Could a data center be coming to this North Texas community? Here's what's proposed.
A proposal for a new data center in a North Texas community is set to be discussed on Tuesday, and the rezoning documents suggest it will be built near a future neighborhood.
Leaders of the town of Prosper will meet to discuss rezoning a portion of agricultural land along Parvin Road near FM 1385 to allow a planned data center development, currently named Project Tomahawk. The development has been recommended for approval by town staff.
The planning and zoning commission meeting will happen at 7 p.m. at Prosper Town Hall, located at 250 West First Street.
The agenda item for the meeting notes that, if permitted, Project Tomahawk would occupy about 20% of a roughly 37-acre lot. The data center would also be located directly behind both a substation and a planned commercial development.
Per the agenda item, an approved data center would include a "living screen" to be built near the future Prosper Oaks development, located east of the proposed data center site. The living screen would expand on an existing tree line with more plantings, including canopy trees and evergreen shrubs. An additional eight-foot wall is also proposed to be installed at the rear of the building, both for screening and to provide a sound-damping mechanism for the noise created by generators.
The agenda item also claims that traffic impacts would be low and that Project Tomahawk's developer would be responsible for all electrical upgrades required to meet the project's power needs. It also claimed the data center would use less than half as much water as a single-family home.
A project narrative from the developer said the data center's purpose is focused on internet connectivity. Nothing in the agenda item appears to suggest that the data center would be used specifically for artificial intelligence (AI).
The construction of data centers, chiefly those for AI applications, has faced backlash across North Texas, making it a political flashpoint.
Gov. Greg Abbott has paused approving permits to build new data centers until state regulators can conduct a comprehensive audit on each proposed project, which will take months to complete. The governor previously developed what he calls guardrails and guidelines on how new data centers operate in the state.
A poll released by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin found that a majority of Texans oppose the construction of data centers in their communities. In a sample of 1,200 voters, 30% of respondents strongly or somewhat supported the construction of data centers in their community, while 57% strongly or somewhat opposed.