The concerns are reasonable. The scale is the surprise.

The campuses planned here are designed around closed-loop cooling. The same water stays in a sealed system. It is not an evaporative tower that has to be refilled all day. Building Bastrop County puts Pacifico’s potable use at about 2,000 gallons a day — 23 living-unit equivalents — against roughly 3,000 equivalents for a residential use of that scale. Tomorrow Begins Here compares a modern closed-loop campus, about 5 million gallons a year, with an 18-hole golf course at about 114 million gallons a year, and with a 1,000-home subdivision at 300,000 to 400,000 gallons a day. All U.S. data centers together accounted for less than 0.5% of national freshwater use in 2023.

The value is the taxable asset, not a headcount that fills schools. A billion-dollar building that adds almost no students, little daily traffic, and its own security and fire systems still pays for teachers, classrooms, and emergency equipment. Each construction phase is also published at 400 to 600 jobs, and the permanent technical roles pay roughly $55,000 to $130,000 and up. Many of those paths run through a trade, a certificate, or military technical training, not a four-year degree.

A permanent crew measured in dozens does not create a new city of commuters. A 1,000-home subdivision, the kind of alternative use discussed for land like this, adds about 1,500 students, a morning rush, and a heavy draw on water and emergency calls. The data center adds the tax base and skips that household demand. Building Bastrop County reports that comparable rural markets have not seen housing spikes attributable to the data center itself.

An abatement is a temporary discount to win a project that is choosing among hundreds of sites. On the EdgeConneX land, the starting point was about $25,000 a year. Building Bastrop County reports that during the abatement the county and Bastrop ISD still receive more than $107 million. When the abatement ends, the full commercial value is what gets taxed. Pacifico took the other route: it withdrew its Chapter 312 and JETI applications and is published as paying full property taxes, more than $20 million a year.

Pacifico’s plan is 710 megawatts of generation on the campus itself. Building Bastrop County describes that as no draw on the ERCOT grid and no rate impact from that design. For grid-connected load, Tomorrow Begins Here points to Texas SB 6: large facilities can curtail sharply during grid stress so houses and hospitals keep power, and large industrial customers are expected to pay for the substations and lines they require.

A county that lives on houses asks those houses to fund every new classroom and ambulance. A commercial asset of this size pays a large share of the same bills without adding a family to the system. Building Bastrop County describes that shift as the buffer that keeps residential rates from having to climb, and that can move them down. This site does not promise a dollar figure off a specific homestead. It describes the structure: more of the levy comes from the campus, less of the need comes from it.

Rows of servers, networking gear, and the power and cooling that keep them running. An AI campus packs that building with high-performance chips used to train and run models. The standard the industry builds to is five nines: available 99.999% of the time. Every map search, bank transfer, prescription refill, and storm alert already passes through a building like this somewhere. The local question is whether Bastrop’s tax roll includes one.