Hyperscale data centers became a 2026 political subject in Texas. Between February and May 2026 alone, the Texas Tribune, the Texas Observer, Public Citizen, and regional outlets documented organized civic responses in at least half a dozen towns. The summaries below pull together what each town did, what arguments they made, and what the outcome was — not to recommend a position, but so Lavon residents can see how the playbook has been running elsewhere.
After a marathon public hearing that ran past 2 AM, the San Marcos City Council voted 5–2 in early 2026 to reject a proposed $1.5 billion data center on a 200-acre site. Residents packed City Hall to voice concerns over the project’s potential impact on the San Marcos River and the state’s electric grid. The council’s vote was the highest-profile municipal rejection of a data center in Texas to date.
The small town of Lacy Lakeview, north of Waco, partnered with developer Infrakey on a proposed $10 billion data center on a roughly 520-acre site — described in local reporting as potentially the largest industrial development in McLennan County history. Rural neighbors organized an opposition campaign starting in November 2025: a petition with about 3,000 signatures, a Facebook coalition, a website, and standing strategy meetings. The proposal advanced on May 13, 2026, and the opposition — now a reference case for other Texas community groups — has continued to build.
By late May 2026 the dispute had widened beyond a single site. A second company, Cipher Digital, reportedly purchased roughly 300 acres near Riesel (also in McLennan County) and is seeking a connection to the state electric grid. At a late-May panel covered by KWTX, residents and experts framed their concerns around water use and electricity demand in “a state already strained,” along with light, noise, and heat impacts — the same categories of concern being raised in Lavon. (Specific claims aired at those meetings, such as local-temperature or radius effects, are residents’ characterizations, not established findings.)
Hood County commissioners considered a temporary moratorium on new industrial development, including data centers, in early 2026. After a letter from a state senator threatening legal action on the grounds that the county did not have the power to issue such a moratorium, the commissioners voted the moratorium down. The episode highlights the limits of county-level zoning authority in Texas (counties have far weaker zoning powers than cities) and is the case most often cited as evidence that grassroots opposition needs to flow through the city level, not the county.
The disputed project is Comanche Circle (Sailfish Development) — roughly 2,600 acres for up to nine data-center campuses and 5 gigawatts near Vistra’s Comanche Peak nuclear plant. Residents warn the site sits on the Upper Trinity Aquifer recharge zone and the Paluxy River watershed and could use up to 1 million gallons of water per day at full buildout.
Hill County took the step Hood County backed away from. On May 12, 2026 the Hill County Commissioners Court voted 3–2 to adopt a one-year moratorium on new data-center construction in the county’s unincorporated areas — the “Hill County Green Energy and Data Center Moratorium” — to give the county time to study the public-safety and infrastructure impacts. Reporting from the meeting noted commissioners were warned, before they voted, that a moratorium would likely draw a lawsuit.
On May 27, 2026, developer RCM Hill, LLC filed a $100 million lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas (Waco Division). The complaint asks the court to declare the moratorium void and block its enforcement, arguing it is illegal under Texas law and that the officials who voted for it knew that when they cast their votes. RCM Hill says it spent more than 16 months and millions of dollars on a planned 1,235-megawatt data center on roughly 800 acres in unincorporated Hill County. Named as defendants are Hill County, County Judge Shane Brassell, and Commissioners Jim Holcomb and Larry Crumpton, the three who voted for the moratorium.
On June 5, 2026, after the lawsuit, the Hill County Commissioners Court rescinded the moratorium and replaced it with a checklist of requirements for data-center developers. The reversal makes Hill County the cautionary case for the county route: a county can attempt a pause, but it is quickly tested in court and may not hold.
Why this matters for Lavon: this is the live test of whether a Texas county can pause data centers at all — the question the Hood County episode only threatened. It does not map directly onto Lavon, which is an incorporated home-rule city with full municipal zoning authority under Chapter 211, not a county relying on the much weaker county-level powers being challenged here. If anything the case sharpens the same point that runs through this whole page: in Texas, the durable land-use authority sits at the city level, and the consequential decisions happen there.
