By Kent Paterson
Data centers are a burning issue in the Paso del Norte borderland of 2026. Plans to open a giant data center complex in Santa Teresa and at least two more in El Paso are stirring great controversy and unleashing an outpouring of citizen engagement that’s rarely seen in nominally local issues. On one front, beginning March 23 and continuing until April 8, the City of El Paso is hosting community meetings to gather input for a future City Council approved policy on future data centers. Held at the Don Haskins Recreation Center in the Upper Valley, the first meeting drew a lively crowd that jammed an undersized room for the occasion.
City of El Paso Communications Director Laura Cruz-Acosta defined the city council ordered sessions as an “open house set up” with three “roundtable conversations” and six poster boards designed to gather public input for a “City data center policy framework” that will be considered by councilors. Cruz-Acosta said city government wanted public ideas related to community benefits from data centers, concerns and mitigation options, and future developments.
“Maybe we could ask for more greenery or we could ask for a certain percentage of funds from the data centers to promote whatever it is the community (wants),” Cruz-Acosta told the reporter. “Or maybe there are no benefits that (people) want to share and maybe they just want to state a point that this is something we don’t want to move forward with.” The city official added that anti-data center comments would be noted.
Concretely, opposition buzzed throughout the meeting to Meta’s data center under construction on a 1,000 plus acre parcel of land in Northeast El Paso and near the New Mexico border.
“We’re adamant that the Meta AI data center has to go, regardless of any contracts that have been signed. We must get out of them immediately,” said Veronica Carbajal of the Sembrando Esperanza organization. “We don’t have water, and we’re not gonna have the water we promised them based on what is happening worldwide and statewide.”
Carbajal praised the City of Socorro, Texas, for adopting an ordinance at its March 19 meeting that regulates data centers. “A little community is doing what the big ones cannot,” she observed. Pausing from an interview, Carbajal then dialogued with a woman attendee about organizing tactics and strategies. In terms of Meta, the longtime community activist and public interest attorney urged mass petitioning demanding that El Paso Water and the city and county governments break contracts and take back financial incentives while similarly exhorting the utility commission to deny a (gas) power plant application for the site.
“I’m all for that, getting in (officials’) face…” the woman responded. “That’s how they got rid of Airbnb in Dallas.”
In a crowded meeting space, complaints were registered about the meeting format and audibility. Members of El Paso’s Amanecer Peoples Project were on hand, handing out leaflets that compared the group’s projection of a Meta data center’s outsized energy and water consumption with residential, school and municipal consumption in El Paso and Las Cruces.
The City of El Paso’s contract with the impending data center was done “before we knew any of the energy usage it took and any of the water usage,” said Matt Rodriguez, Amanecer Peoples Project co-founder. “It is a bad deal, it is our belief.”
According to Rodriguez, the data center’s plan to have its own gas-fired plant will produce more emissions than all three of the existing natural gas plants in the Sun City and “double the pollution.”
He assessed the pending data center as a “huge step back” in the City of El Paso’s recently approved Climate Action Plan as well as “green initiatives” in both Texas and New Mexico. Rodriguez noted that together with the construction of the Project Jupiter/Stargate hyperscale AI data center complex in neighboring Santa Teresa, New Mexico, two new gas-fired plants would be located within 20 miles of one another. “Water usage of both of them is a huge concern,” he added.
Regarding a new data center industry in the Borderland, Rodriguez cited a town hall held by his group earlier in March that attracted about 350 people. A subsequent meeting likewise drew a greater-than-expected crowd.
“This issue is turning out people like nothing else we’re seeing in the city, and it shows how concerned and upset people are with the data centers,” he affirmed. The activist rejected notions that either Meta or Jupiter/Stargate were done deals, maintaining that the public had the power to “shrink the size” of the projects and force them to “actually adhere to real climate standards or cancel the contract(a) altogether.
The three roundtables proceeded until near the end of the meeting, with attendees sticking their comments onto the poster boards. Water, noise, earthquakes, utility rates, tax rebates, and property taxes were among the common concerns. One young woman told the reporter she was neutral and came to “hear both sides.” A few of the written comments included:
“Our city already looks like a war zone with walls, razor wire, little water. Build something of beauty…no more boxes.”
“People will get sick from the air pollution and water pollution. We already have a shortage of physicians.”
“The city officials should notify the public sufficiently before accepting any contracts.”
According to City of El Paso Communications Director Cruz-Acosta, the comments received at the Don Haskins Recreation Center and other community meetings will be synthesized with additional staff conversations as well as experiences from other cities before city staff present councilors with “suggestions” for the development of a “data center policy framework component.” Cruz-Acosta said no specific timeline exists for the conclusion of the process, but that city staff hope to have something to the councilors later in the spring or summer.
