Datacenters, Home Values, and Usage

You may have seen a news article stating that researchers discovered that datacenters don’t lower home values. What the title doesn’t say (though the article itself does) is that the promoter of this study works in a consulting role with Datacenter companies and leverages his previous political involvement and understanding of energy regulation to help these companies close deals with the state. So he’s not exactly unbiased regarding the public perception of datacenters.

The next thing to consider is the broad concept of datacenters. We get a lot of grief for labeling our coalition “against datacenters”, but the reason is because there is no distinction of datacenters in the writing of news articles or in our political scene. They say all of these datacenters are the same:

720 ft “Duos Edge AI” for schools in Waco, TX

350,000 sq ft (0.0126 sq miles) “Houston 2 Data Center” for high performance computing in Houston, TX. 60 MW (could power about 15,000 homes)

1,100 acres (almost 2 sq miles) Lancium for Ai infrastructure in Abilene, TX. 1.2 GW of power (could power about 1 million homes)

(More info on Gigawatt)

They’re obviously not the same. They use significantly different amounts of land, water, and energy. They’re not comparable for a survey of land or home values. One could be in your neighborhood and you’d never know, the seconds in an industrial park, and the other has created a housing crisis as it’s being built.

So maybe our title is too broad. If the folks pushing this agenda will change the language on their side of the conversation, I think we’d all be happy to be more specific.

In regards to this study, they didn’t research the large Ai campuses popping up across the state. Because they couldn’t - they haven’t been built yet, and they “don’t know” what the long term repercussions will be yet. But I imagine that we can all make some educated guesses about the impact of hundreds of datacenters using the same amount of electricity and water as millions of homes in our state.

You can review parts of the study here: 

https://hyperscalenews.com/articles/do-texas-data-centers-lower-home-values?fbclid=IwY2xjawS_taRleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFrc1pYbTVWSldteUFMdHl0c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHuP7rHh5WkCjjoUOuwAotMsX8HJcRk2Q67evMt0hWW2pv1yA4iAINc8pd0SG_aem_1HrS9wALuEun1IpKULe7Xw