Data centers are swallowing the land east of Austin. Here’s what it actually means for the rest of us.
By Greg Cooper, Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty
In one morning last week, the Austin Business Journal ran three separate data center stories. A developer filing to break ground on four more buildings in Bastrop County. A wave of lawsuits from people who live next to the ones already running. And Anthropic — the AI company behind Claude — in talks to occupy a 2,842-acre site in Cedar Creek.
Three stories, one county, one news cycle. Something is happening about twenty minutes east of the airport that is going to shape this region for the next decade, and most of the conversation about it is either breathless or furious.
Here’s my attempt at neither.
The scale is genuinely hard to picture
Bastrop County has about 119,000 residents. It is also, right now, one of the most aggressively pursued data center markets in the country.
EdgeConneX is tied to three campuses totaling roughly 1,500 acres out there. It just filed notice that it intends to break ground on four more buildings by early October — two of them 730,000 square feet, two of them 577,000 — at roughly $700 million apiece. That’s $2.8 billion in this wave alone, finishing by 2029, and officials have confirmed at least a dozen buildings could eventually land across the three sites. The first building is about to open, leased to an AI company called CoreWeave.
A few miles away, two energy and infrastructure firms have assembled a 2,842-acre project that includes its own 710-megawatt gas-fired power plant. Anthropic is reportedly in talks to occupy it. Amazon, separately, has bought about 1,200 acres nearby and called it “due diligence.”
For scale: one of those 730,000-square-foot buildings covers about thirteen football fields.
Now the number that stopped me. The six parcels underneath that 2,842-acre project are owned by one man, and they carry a combined value on the county appraisal roll of $30.7 million — about $11,000 an acre. Ordinary Central Texas ranch land. The economic impact study for the project that wants to sit on it projects $3.3 billion in state and local taxes.
That gap — between what land out there is worth on paper and what it’s suddenly worth to the right buyer — is the whole story of this cycle.
Why the neighbors feel powerless (and technically are)
The opposition in Bastrop County is not a handful of cranks. It’s organized, it’s bipartisan, and it’s fighting with almost none of the tools you’d expect.
That’s because Texas counties have essentially no zoning authority. If you live inside Austin or Round Rock or Cedar Park, your city can say no to a project. If you live in unincorporated Bastrop County — as most of these neighbors do — your county commissioners largely cannot. They’ve said so out loud. In August they tabled a resolution that would have formally declared their own limited authority and asked the Legislature for more.
This is not a small point, and it’s worth understanding if you or your clients own property outside city limits anywhere in this region. The protections most homeowners assume exist mostly come from municipal zoning. Out in the county, they often don’t.
So residents are using what they have: challenging stormwater permits with the state environmental agency, asking their state representative to force a public meeting on an air permit, and packing commissioners court.
Then the governor hit pause
On August 3, Governor Abbott paused new data center approvals statewide pending an audit by ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission.
The number that triggered it is remarkable. There are more than 1,800 projects sitting in the queue asking to plug into the Texas grid, representing 474 gigawatts of requested power — more than five times what the entire state uses at peak on the hottest afternoon of the year. Roughly 90% of those requests are data centers.
Nobody believes 474 gigawatts is real. Developers file in multiple places at once to hold their spot. But nobody knows which ones are real either, which is precisely the problem, and the audit is meant to sort it out. The first results are expected around April.
This isn’t a Texas quirk. More than 100 state and local governments across the country have moved to ban, pause or restrict large data centers. New York’s governor imposed her own moratorium. One tracking group counted 25 projects canceled in 2025 — about four times the year before.
The catch: the Texas pause only applies to projects that want to plug into the public grid. Facilities that build their own power plant aren’t covered. Which is exactly what that 2,842-acre Cedar Creek project is doing with its own 710 megawatts of gas turbines. That is not an accident, and it tells you where this is all heading — toward enormous, self-powered sites on big rural acreage.
What this actually means for the rest of us
Your electric bill is an open question. The state passed new rules last year for these massive power users — they now have to be able to be shut off in a grid emergency, and regulators have until the end of this year to rewrite how the cost of new transmission lines gets divided up. Who pays for the wires these facilities need is being decided right now. That’s worth paying attention to as a homeowner, and it’s the single most underdiscussed piece of this.
Home values near data centers: the honest answer is nobody’s sure yet. A University of Rochester study found little measurable effect on nearby home prices. A George Mason-led study found data centers slowed local price growth. Both can be right depending on when you bought. What’s clearer is the construction distortion: Abilene saw rents jump 33% year over year while its facility was being built. If you buy ahead of that wave you likely ride it up. If you buy at the peak of a construction boom, you’re buying a temporary market.
If you’re buying near a proposed site, ask about noise specifically. Six class-action lawsuits were filed nationally this year against operating data centers, five of them over noise — generators and cooling equipment running around the clock. One plaintiff in Wisconsin said he changed job shifts because he couldn’t sleep. No case has reached a verdict yet and some have settled. None of this makes a purchase a bad idea, but “there’s a 500-megawatt facility going in a mile from here” is something a buyer deserves to know before they write the offer, not after.
The jobs story is real, but not the one people think. That Cedar Creek project projects 767 temporary construction jobs — and 25 permanent ones. Excellent jobs, averaging around $250,000, but 25. The honest summary is: a lot of construction work for a few years, a very small permanent payroll, and a very large addition to the tax base that funds schools, roads and emergency services. Two of those three are genuine wins for a county like Bastrop. Anyone who tells a homeowner these facilities will “bring thousands of jobs to town” is stretching it, and anyone who says they bring nothing is too.
Land east of Austin is being repriced in real time. Reported premiums nationally run from $25,000 to well over $360,000 an acre for the right site. Appraisals and comparable sales haven’t caught up, because there aren’t enough sales yet to catch up to. If you have family, clients or neighbors sitting on a large piece of acreage in eastern Travis, Bastrop, Caldwell, Lee or Milam County, what that land is worth today may bear very little relationship to what it was worth two years ago — and they may not know it.
What I’m watching
Whether the state’s audit actually thins out that queue by spring. Whether the Legislature gives Texas counties any real say over land use in 2027, which would change this landscape overnight. Whether the first noise verdict lands anywhere in Texas.
And one detail I found genuinely surprising: the developers of the Cedar Creek project withdrew their tax abatement requests from both Bastrop County and Bastrop ISD. Reporting indicates Anthropic drove that decision, saying it didn’t want to pull money out of the local community, and is instead working with local officials on a list of community priorities. Read that as good citizenship or as buying goodwill — either way, if it becomes the expectation, it changes what every developer after them has to offer a Central Texas community to get in the door.
The backlash isn’t going to stop this buildout. The money behind it is enormous and the demand is real. But it’s already changing where these things go, how they’re powered, and what they have to give the neighbors.
For those of us who live here, that’s the part still up for grabs.
— Greg Cooper, Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty
Sources
• Austin Business Journal, Aug. 24, 2026: “EdgeConneX aims to break ground on additional Bastrop County data centers”; “AI giant Anthropic in talks to lease massive Bastrop County data center”; “Data center opponents are using a unique legal strategy to challenge developments”
• Texas Tribune — New Texas data center projects frozen until state audits them
• Utility Dive — Facing 474 GW of interconnection requests, Texas hits pause
• KUT — Will Abbott's pause make a difference?
• Community Impact — Bastrop County residents challenge TCEQ data center permits
• Bracewell — Texas SB 6 large load rules
• HousingWire — Data centers and home prices