Data centers are being built across Texas every day. Here's what goes on inside one in Austin
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin offered a tour of its facility, highlighting the increasing demand for data centers, especially for AI, and the associated challenges of electricity and water consumption. TACC is also expanding with a new facility in Round Rock. Despite public opposition and concerns about power and water, Texas remains attractive to developers due to cheap land and a friendly regulatory environment.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), a University of Texas at Austin facility, provided KUT News with a rare tour of its Austin data center, detailing the operations and challenges of housing massive computers for data storage and AI processing. This comes as TACC plans a significant expansion with a new facility in Round Rock, adding to the nearly 250 data centers projected for Texas. The statewide data center boom faces considerable public opposition, with a recent Texas Politics Project poll indicating 42% of Texans strongly oppose these developments, often citing concerns over resource consumption.
Tommy Minyard, TACC's director of advanced computing systems, explained the immense power demands, recalling how a 2005 request for 10 megawatts of electricity was initially dismissed but quickly proven necessary. The article highlights the deafening noise from the 500 fans required for air cooling and explores various cooling methods, including evaporative cooling (water-intensive) and immersion cooling in mineral oil (less resource-intensive but costly). Minyard emphasized the lack of effective cooling technology for Texas's climate.
TACC's servers are primarily used for complex scientific research, from climate change studies to cancer treatments, processing data from projects like the James Webb Telescope. However, the surge in new data centers is largely driven by the demands of artificial intelligence, which requires substantially more computational power, space, and resources than traditional data storage.
Despite Texas's unreliable power grid and ongoing droughts, the state remains a prime location for data center developers. Mike Kamerlander, CEO of the Hays Caldwell Economic Development Partnership, attributed this to readily available cheap land, which facilitates larger campuses for AI model training, and a historically permissive regulatory environment from entities like ERCOT. While Kamerlander expressed concerns about water usage and long-term job creation, he conceded that developers are choosing Texas regardless of local recruitment efforts.