Two mayors, one $10 billion AI data center, and a growing divide in small-town Texas

What happens when a megaproject lands next door—but your town has no authority to stop or shape it?

The lives of Jim Jaska, the 80-year-old mayor of Ross, Texas, and Mayor Charles Wilson, 65, of the nearby town of Lacy Lakeview, have long been deeply intertwined. Wilson’s mother worked alongside Jaska for years in the local public schools. Their ancestors are buried in the same cemetery in Ross.

Jaska was even Wilson’s football and baseball coach at Connally Junior High. “Hard worker, decent athlete, good kid,” he said of his former student, who went on to serve overseas in the CIA before returning home.

But now the two men, who both grew up in these central Texas towns outside of Waco, find themselves on opposite sides of the fierce debate around AI data centers that is roiling their communities as well as much of the nation. Last summer, Infrakey, a newly established AI data center developer, purchased a 520-acre plot of unincorporated farmland next to Ross for a proposed $10 billion AI data center campus with a power capacity of nearly 1 gigawatt—enough to power a midsize city.

Jaska and Wilson see the project very differently. For their neighboring communities, one rural and one suburban, the data center represents both an enormous opportunity and a profound risk.

That’s because Texas municipal law has created a stark divide between the two towns. Ross, with a population of just 200 and no taxing authority, sits right next to the site of the project’s industrial footprint, with some residents directly bordering the parcel. Lacy Lakeview—seven miles south but legally positioned to claim the land—is moving to annex the site of the data center, and stands to collect up to $50 million a year in taxes. This has created growing tensions between the neighboring communities over who gets the benefits, who absorbs the consequences, and who ultimately gets a say.

The project is part of a much larger trend: Across Texas and other states in the South and Midwest, rural communities are finding themselves caught in the path of the AI infrastructure boom as developers race to secure land, power, water, and transmission access for massive new data center campuses to train and run AI models. The result is a wave of local conflicts over resources, governance, and environmental consequences from projects that can reshape entire regions. Hyperscalers and AI companies are spending hundreds of billions—and analysts speculate there could be more than $1 trillion in spending over the coming few years—on AI infrastructure as they compete to build the computing capacity needed to train and run increasingly powerful AI models.

The build-out has become a strategic priority not only for Silicon Valley but also for Washington. The Trump administration has repeatedly emphasized the importance of expanding U.S. energy production and accelerating data center construction as part of a broader effort to maintain American leadership in artificial intelligence amid growing competition with China.

But backlash is growing to these projects across the nation. Even in Texas, one of the states that has aggressively pushed for AI data center development, political support is becoming more complicated. As complaints have mounted in the state’s rural communities, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has called for tighter oversight of data center development and has urged lawmakers to reconsider some financial incentives that critics argue disproportionately benefit large technology companies.

In communities from Arizona to Louisiana to Michigan, residents and local officials are wrestling with the same question: When projects backed by some of the world’s richest and most influential companies arrive in their backyards, how can residents and local officials—outmatched in resources, lawyers, and lobbying power—hope to get a fair shake?

And it turns out, the burdens and benefits can fall unequally. Jaska and other residents of Ross, as well as several other communities around the perimeter of the site, are coming to terms with a shocking political reality: The people most directly affected by the proposed AI campus may ultimately have the least say over it. While Ross is right next to the proposed AI data center, the farming town—so tiny that it has no police, fire, or sewer services—has no way to stop or shape it.

Instead, much of the political maneuvering around the project has centered on Wilson’s town, the much larger Lacy Lakeview, a suburban municipality of 7,500. In December 2025, Lacy Lakeview approved a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the city and Infrakey for what the company called the “Lacy Lakeview Data District,” in which Lacy Lakeview would pursue annexation of the property, support permitting and municipal coordination, and potentially grant Infrakey and affiliated utility entities long-term rights to operate power, cooling, water, and other infrastructure systems under a public-private development model.

The MOU established Infrakey as the city’s exclusive development partner for 12 months while the two sides explored feasibility, financing, and other issues, though the arrangement is nonbinding and does not commit the city to final........

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