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RED OAK - Elda Jazmin Villegas' dining room transformed into a war room overnight.
The room started as a meeting spot for dozens of residents alarmed as Red Oak rezoned 830 acres of farmland for another data center. It has evolved into the group's "little unofficial office."
On a mid-June afternoon, documents and spiral notebooks covered the long, dark wood table beside a Tupperware container of freshly picked tomatoes. On the wall hung a list of notary phone numbers, a calendar and a handmade card from Villegas' 9-year-old daughter, Amara.
Decorated in crayon with a multicolored heart, butterfly and flower, the front read, "Happy Mother's Day." Inside, the message brought Villegas to tears:
"Hey Mom, Happy Mother's Day.
You work hard so they don't build a data center.
You bought us a house. It doesn't matter if it's big, clean, or pretty. I still love you.
Not only are you the leader of the no data center thing but you're also the leader of love for us.
When me and the boys fight, you stop it.
That's why we love you because you protect us."
It's a reminder of why Villegas is determined to slow down the data center development in Red Oak and surrounding areas.
The 43-year-old retired U.S. Marine moved to Pratt Road in Red Oak in 2021 with her husband, Chris, and their three kids. Because of Villegas' health, they needed to be in a more open space: A property where they could raise horses, goats and chickens, and listen to the cicadas whine on a hot summer morning.
Their house has been picture-book perfect, but that peacefulness was interrupted in April when Villegas heard of plans for a large data center campus abutting her property. The family will be able to look out their windows and watch the open field transform into a cluster of industrial buildings.
Leafy trees on the shared property line can block only so much of the view and noise. They've already noticed traffic from soil sampling trucks on the neighboring property's dirt road.
Even though it feels like an impossible battle, Villegas refuses to back down.
"I'm not in the uniform anymore, but that does not mean I'm done fighting for what's right for my country," Villegas said. "And if we allow the city to take those rights from us - to silence our voices - then the state is going to do it and then higher up is going to do it. We can't let that happen."
Across America, the nation's data center buildout has forced small and midsized cities to choose between preserving their way of life or reaching for greater economic prosperity. Red Oak offers a window into what happens when a city strives for both.
Related story: Data center construction is booming in Texas. Favorable factors could catapult it to the lead the nation
Bedroom town to industry hub
Red Oak has boomed in recent years, with the population more than doubling to about 20,000 between 2018 and 2025. Industry moved in, too.
In a recent interview, Mayor Mark Stanfill, a longtime resident and veterinarian, described the city about 20 miles south of Dallas as the "gateway to Ellis County." He said it's a welcoming, home-knit community with small-town perks and big-city amenities.
Originally called Possum Trot in the 1840s, the city was renamed for Red Oak Creek and the trees along its banks. The city's first recorded population was 350 in 1950.
Industry has been within its grasp at least twice.
MKT Railroad built a depot there but stopped carrying passengers in 1965 and in the 1980s, Waxahachie was chosen as the site of the nation's most-ambitious science experiment that never was: the Superconducting SuperCollider.
In the last decade, Red Oak sought to attract other industry and development to rid itself of the "bedroom town" way of life, where residents leave for work, to shop and eat dinner.
An industrial park that now houses manufacturing facilities for Qarbon Aerospace and Bombardier Aviation was the initial spark. Texas State Technical College opened its Red Oak campus to train workers in 2016.
Then came the data centers.
Positioning Red Oak to be a hub for data centers, Stanfill said, didn't happen by chance. It was a mix of foresight, planning and partnerships that put them ahead of the curve in this now flourishing industry.
"Our vision of where we kind of started and how it's progressing, it's gotten better than what we could have imagined because we didn't know. It was uncharted grounds," said Stanfill, whose third and final term as mayor ends next year.
Related story: Exclusive: A look inside construction on DataBank's Red Oak AI data center campus
The city has two operating data center campuses, one under construction and another four planned in its roughly 16 square miles, about the size of Dallas' Lake Highlands neighborhood. All were approved with similar 10-year tax breaks, City Manager Todd Fuller said.
Google and two Dallas-based companies, Compass Datacenters and DataBank, are leading the buildout.
City officials first started talking with Compass about bringing a data center to Red Oak in 2019, years before data centers became the topic of neighborhood gossip and social media feeds.
In an opinion piece last year for The Dallas Morning News headlined "Data centers are critical for Texas communities," Stanfill wrote there was $13 billion in data center investments already underway in Red Oak with more to come. He said the facilities were set to quadruple the city's total taxable land value.
"It is no understatement to say this investment has fundamentally transformed our community, creating thousands of construction jobs and attracting retail and other industries to support the growth, along with employees of businesses tied to construction and operations," he wrote of one of the data center projects.
According to the city, the developments have generated thousands of construction jobs and dozens of high-wage, long-term operational jobs.
