The loud version is a different machine than the one being built.

Building Bastrop County puts Pacifico’s potable use at about 2,000 gallons a day, counted as 23 living-unit equivalents. A residential use of that scale is put at about 3,000 LUEs. The same source says a 96-megawatt closed-loop building, the size of EdgeConneX’s published capacity, sits in roughly the same daily water range as a flagship Buc-ee’s.

Tomorrow Begins Here puts a modern closed-loop campus near 5 million gallons a year. An 18-hole golf course is about 114 million gallons a year. A 1,000-home subdivision is 300,000 to 400,000 gallons a day. All U.S. data centers together used less than 0.5% of national freshwater in 2023, about 15 times less than what leaks from municipal pipes, and irrigation uses on the order of 100 times more.

The Texas Association of Business puts every data center in the state combined at less than 0.5% of Texas water. It says newer facilities cool with air, recycle the same water, or use treated wastewater so drinking supplies stay in the system.

The Data Center Coalition’s FAQ says the cooling method is chosen for the local climate and for whether recycled water is on hand. It cites a Virginia legislative audit: 83% of data centers in that state use no more water than a large office building, which the FAQ puts at 6.7 million gallons a year, about 18,400 gallons a day. The industry’s own list of reductions is waterless cooling, closed-loop systems, and reclaimed water. That audit is Virginia. It is not a meter on these campuses.

The loop is the whole argument. Water stays in the pipe. It is not the cooling method that made the old reputation.

Pumps and fans exist. A data center is not a library. The myth skips the enclosure and the distance. Servers, coolant, and the heat exchanger sit in the building. EdgeConneX’s published Cedar Creek design is closed-loop chilled water with thermal storage, not a row of evaporative towers. Pacifico’s tract is 2,842 acres, so the equipment is inside a large site rather than on a residential lot line.

Construction is the loud chapter. Truck traffic and site work do not sound like the finished building. Once the hall is operating, the county is not living next to a subdivision of commuters either. Daily traffic is one of the things this land use is built to avoid.

The two source sites do not publish a decibel study for these campuses. This page will not invent one. What they do publish is the machine: a sealed cooling loop in a building, not an open tower farm at the fence.

The coalition’s FAQ cites that same Virginia audit on sound. The finding, as the FAQ reports it: low-frequency noise, not loud enough to damage hearing, and rarely loud enough to break a local noise ordinance. The coalition treats the complaints that do arise as specific to a site, not as the way every building behaves. That is still not a decibel reading for Cedar Creek.

Pacifico is the direct answer. The campus includes 710 MW of natural gas generation on the property. Building Bastrop County describes that as no draw on the ERCOT grid and no rate impact from that design. Neighbors are not the power plant for that site. A post about fine particles treats a size chart and a stack inventory as a medical finding about that plant. The air page sets that inventory next to the county’s own year of roads, prescribed fire, and traffic.

EdgeConneX is a different project: a hyperscale campus of up to 96 MW, under construction, not described as an off-grid plant. For grid-connected industry, Tomorrow Begins Here points to Texas SB 6. Large loads, 75 megawatts and up at one site, can be ordered to curtail, switch to backup, or be cut when the grid is under stress. The published example of that flexibility is a drop from 100 megawatts to 5, so houses and hospitals stay served. The same account says those customers pay for the substations and lines their load requires. The state chamber says many Texas centers build generation beside the hall, adding supply rather than only taking it, and some can dial back on the hottest days. The state’s economic development office describes the same expectation in policy: in 2026 the Governor directed the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to verify projects in the interconnection queue, and said growth should add electric capacity, not only demand. The Data Center Coalition’s FAQ says its members pay the full cost of the energy they use, including breakers, transformers, and whole substations. It cites a 2026 study by the firm E3 that found no historical evidence, under existing rate structures, that data centers are what has pushed residential bills up, and that adding them can ease rates for other customers. Virginia’s legislative audit, as the FAQ quotes it, said current rates already assign those costs to the customers who cause them, data centers included.

The land started at about $25,000 a year. That is the number an abatement has to beat, and it is not a close call.

EdgeConneX won its site over 535 others. A ten-year discount was part of landing it. Building Bastrop County reports that during the abatement the county and Bastrop ISD still receive more than $107 million+. Tomorrow Begins Here publishes a separate ISD figure for that proposal: $15.5 million a year, $155 million over ten years. Those lines are not added together. When the discount ends, the full commercial value is what the roll taxes.

Pacifico withdrew its Chapter 312 and JETI applications. It is published at the full rate: $20 million+ a year, described as 30%+ of county revenue, from a $2.2 billion campus. No discount. A commercial bill, and still almost no students.

The op-ed offers three places where he says that pledge showed up as a local result:

• Pike County, Ohio. Department of Energy land, generation financed through a U.S.–Japan trade arrangement, and privately funded grid work. Walsh’s account: lower power bills, a more reliable grid, higher local tax revenue, and thousands of high-paying jobs, without the cost landing on ratepayers.
• Indiana. An AI data center paid for new transmission lines and substations. He says that raised resilience and lowered electricity costs nearby by cutting outage risk.
• Georgia. Developers paid to expand local generation. He says the added capacity made the grid more reliable and electricity more affordable for residents.

The rest of the piece is about what the buildings are for. Walsh describes AI used to search medical data, support hospital diagnostics, and model problems in energy, genomics, and materials. At his own agency, he says AI has been used on decades of nuclear-cleanup records to move that work faster and spend fewer taxpayer dollars.

Read the op-ed at energy.gov