The Lavon dispute is one node in a wave of community fights over hyperscale data centers built for AI compute. Two cases outside Texas show both ends of the range — one where residents are still living with the harm, one where they stopped the project.
| Memphis, TN — xAI “Colossus” | Elon Musk’s xAI built supercomputer data centers (Colossus 1 & 2) to train its AI and powered them with dozens of unpermitted methane gas turbines (reported growing from 27 to 46+). The NAACP and the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP sued xAI on April 14, 2026 over illegal air pollution. The turbines emit nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, and fine particulates; the nearest neighborhood, Boxtown — a majority-Black community — already carries a cancer risk reported at about four times the national average, and Memphis received an “F” for ozone from the American Lung Association. It is the clearest example of the AI-data-center harm profile landing hardest on the community with the least say. |
|---|---|
| Tucson, AZ — “Project Blue” | An Amazon-linked data-center campus advanced in secrecy under a code name. After residents organized over desert water use and the lack of transparency, the Tucson City Council voted unanimously to reject annexing the site (August 2025). In May 2026 the city cut off water to the project’s contractor after it used city water without authorization. A community that organized early, and a council that listened, stopped it. |
Sources: Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center (xAI / Memphis, 2026); the NAACP lawsuit (filed April 14, 2026); Data Center Dynamics, Arizona Public Media, and the Tucson Sentinel (Project Blue, 2025–2026).
Lavon’s home-rule charter includes a recall instrument (see Claims & recourse). Two other Texas cities show that tool being used right now, specifically over data-center decisions — including what it takes to clear the bar.
| Temple, TX | After the City Council voted to annex and rezone about 700 acres along Bob White Road for a roughly $700 million data center (Rowan Digital Infrastructure), residents formed Stop the Temple Data Center and launched a recall of Mayor Tim Davis, Mayor Pro Tem Jessica Walker, and councilman Mike Pilkington. The petition fell short of the signatures needed by the deadline; organizers then shifted to county-level pressure. The episode shows both the power and the limits of the recall tool — a high signature bar in a short window. |
|---|---|
| San Angelo, TX | The San Angelo Data Center Citizen Coalition, formed over a proposed Skybox/Emergent data center, launched a recall of Mayor Tom Thompson (affidavit filed April 21, 2026) and later two council members. Petitioners must gather 2,971 signatures — 30% of the votes cast in the May 2025 mayoral election — by a June 22, 2026 deadline; as of mid-June the signature drive was ongoing. The Texas Attorney General has also ruled on the city’s handling of public-information requests about the project. |
| Fort Worth, TX | Residents are pushing the city for a moratorium on data-center growth — the same ask surfacing in smaller towns is now reaching a major metro. |
Sources: KWTX, KXXV, KCEN, KVUE (Temple, April–June 2026); ConchoValleyHomepage, SanAngeloLive, Ballotpedia (San Angelo, 2026); CBS News Texas (Fort Worth, 2026).
The Elevon project sits inside the City of Lavon, which is an incorporated home-rule city. But the civic tools available to residents — zoning leverage and the power to recall an official — depend entirely on a jurisdiction’s government type, and Lavon’s three closest neighbors fall into three different categories. The contrast is the clearest way to see why the where of a project decides the what-can-be-done.
| Jurisdiction | Government type | Municipal zoning power? | Recall instrument? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lavon | Home-rule city (charter adopted Nov 8, 2022) | Yes — full Ch. 211 zoning | Yes — charter Chapter 12 |
| Princeton | Home-rule city (charter approved by voters Nov 8, 2022; adopted by Council Nov 18, 2022) | Yes — full Ch. 211 zoning | Yes — charter “Power of Recall” |
| Nevada | General-Law Type A city (reincorporated 1988) | Yes — Comprehensive Zoning Ord. No. 17-09 | No — recall requires a home-rule charter |
| Copeville | Unincorporated community | No — no municipal government | No — no elected municipal office to recall |
Princeton is home-rule, so it carries a recall instrument in its charter (an “Initiative, Referendum and Recall” article with a “Power of Recall” section). As a documented matter of public record, a recall effort against Place 6 Councilmember Ben Long and Place 7 Councilmember Carolyn David-Graves was reported as underway, with a signature requirement of 1,576 registered Princeton voters. Princeton voters had separately already turned over leadership at the ballot box, with Mayor Brianna Chacón losing a December 14, 2024 runoff to Eugene Escobar Jr. The stated grounds for that recall, its current certified status, and any connection to a data-center issue are not established here and should be confirmed directly with the Princeton City Secretary and Collin County Elections.
