To Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, the debate over data centers starts with the boom in capital investment and property tax revenue the developments promise to the state.
Creating regulatory guardrails on issues such as water usage and power are necessary but shouldn’t risk the potential return, Christian told the Fort Worth Report after appearing on a data centers panel Sept. 26 at the Texas Tribune’s annual TribFest conference in Austin.
“I think you can learn from previous problems from data centers that have shown problems in the past,” said Christian, who doesn’t regulate data centers but has increasingly spoken on related questions about natural resources. “And what you do as an educated public is you fix the problems, you regulate to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But you don’t stop and turn down billions, billions of free market dollars.”
Data centers — and their massive potential economic return — have careened into the intersection of the free market and community concerns about their environmental impact. The Texas Legislature is set to take up the debate over regulation in the 2027 session.
The accompanying statistics highlight the choices and problems data center developers and operators face. Demand nationally for development of data centers — the buildings that house the digital infrastructure necessary for processing daily transactions worldwide for everything from paying water bills to buying airline tickets — is surging, according to research by the JLL commercial real estate firm.
Seventy-nine percent of Americans support U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence, but only 14 percent support “data centers in our community,” according to research by JLL, Gallup and Reuters published by JLL in August. JLL declined a request by the Report for an interview for this story.
Communities are experiencing the conundrum. In Fort Worth, property tax revenue makes up about 60% of the city’s general fund budget, which pays for most basic city services. But residential revenue — 63% of the tax base, compared to commercial — has turned soft in recent years because of protests and litigation, plus the Tarrant Appraisal District’s policy of reappraising every two years. Fort Worth struggled to close a $94 million budget shortfall for 2027 as a result.
The city estimated this spring it received $83 million in gross property tax revenue from four data centers in the city over the last five years. In 2024, Fort Worth’s property tax revenue from data centers equaled the same revenue from 8,378 average-valued single family homes, the city estimated.
“That’s a huge impact to a school district as well,” Jesica McEachern, an assistant city manager, told council members June 2 in presenting a report on proposed regulation.
By 2030, including the existing data centers and phases of planned facilities the city projects will launch by then, the proportion of…
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