Rural Taylor, Texas drew residents with its charms, and data centers have since followed.

TAYLOR, Texas—A red thresher cuts across the countryside off County Road 401 in Taylor, leaving behind tufts of discarded stalks as farmers prepare to plant seeds for the next year's harvest.

Less than five miles away, mom-and-pop antique shops open their doors on North Main Street, welcoming residents and tourists alike to glance into the city's historic past as a 19th-century railroad town known for its cotton fields.

The day has begun in what seems, at first blush, to be an iconic rural town of roughly 17,000.

It was that idyllic picture that drew many of the city's newer homeowners to the area after the pandemic. The town sits about 35 miles northeast of Austin, the booming Texas capital. Among them were Sarah Medina and her family.

"We wanted some land, and so we had looked in different pockets outside of Austin," said Medina, 38, a creative director for an Austin-based hospitality group who bought land in south Taylor with her husband five-and-a-half years ago. "It just seemed like it was potentially up-and-coming and cool, and had some kind of artsy fun stuff happening. We found some affordable land, so that was really what did it."

Medina and her husband, Tate Green, a career and technical teacher at the junior high and high school in Coupland about 10 miles south of Taylor, nurtured a garden on about an acre of land, raising pigs, chickens, guinea hens, goats and geese. They built their homestead intending for it to be theirs for the rest of their lives, a place to raise their two kids, continue their careers and eventually retire.

But that vision has been slowly fracturing over the past few years as they've faced the impacts of Samsung breaking ground in 2022 on a semiconductor facility, a $17 billion project on a sprawling 1,200-acre campus about a mile from their house.

"We moved for a small-town feel, for a tighter-knit community, for the ability to afford some land and do some agricultural stuff, and to have space for our kids to run around," Medina said. "We did not move here to be closer to any kind of tech. It's not part of the appeal."

Now, that same county road, once lined with farmers working their land, is clogged by delivery trucks, concrete mixers and flatbeds hauling building materials to the Samsung facility site. The beeping of construction equipment echoes across the flatland, with construction visible and audible from Taylor High School and the newly built houses surrounding it, less than two miles away.

But Samsung's arrival was only the beginning of Taylor's transformation from small town to big tech. Since then, the city has approved the development of three data centers south of the railroad tracks that cut through the city, raising resident concerns about what the construction means for the community. Together, the three projects would, by some estimates, consume 1.42 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power 950,000 Texas homes a year, or about the annual electricity footprint of Austin.

Texas has seen an influx of data center construction over the past few years, with almost 600 separate facilities operating or planned as of September, according to analysis by The Texas Tribune.

Work on the Samsung plant is slated to end as construction on the first of Taylor's three planned data centers, Blueprint Projects, begins later this year. When built, the 135,000-square-foot data storage and AI processing complex would use 60 megawatts at full capacity.

At the same time, Linde PLC will build a $271 million air separation unit and industrial gas facility for chipmaking on the site of the Samsung campus. The industrial gas company is also planning a second facility next to the first, with construction starting by the end of the year, according to a July earnings call.

Taylor gave initial approval to the Blueprint Projects data center in 2024. When the project first began releasing information online, residents like Samia Brand, a 39-year-old graphic designer, responded to the posts by questioning the project's water sources and asking what could be done to stop the development. But the city's unclear responses only weakened trust, she said.

"Even when I had that little conversation on Instagram, I tried to ask my questions and they just recopied and pasted what was already in the post, and I was like, 'That's not what I asked, though,'" said Brand, who moved to Taylor shortly before the announcement. "I'm actually trying to get an answer here, and it took a few tries before I did."

In March, Taylor introduced KDC Project Comal, a $2.5 billion, 360-megawatt hyperscale AI data center campus that would be built near the Samsung facility. It requires rezoning before any development can proceed.

Then, on Oct. 8, the city authorized a development agreement with Big Watt Digital and PowerHouse Data Centers, co-owners of the third data center project, now named Taylor Technology Campus but formerly called Project Mustang. The City Council approved the 664-acre property's annexation into city limits, giving the city jurisdiction over regulation and construction and opening the door for construction to begin in 2027. The companies had requested annexation before but withdrew their request two weeks after the city tabled all discussions in mid-August for 90 days.

"It's something different," said James Brand, Samia's husband. "I don't think it's what we envisioned when we moved here."

But one data center, on top of the massive Samsung factory, set in motion a full-blown residents' opposition movement, now known as the HALT Taylor coalition.

**The Deed and the Data Center**

The Brands live a few miles away from any of the proposed data center developments, but they still have concerns about health and safety. For other residents like Pamela Griffin, the threat is more immediate. A born-and-raised Taylor native, Griffin, a 58-year-old retired learning center director, lives in her recently rebuilt childhood home in the neighborhood around First and Second avenues and Royal Street, less than half a mile from the Blueprint Projects site.

She knew nothing about the proposed data center until she found a flyer on her door last year warning of planned construction on vacant acreage several hundred feet behind her home. "We didn't know what a data center was," Griffin said. "None of us did."

She started thinking about the land.

After passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, skin color, religion or nationality when purchasing, renting or financing a home, Griffin's family was one of many that seized the chance to buy property in the neighborhood. It was the only place people of color could purchase land in Taylor at the time, she said.

Griffin said her father also purchased a vacant lot behind the family's home as a safe place for children to play after the closest city park, opened in 1955 as the first recreational space open to people of color, a former landfill, started sickening children.

The vacant lot bordered 87 acres of undeveloped land owned by the descendants of a prominent 19th-century local businessman and lawmaker, Howard Bland, Sr. Because Griffin and her siblings often chased baseballs onto the Bland tract, Griffin said, members of the Bland family promised her father and the rest of the community that they would preserve the green space for future generations.

As Griffin began researching the Blueprint Projects, she discovered that the Bland family's promise to preserve the land was not just an offhand remark. In 1999, his descendants sold the property for $10 to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, with this clause in the grantee's specifications: "to be held in trust for future use as a parkland by Williamson County."

Members of the Bland family "told my dad and the rest of the community," Griffin said, that they were going to give the community the tract as parkland. They did so, she said, "but the city did not let us know."

The Williamson County Park Foundation acquired the land in 2003 for $10 and held onto it for a little over a month before transferring ownership to the city of Taylor for the same price. The property deeds state that five years later, the city sold the 87-acre property to Taylor's Economic Development Corporation for $15,000 and 39 additional acres, which included 16 acres that would become a proposed buffer zone between the data center site and the nearest neighborhood.

The EDC then held onto the land until April 2025, when it sold the property to the Blueprint Projects data center