Nevada is a general-law city, not home-rule. Under Texas law a municipal recall exists only through a home-rule charter, so Nevada residents have no recall instrument; the alternative routes for removing a general-law city official are a district-court removal petition (incompetency, official misconduct, or intoxication, under the Texas Local Government Code) or the next regular election. Nevada does zone land use (Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance No. 17-09), but no data-center definition or proposal was found on its public ordinance listing.
Copeville is an unincorporated community on SH-78 near the eastern shore of Lavon Lake. Because it never incorporated, it has no city council, no municipal zoning authority, and no recall instrument at all. A project sited “near Copeville” would not be Copeville’s to zone.
The pattern this exposes is the one that runs through every Texas case on this page: in Texas, cities hold zoning power and counties largely do not, and roughly half of the state’s planned data centers are deliberately sited on unincorporated county land specifically to escape city zoning, public hearings, and citizen pushback. A parcel that sits inside Lavon (as the Elevon site does) is subject to Lavon’s zoning and Lavon’s recall charter; a parcel a short distance away on unincorporated Collin County land could be decided by the Commissioners Court — which cannot block it by zoning — with no recall-capable municipal body involved at all. The single most consequential fact in any specific dispute is therefore which jurisdiction the parcel actually sits in.
The Texas Tribune’s February 2026 piece, “Can local officials stop data centers in Texas?”, is the single best primer on the legal scope of city authority. Key points relevant to Lavon:
Two May 2026 pieces frame the broader political context in which Lavon’s decision will be made:
Below is a synthesis of the most-frequently-raised concerns at Texas city-council hearings on hyperscale data centers in 2025–2026. They are listed here without endorsement, simply to document what other cities have heard.
Hyperscale cooling fans and emergency-generator testing produce 24/7 industrial sound. Modeled and measured values at hyperscale sites in Virginia and Texas have ranged from 65–90 dB(A) at the property line, with significant low-frequency content that propagates over distance. Standard 6-foot solid walls provide minimal attenuation at low frequencies. (Source: county-level sound studies cited in Loudoun County, VA hearings and replicated by the Public Citizen brief.)
A 40–100 MW site is comparable in load to a small Texas city. Hyperscale operators typically require a dedicated substation or private substation, and ERCOT’s 2026 forecast already projects peak demand reaching 150 GW by 2030 driven primarily by AI data centers and crypto operations. Local impact: new transmission-line easements, peak-load reliability questions, and a structural shift in who pays for distribution upgrades.
Cooling-tower designs at a hyperscale site can consume hundreds of thousands to several million gallons of water per day, depending on climate and cooling architecture. The North Texas Municipal Water District serves Lavon; questions raised in other Texas cities have focused on long-term raw-water allocation and competition with residential and school water demand.
Industrial-scale infrastructure adjacent to residential entitlements has produced documented downward pressure on adjacent property values in Virginia and Arizona case studies. The 100-foot setback range in the Lavon amendment is well below the 750–1,500-foot setbacks adopted in some other jurisdictions specifically for hyperscale facilities adjacent to residential.
Hyperscale data centers generate substantial property-tax revenue once built, but typically employ a small number of long-term operations staff (often dozens, not hundreds). The standard tradeoff cities are asked to weigh is short construction-jobs surge + long-term tax-base + low long-term direct employment, balanced against utility-load, noise, and adjacent-use impacts.
Many of the Texas hearings have focused on whether Chapter 380 grants, Chapter 312/313 abatements, or PID/TIRZ financing arrangements offered to attract a data center are publicly disclosed before the council votes. Once an Amended and Restated Development Agreement is signed, much of the financial framework is fixed.
None of the above implies a position on the right outcome for Lavon. The Elevon site might be a defensible location for a data center given the right operating conditions and the right incentive structure, or it might not. The point of this page is that the questions being raised in other Texas towns are the same questions Lavon residents are likely to want answered before any irrevocable agreement is signed.