026

Business Insider Oracle Got Big Tax Breaks in Texas for Stargate — July 2025

MediaJustice Stargate Project Southwest Fact Sheet — Dec 2025

Sierra Club Virginia Data Center Impacts in Virginia — 2025

Piedmont Environmental Council Data Centers: Industry Impacts in Virginia — 2025

NRDC The AI Boom Is Stressing the Grid — September 2025

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom — Feb 2026

Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School Data Centers and Large Scale Electric Growth: Texas and Virginia — 2026

Fortune 15 Quotes Charting Sam Altman's Sleepless Panic — 2023

Utility Dive Data Center Activity Exploded in Texas, Spiking Reliability Risks — July 2025

Data Center Watch $64 Billion in Data Center Projects Blocked or Delayed

KTAB / Big Country HomepageAI Boom Hits Abilene as New Website Raises Housing, Growth Concerns — May 14, 2026

Our City. Not Their Server Farm.

The Story Is Getting Out.

AI Boom Hits Abilene as New Website Raises Housing, Growth Concerns

What is Stargate?