Missouri City is nestled on the southwest side of Houston in Fort Bend County and is home to a range of regional manufacturing warehouses and consumer goods industries. Currently, though, no data center exists within city limits.
The city, which has a population of over 78,000 people, is part of a county that’s expected to reach 1 million residents in the next couple of years, transforming a once small, suburban town into a growing hub for new residents and businesses.
Missouri City Council passed new zoning regulations in May for industrial businesses, including storage warehouses and concrete batch plants. One measure requires any newly proposed data centers to disclose potential energy and water usage before it can be approved for a building permit.
Speaking at a recent city council meeting leading up to the vote, Development Services Director Jennifer Thomas Gomez said the new zoning amendment doesn't explicitly prohibit data centers from being built.
"This gives us the proactive ability to create the standards that we want to see for locations within the city of where they would be appropriate," Gomez said. "Whether it's protection from a utility standpoint, from a design standpoint, from an adjacency standpoint, it allows us to be proactive in that process."
Land-use legal experts cited in the city's agenda documents state there are nearly 400 data centers in Texas, with 55 in the Greater Houston region. At this current pace, the Houston region could soon account for up to a quarter of all the data centers in the state.
Dan Diorio is the vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, a national trade association for the data center industry.
He said data centers are the backbone of the 21st-century economy and Texas is leading the way.
"It is every telehealth appointment, every online classroom, every online purchase, a banking or financial transaction," Diorio said. "It is electronic health care records, 911 geolocation, state and local government, you name it."
Researchers with the nonprofit Houston Advanced Research Center said that while data center investment brings enormous economic opportunity to Texas, it also carries significant challenges for the electric grid and for natural resources.
Data centers need constant cooling for their servers with enough energy to power operations. Roughly 30% of the total energy consumed by a data center is used to prevent high-power chips from failing due to heat.
The amount of water and energy it takes to fuel this infrastructure is concerning for Missouri City officials. However, Diorio said water usage is a common misconception with data centers, claiming they are extremely efficient water users.
He said that being an unwelcoming community can have a domino effect with other potential businesses in a city, as the data center industry has already contributed over $3 billion in state and local tax revenues in the last three years.
"I think what's key in these conversations is, you don't want to impose punitive or unachievable restrictions that ultimately drive development out," Diorio said. "Data centers create significant business ecosystems around them."
University of Houston computer engineering professor Harish Krishnamoorthy said daily human habits contribute to the need for massive modern facilities that store data and power artificial intelligence.
"Typical data centers, their main duty is like when you send out a request for an image, or you want to store something as an email, all these would go and sit in some data center," Krishnamoorthy said. "The limitation of how much we can do with AI now is basically with respect to infrastructure."
Krishnamoorthy said hyper-scale larger data centers in the future will need "a really high requirement of water usage."
"A few million gallonsof water per day, so that is maybe up to five million gallons per day," he said.
The average, mid-sized data center uses 300-thousand gallons of water a day depending on the type of cooling system, according to a new policy brief from the nonprofit Houston Advanced Research Center. Researchers there said, "no one knows how we will meet the industry's insatiable demand for water and electricity."
Donna Thomas is the founder of the Fort Bend County Environmental Organization, a nonprofit serving multiple cities in the county to address environmental concerns like air quality monitoring and pollution.
"People don't realize what that's going to do to your water," Thomas said. "It's going to impact the water that we have."
A recent survey by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs examined Houstonians’ opinions on data centers and artificial intelligence.
Maria Perez Arguellesis a UH research professor and worked on the report. She said a major finding is that people oppose data centers but support AI, because they use it a lot.
"They are worried and uncertain about the impact that data centers can have on energy demand," Arguelles said. "The grid, as we know, is already having high demands, especially with our long summers and other natural disasters that might put an extra strain on it."
Back in Missouri City, the new zoning regulation will require public hearings before any new data center can be approved for a special use permit. Both the city council and the planning and zoning commission will consider how a data center, or other industrial facilities, could affect traffic, noise and the environment.
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