In attendance at the Don Haskins Recreation Center meeting, District 1 City Representative Alejandra Chavez said she was “very happy” at the turnout and public interest in the data center issue. “I think people are concerned in general how this could potentially affect our utilities in the area, their quality of life, and those are very valid concerns,” Chavez said.
“So I’m happy to hear from my constituents and our community as a whole and take that back with me to City Hall so that as a council we can review that feedback and make decisions moving forward.”
Like Cruz-Acosta, Chavez didn’t offer a timeline for council approval of a data center policy framework, but she said a “robust” discussion would ensue once councilors take up the matter.
Asked about demands to cancel the city’s Meta contract, Chavez deferred, saying the question was for the city’s legal department, which was not present at the meeting. Meanwhile, in addition to the March 30 event at the Beast Urban Recreation Center (13501 Jason Crandall Dr.), the remaining two data center community meetings will be held on Thursday, April 2, at the Chamizal Community Center (2119 Cypress Ave.) and on Wednesday, April 8, at the Wayne Thornton Community Center (3134 Jefferson Ave.) The meetings commence at 5:30 pm.
During the last week of March, new developments added more fuel to the fire of controversy over data centers in the Borderland.
Despite recently announced layoffs in other operations, Meta announced March 26 that it was expanding the size of the Northeast El Paso data center to 1 gw, upping its investment from an estimated $1.5 billion to more than $10 billion. The California-based company insists it will harness clean energy and, without detailing how, restore double the amount of water it will use by 2030. Among other measures, Meta pledged a donation of $500,000 for workforce development in conjunction with El Paso schools and committed to helping fund emergency water utility bill assistance for needy families via El Paso Water’s AguaCares program.
On the same day, the U.S. Army issued a surprise press release that unveiled a possible lease of 1,384 acres of land at Ft. Bliss for an AI data center in partnership with the global investment firm Carlyle.
“AI is a strategic asset for the Army,” Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll was quoted. “It is a force multiplier, supports future transformation and requirements, keeps the Army ahead of our adversaries, and generates resiliency across the force…
El Paso Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who had issued a public appeal on March 25 for Meta to convene “public listening sessions” focused on its El Paso plans, quickly issued a statement to El Paso media outlet KFOX, saying her efforts to get prior consultation by the Army went unheeded.
“El Pasoans have expressed legitimate concerns — which I share — regarding the impact data centers will have on our resources, utility costs and the environment, and they deserve to have a voice, especially as data centers proliferate in our community,” Escobar was quoted by the news outlet.
According to the U.S. House member, a Ft. Bliss data center “began as a directive from the Trump Administration and did not include Congressional or community consultation…”
Backdrop and Postscript
The first week of City-sponsored data center community meetings took place as wars raged abroad while drought, record breaking March heat and mounting climate chaos marked the borderland and planet. On March 23, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization released its annual climate report, which assessed 2015-2025 as the hottest 11 years worldwide on record. Contending that global climate is in “a state of emergency” and the planet is “being pushed beyond its limits,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres characterized the report as “a call to act.”
A regional jaunt readily detected scenes buttressing scientific findings and warnings. In El Paso’s Upper Valley, the Rio Grande was bone dry at the bridge on Country Club Drive, as was the river farther north off the 1-25 exit in Hatch, New Mexico. A few miles upriver, a handful of pitiful pools held on for dear life amidst heat and dust. There, river flows south of Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico are largely determined by compacts and treaties negotiated in a world long gone but lately shaped by judges, lawyers and global commodity market forces. Rio Grande water from the big lake is nourished by snowpack from northern New Mexico and southern Colorado mountains. But this year’s snowpack was so poor that some ski resorts closed early.
In the agricultural Hatch Valley, an intense sun baked the land a rusty tan. Remnants of a red chile field bent over in post-winter wilt while scattered shreds of cotton pockmarked another bare plot. Seasonally bereft of leaves (90-degree temperatures notwithstanding, it’s barely past winter), pecan orchards resembled rows of witchy sticks from a horror film. As if beckoned for the cast, numerous ravens (crows? black-winged phantoms?) swooped through the naked pecan tree branches, landed in force and pecked at the crumbling earth. Here are few lyrics from an old Pink Floyd song:
Cymbaline (1969)
The path you tread is narrow
And the drop is shear and very high
The ravens all are watching
From a vantage point nearby
Apprehension creeping
Like a tube-train up your spine
Will the tightrope reach the end
Will the final couplet rhyme . . . .
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