My folks live on Cedar Creek Lake up there near Trinidad on the south end of the lake. My mom called me today up in arms about a data center that's going in VERY close to their house. As you can imagine there is a ton of (probably legit) fearmongering going on with water consumption and energy concerns. Their biggest concern is of course their cove drying up and their land being worth nothing, when it's all they have. Not to mention energy costs going up, as well as taxes.

They're extremely concerned, as am I. I wanted to see if anyone knew anything about those Diode data centers that are going in? I am hopeful that they will have a closed loop system and maybe it won't be the lake-drying disaster they're thinking, but I also do not trust any of these folks (or politicians) in the least. Just trying to find some facts, thanks in advance!

If anyone has knowledge on this, I'd be super interested to know as well. I live closer to Tyler, but it seems that these centers are popping up and concerns seem legit.

I don't know anything specific about that project, but this state has large, imminent water issues pretty broadly and our state government does nothing useful as far as I can see. We should already be working on large scale desal projects for future growth and charging more for water.

We have the cheapest energy in the world available (outside of SENM) and don't seem to have any real plans to use it.

Texas, at best, gets out of the way. New Mexico is vocal in their stupidity, at least. Texas likes to pretend otherwise.

The construction process will be a mess, and the buildings are generally unattractive, so if you live really close and that's your view it wouldn't be great.

But all the water is closed loop in the new ones. Texas added 10,000,000 people in the last 25 years, the amount of water consumption by those 10m people is exponentially larger than any amount of data centers being built.

The recent pushback is crazy, these have been being built all over the country for the Cloud for years and years. Most ironic part is that everyone complains on social media, which wouldn't be possible without data center.

I'm pretty familiar with all that, and that cooling system deal is the main thing I'm concerned about, and probably them as well. Look, everyone knows we need data centers, but for people in these rural areas that are having their homes (greatly) devalued it's a real issue. Not to mention the taxes and inevitable utility cost increases for retired people. It's not just the 'ugly building close to me" that's the issue. I sincerely hope these data centers are closed loop cooling, because they're slated to build 10 of them (1 every 10 years) on that land, so water usage would be absurd if not.

I assume you mean build 1 every year, not 1 every 10 years, but if they have land and power they would build 10 as quick as humanly possible.

I do understand concerns when these come to smaller markets because it's way outside of the norm, but they use closed loop now because it leads to less downtime and it's cheaper long term, end of the day these are built to make money.

The developers and tenants are who foot the bill for bringing in the utilities, and taxes are typically lowered, worst case flat, but certainly not higher.

There is a lot of bad info, but there are always town halls, etc where the builder, developers, and tenants come to answer questions. Most are salt of the earth types who are just trying to make a living and will give you a very direct No BS answer.