Aligned Data Centers is currently building a 313-acre data center campus in Hale County near Abernathy, known as Project Caprock. The total project investment is estimated at $5 billion.
The finished project will have six individual facilities with 1.65 million square feet of capacity and a total of 540 megawatts of power. It is slated to enter service in 2027.
Abernathy local officials met with some scrutiny of the project that will be located north of Abernathy near I-27 and FM 54, as residents of the county and city voice concerns about power usage and use of water, stating that farmers can’t handle less water, with some not even running wells all day because of the lack of water.
Opponents note that data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity and water. In one grid, which serves 65 million people across 13 states, power supply costs jumped from $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion in a single year, with data centers accounting for nearly two-thirds of the increase.
Residential electricity rates nationally rose about 32% between July 2020 and July 2025. Communities near proposed facilities face noise, strained infrastructure, and the loss of farmland, costs that are immediate and visible.
The biggest selling point for the facility is the promise of job creation. While operations require fewer staff, a large data center build requires massive labor that will temporarily increase jobs in the area. But once built, those jobs are finished. While data centers do create some local jobs, it may be much fewer than industry advocates claim.
Rural residents also note that another concern is the loss of a community’s way of life and local control over its future. According to Brookings, once built, a typical data center produces relatively few direct, permanent jobs, and those direct roles which include technicians, facilities and controls engineers and security and logistics personnel are highly skilled and supported by various indirect or contracted positions.
In a study done by Bookings, it was found that before the facilities arrived, data center counties were growing faster than other counties.
As data centers push their way into rural communities and counties, many have enacted moratoriums as more than 300 state data-center bills were filed in the first six weeks of 2026, and in several states that once competed to offer the largest tax incentives. Texas has seen pushback in many counties and officials ignore “the will of the people” as projects move forward taking rural farmland land, water and power while those companies get huge tax breaks and incentives.