Energy company Open Origin is leading the project and is one of several firms responding to a massive $500 billion infrastructure push known as The Stargate Project.
Filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) last week show plans to spend an estimated $650 million on construction costs for the two projects.
Although telework is nothing new in state government, the practice came into the conservative crosshairs in recent months after President Donald Trump ordered federal workers back to the office.
Data centers in Texas accounted for 4.5 percent of the total state electricity consumed in 2023, according to the nonprofit electricity researcher the Electric Power Research Institute.
“That one group of tilt-wall warehouses full of computers in Abilene by 2030 will use almost twice as much of electricity as the entire Rio Grande Valley uses on any given day,” said one state senator.
“We start with a single one, go to tens by the end of the year and then, over the course of the next five years, go to like, hundreds and then, eventually, thousands,” said a spokesperson for trucking company Aurora.
Senate Bill 6 would require companies seeking to develop power-hungry facilities to pay a fee of at least $100,000 to apply to connect to the power grid, so those not serious about building are weeded out.
Initially, the Energy Abundance Development Corp. data centers will run on natural gas produced in Texas, but the company plans to transition to 100 percent green hydrogen sourced from its hydrogen salt dome storage facility in the future.
The bond dollars would also go toward the construction of a new health sciences facility, major overhauls to residence halls, construction of a new welcome center and campus renewal and safety improvement projects.
Forty-six Texas agencies said allowing employees to work outside the office has made them more productive, while 40 others said productivity wasn’t affected either way. None reported a negative impact on worker output as a result of remote work.
Plano City Council approved spending $765,000 over two years to have temporary workers manually read the city’s roughly 88,000 water meters to properly bill water customers.
A city spokesperson said there is no indication of any actual or attempted misuse of personal information, but filings identify 17,751 people notified of the breach “out of an abundance of caution.”
The city of Frisco received a $437,000 grant from the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority at the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles for the camera system.
Coming as the state’s coffers are brimming with more than $20 billion in unspent tax money, the requests lean heavily toward pay raises and new hires for state agencies dealing with high turnover and low pay.
Northside, North East, Judson, Alamo Heights, Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City, Southside, East Central and Edgewood independent school districts were among the Texas school systems that lost access.
