Abilene Is Paying The Price For Texas’ Billionaire Giveaways
While billion-dollar tech companies get tax breaks, residents deal with rising rent, traffic, and a city pushed to the brink.
I spent the better part of this morning watching videos of the City Council in Abilene. Which may seem like a strange thing to do on a Monday, but I’ve been hearing some of the Democratic candidates running for office in Texas increasingly talk about the data center going up in Abilene (thank you, Riley Rodriquez and Diana Luna). It’s called Project Stargate, a massive, multi-billion-dollar AI data center campus developed by Lancium and supported by OpenAI and Oracle. This project is designed as a 1.2 GW+ facility, with construction ongoing. It’s meant to power advanced AI technologies.
But the story on the ground tells us a story of chaos, rising costs, and a city unprepared for the future the tech-lords have planned for us.
The population of Abilene is 130,000, but a sudden, rapid influx has painted the city red with brake lights. A little town like this has limited infrastructure, and its deputies have been dispatched to intersections all over to keep traffic moving because the system can’t handle the surge. Ten-minute dives have turned into forty-minute drives, every day, for people who didn’t sign up for any of this.
Thousands of workers showed up in Abilene almost overnight. RV parks are expanding to house them. Temporary housing is becoming a semi-permanent strain on everything from water lines to grocery stores and emergency services. City officials are approving exceptions and adjustments in real time, trying to stretch infrastructure that was designed for a much smaller, slower-growing community.
Then, there’s the housing.
In DFW, it’s common knowledge that if you want to move to somewhere with cheaper rent, you move out to a smaller city. You move out to places like Abilene. When rent in Abilene is just as high as or higher than in DFW, I don’t know where you go from there. This is from Zillow, today:
Rents are climbing so fast that people who have lived in Abilene for years are being priced out of their own city. Shelters are stretched thin, and housing voucher holders aren’t able to find placements. More and more people are falling through the cracks because the math just stopped working. What used to be affordable isn’t anymore, and what replaces it isn’t built for the people who are already here.
All of a sudden, Abilene has had a sharp spike in its unhoused population.
Talk to residents, and you hear the same thing over and over again. It feels like an invasion. It feels like it happened all at once. It feels like nobody was ready for it.
Chaotic or intentional?
While residents in Abilene are sitting in traffic, watching their rent spike, and trying to figure out how their city got turned upside down overnight, the companies behind this project aren’t exactly sharing in that burden.
They’re getting a discount.
A massive one.
The Stargate-linked development in Abilene is tied to a property tax abatement of up to 85%, approved as part of the deal to bring this project to town. In plain English, that means the same project driving up housing costs, straining infrastructure, and forcing the city to scramble in real time… is not paying anywhere close to its full share into the local tax base that’s supposed to handle those exact problems.
The Texas miracle, a.k.a. Republican corporate policy.
Local officials will tell you this is the cost of doing business. If Abilene hadn’t offered the incentive, the project would have gone elsewhere. That is how you compete. That this is how you “win.”
But it raises a pretty simple question.
If the city has to expand water access, manage traffic, deal with housing shortages, and absorb a sudden population surge… and the companies driving that growth are getting an 85% break on property taxes…
Who exactly is paying for all of this?
Because it’s not the billion-dollar corporations.
It’s the people already living there.
The only entities to benefit from this project are the corporations and the campaigns of the Republican politicians who cleared the way for it. Over and over again, the people of Texas pay for the favors Republicans give to billionaires. To oil billionaires. To petrochemical moguls. And now to tech-lords.
Which tech-lords?
It’s a full-blown corporate stack, and every name on it should tell you exactly what kind of deal this is.
At the center of it is OpenAI, backed by billions in capital and tied directly to some of the most powerful players in tech and finance. You’ve got Oracle in the mix. SoftBank on the funding side. Lancium, the Texas-based infrastructure company that helped land the project. Crusoe, which is handling parts of the buildout and energy side. And now Microsoft is circling the site as part of the broader expansion footprint.
OpenAI is worth approximately $852 billion.
Oracle is worth approximately $503 billion.
Softbank is worth approximately $172 billion.
Microsoft is worth approximately $3.1 trillion.
But they need corporate tax abatements, so the people of Abilene can pay $3,000 a month to live in an apartment in Abilene, Texas.