The pace shows no signs of slowing. Last year, the city's development services department permitted, inspected and oversaw more than $1.2 billion in industrial, commercial and residential projects.
Until this spring, the buildout of data centers in Red Oak was relatively out of sight, out of mind, at least to those who don't live next to the older campuses.
But now the developments are becoming too abundant, too spread out to ignore.
Related story: Dallas-Fort Worth is a leading data center market with a 'significant scale issue'
Lonnie Janssen, a 68-year-old self-proclaimed Iowa farm boy who moved to Red Oak in the 1980s, has been surprised and discouraged by the data center development.
"It's sure messing up our lifestyle," he said. "Everything in the past has been done up north - Frisco, Anna and all those northern suburbs. Now, everything is Waxahachie and Palmer … all these little towns. ... It just seems like [they need to] step on the brakes."
Sitting on his patio on Crestview Drive, he points to the end of his street where the next large-scale data center campus is slated.
"It feels like residents were kind of left behind on this one," he said.
More than two dozen people living in Red Oak and Ellis County told The News they feel the same way.
A continued fight
For years, the data center buildout in Red Oak happened without notable opposition.
In April, the city's planning and zoning commission was scheduled to vote on whether an 830-acre property should be rezoned from agricultural use to planned development for a "high tech industrial park," which city officials said would be "conducive to data center uses."
The night before the meeting, a Facebook post about the potential rezoning caught residents' attention, including that of Villegas and Janssen. A large group showed up to speak during public comment, and the commission voted 3-2 to not recommend the rezoning request.
It was a small win, but residents knew the City Council would have the ultimate decision in a couple weeks. Soon Red Oak TX - Say NO MORE Data Centers, first a private Facebook group, transformed into a public effort.
Villegas offered her home as a meeting spot. Longtime Red Oak resident Cindi Stephenson gathered contact information and spread the word. Lacey Hamel, an Ellis County resident who lives across from the rezoned property, searched documents, past meetings and everything available to find answers as to how the data center plan got to this point.
Others pitched in, dispensing yellow "No data center" signs. Janssen drove around with one on the grill of his pickup.
Between the end of April and the May 11 City Council meeting, the residents emailed City Council and staff, held multiple protests, picketed and connected with local news outlets.
The group's efforts led to over 130 people attending the tense marathon meeting where more than 20 people spoke during public comment. All said they were opposed to the rezoning or data centers more generally.
They looked at the mayor, City Council and staff and sounded off about all their concerns: potential health impacts, harm to the environment, flooding from more concrete, increased traffic, a changing way of life.
Some said they were concerned with how it all played out, suggesting the process was secretive or incognito. They told council members they never received the official notice they believed was legally required.
The City Council presented the benefits of data centers: improved road, water and sewer infrastructure, an eventual lowering of tax rates for residents, job creation and new revenue for amenities such as parks, playground expansions and trails.
They said the proposed project reflects a $9.45 billion investment in the city. They said it would add an additional $405 million to the total taxable value of the city even during the abatement period.
They described how advancing technology in the new data centers uses less water than a Walmart Supercenter.
Related story: Texas green-lights new batch study for data centers wanting to connect to ERCOT grid
After hours of back-and-forth, but no pro data center speakers in the public comment, the council voted 4-1 to approve the rezoning.
It was nearly midnight, and most everyone had cleared out. A few lingered, their heads hanging in disappointment and their bodies heavy with physical and emotional exhaustion.
In the weeks since, Villegas said the group has become more organized.
They have subcommittees dedicated to tasks such as using the Freedom of Information Act to request documents, planning and hosting events like fundraisers, and seeking legal representation, which they recently retained.
They've expanded their scope, Villegas said.
"It's evolved from just our data center next door to the data centers that are already approved that haven't started development, because even those neighbors were done wrong," she said. "It's not just about us, it's about the entire community as a whole, and we're trying to stop that and worst-case scenario, at least put in ordinances that protect the neighbors as well."
Texas' complicated relationship with data centers
Data centers have powered the internet and e-commerce world for decades, often tucked inside office parks or renovated buildings throughout cities like Dallas. But the race for artificial intelligence has created a demand for hyperscale campuses, which cluster multiple data center buildings on a single site.
Texas is behind only Virginia for states with the highest number of data centers. The Lone Star State has long attracted developers with its abundance of land, relatively low electricity prices, and business-friendly regulations.
Dallas-Fort Worth has quickly emerged as a hub for data centers and because speed-to-market is important to these high-tech developments, the process from application to construction to operation seems to be happening in record time.
Only these projects are starting to hit hurdles. Hard.
Residents across the state are raising concerns about the long-term effects, and they worry about what happens if the AI bubble bursts, making these sprawling campuses obsolete within a decade, leaving behind massive industrial footprints.
Within the last few months, Hill County became the first in Texas to approve a one-year moratorium on new data centers. It brought into question whether officials at the county level hold that power. The County Commissioners Court reversed the action after a $100 million lawsuit was filed by a developer.
City-level bans followed, with San Marcos as the first and the Fort Worth City Council recently calling for one.
While 87% of existing data centers are in urban locations, 67% of planned ones are in rural areas, according to the Pew Research Center.
Texas leaders have recently pushed for more regulation, including Gov. Greg Abbott who last fall touted the state's increasingly integral role in the AI sector. Abbott went as far as to call for a ban on new data centers in rural neighborhoods.
The Pew study found 38% of Americans live within 5 miles of at least one operational data center, and since data centers tend to be built in clusters, 9 in 10 data centers are within 5 miles of one another.
While communities throughout North Texas and beyond host town halls on the pending influx of data centers, Red Oak leaders haven't veered off course.
"Longtime vision"
Data center developers openly campaign on the fact they want to be good neighbors because they'll be in these places for decades.
These efforts sometimes involve philanthropic donations like when DataBank's sponsorship helped Red Oak Public Library purchase five 3-D printers and Google awarded grants of $100,000 to the library and $150,000 to Red Oak ISD.
Most recently, Compass Datacenters held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the company's donation of a $12.6 million, 40,000-square-foot facility to Texas State Technical College. It is a first-of-its-kind, hands-on training center for the college's Mechanical, Electrical & IT Data Center Pathway Program that has expanded to Waco and Abilene.
Related story: Google taps Texas for $40B AI investment to run through 2027
Hundreds of people were in attendance, including Mayor Stanfill, City Manager Fuller and graduates from the program's two cohorts.
As he stood to address the crowd, Compass founder and CEO Chris Crosby paused to fight back tears.
"That is what this is all about," Crosby said, pointing to graduates sitting in the front row before the crowd applauded. "A longtime vision here, and seeing it come to fruition is everything you want as an entrepreneur."
At the event, Crosby told The News he's enjoyed watching the growth in and around Red Oak, and how it can "give the opportunity to people who otherwise wouldn't have it."
Crosby said the data center industry has a history of operating in secretive ways for many reasons, but largely because the operations were predominantly high-security government and financial services.
Crosby acknowledged that's changed and companies are having to learn quickly how to be more transparent and educate the public to combat misinformation.
He said Compass prides itself on being a "class A, community-first developer" rather than a short-term developer or land flipper.
The company plans long-term to be a 100-year neighbor, designing the buildings to be "perpetually updateable," so they're "built to last instead of built to exit."
"We're a long-term partner to this community," Crosby said.
Clint Hawthorne, who grew up in Red Oak, joined Compass as vice president of site operations earlier this year.
He said he watched Red Oak transform from what he called a one-horse town when he graduated from high school in 1998 to having educational and career opportunities.
Hawthorne, who lives in nearby Midlothian, said he worked in and around data centers throughout his career, but to be able to return home to Red Oak for this job was "a little bit of a full-circle moment."
He said he's proud to work for a company that invests in its community, like the partnership with the technical college providing a pathway for people to join the industry.
"This has created opportunities that did not exist 20 years ago," Hawthorne said.
Doubts linger
Jesse Ramos' entire life is in Red Oak. It's where he grew up with his siblings, lives with his partner, Brissa Flores, and his 10-year-old twins, Adalynn and Avery, and operates his professional painting business.
He knew about the data center buildout because he couldn't avoid it.
His sister lives across from the city's first data center campus, and his mom lives beside where the second was built.
Ramos, 35, thought they were evading the same fate when they bought and moved into a new house on Pierce Road earlier this year.
They were excited. It was spacious so they could host parties and family gatherings, like they love to do, and the girls could enjoy doing flips on the trampoline and throwing the ball with their brown Frenchie, Princessa, in the big backyard.
Weeks after buying and moving in Ramos noticed the "No data center" signs.
Sitting inside their new home, the family is all smiles when they talk about their first few weeks there. The expressions soften when they think about the future.
Ramos and Flores turn to each other and lock eyes before softly shaking their heads.
They've spent lots of time recently wondering whether knowing about the impending data center would have changed their moving plans, but they can't say for sure. In the same way, they aren't positive whether they'll stay or go once the development progresses.
"Honestly, it has felt kind of like a movie," Flores said. "You see like Erin Brockovich and Dark Waters, and you watch it on a movie but you never think that it could happen in your area, or you just don't think about it happening to you."
Related story: Texas data center tracker: See where data centers are planned or operating near you
This reporting is part of the Future of North Texas, a community-funded journalism initiative supported by the Commit Partnership, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Lisa and Charles Siegel, the McCune-Losinger Family Fund, The Meadows Foundation, the Perot Foundation, the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas. The News retains full editorial control of this coverage.
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