This is not “economic development” in the way people like to pretend it is.
This is billionaire-scale infrastructure being dropped into a midsize Texas city, with the full weight of corporate capital behind it, and the full support of public policy clearing the way.
And that matters, because when politicians talk about tax abatements, they love to frame it like they’re helping “bring jobs” or “grow the local economy.” They want you to picture a startup, a regional employer, or something that actually depends on the community it’s entering.
That’s not what this is.
These companies don’t need Abilene.
Abilene was chosen because it was cheap, had space, had a political environment willing to say yes, and because the state of Texas has built an entire economic model around giving corporations whatever they ask for and calling it growth.
The money flows toward the corporations.
The benefits flow toward the corporations.
And all the risk flows to the people who live there.
And the lies they sold to the public?
Blah, blah, jobs, blah, blah, growth, blah, blah, the future.
That’s always the pitch, right?
When projects like this get announced, you hear the same talking points over and over again. Thousands of jobs. Economic opportunity. A booming local economy. A chance for a small or mid-sized city to “level up” and compete with the big players.
And to be clear, there are jobs for a while. During construction, these projects bring in thousands of workers. That’s exactly what Abilene is experiencing right now. The surge in housing and traffic, and the strain on everything.
But once the construction is done, the job numbers drop off a cliff.
Data centers don’t employ thousands of permanent workers or sustain entire local economies. They’re designed to run lean. A More Perfect Union reported on these “temporary” jobs and the lies about jobs and growth that are sold to local communities.
Abilene gets the disruption of thousands of temporary workers, the housing spike, the infrastructure strain, the water concerns, the traffic gridlock…
And in return?
A relatively small number of permanent jobs, tied to companies that already got massive tax breaks to be there in the first place.
And it’s not unique to Abilene. This is the data center model everywhere. Big promises on the front end, minimal long-term footprint on the back end, and a whole lot of public cost in between.
This is the blueprint.
On April 11, I published “Texas: The Land Of No Water And Power,” which covered the Texas House Committee on State Affairs interim hearing on data centers. The number of data centers planned for Texas is so great that they would require four times the energy Texas currently produces at its peak. So, over the next five years, what’s happening in Abilene could be happening in every corner of Texas.
This is not some one-off situation. It’s the same model Texas has been running for years, just scaled up and supercharged by AI money.
Republicans give away the tax base. They call it innovation. They promise jobs, growth, and the future. And then they let ordinary people deal with the fallout.
The poverty rate in Abilene is 16.1%, well above the state average.
The food insecurity rate in Abilene is 15.5%.
We’ve seen this play out before in different industries across this state. Oil and gas. Petrochemicals. Manufacturing. Private school expansion. Corporate subsidies dressed up as “economic development,” with the public left holding the bag when the numbers don’t add up.
Data centers are just the next version of the same story.
The state rolls out the red carpet. Local officials are told this is their shot, that they have to say yes, that if they don’t, someone else will. The deals get signed. The abatements get approved. The headlines talk about billions of dollars in investment.
And then the real-world impacts show up later.
And the companies?
They move capital. They expand. They build the next site somewhere else.
Because they can.
Meanwhile, the people who actually live in these communities are left trying to make sense of a system that was never designed with them in mind in the first place.
That’s the model.
And Abilene is just the latest place where it’s being tested in real time.
So, who is this actually for?
Because if Abilene residents are paying higher rent, sitting in worse traffic, worrying about water, and watching their city scramble to keep up, then no one should pretend an 85% tax abatement for a billionaire-backed data center is “economic development.”
It’s a transfer of risk downward and a transfer of wealth upward.
That’s the truth of it.
The truth is that the people of Abilene were never the primary stakeholders in this project. They’re the ones expected to take the hit now in exchange for benefits that may never reach them later.
And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.
Because this isn’t just about one city in West Texas, it’s about a system that keeps asking the same people to give up more, pay more, and endure more, so that the world’s most powerful corporations can pay less.
Abilene makes it impossible to ignore who Republican economic policy is really built for.
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This is horrible! This is scary! There will be more to come. This is how the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Greed is the root to all even. Those leaders have sold their souls to the devil. The Oligarchs. We must ask our candidates how they will fix these mess. It’s so upsetting! 😢