EL PASO, Tx., June 11, 2026: Datacenter backlash continues across the nation after El Paso’s city council voted to continue the META datacenter in the Northeast. Community activists with Amanecer People’s Project and Sembrando Esperanza vowed to continue their efforts to stop the Northeast datacenter because of several concerns with the datacenter including electricity and water use.
Members of both organizations turned out in mass to ask the city council to begin negotiations with META to cancel the datacenter. After the vote against the measure, some members of the organizations said they would seek to recall some of the city council members who voted against the measure and to mobilize voters against those seeking reelection in the November ballot.
Facing reelection are Chris Canales, Alejandra Chávez, Art Fierro and Ivan Niño. Except for Canales, the other three representatives voted against the measure. Because Chávez, Fierro and Niño have less than one-year left in their current terms, they cannot be recalled under the city’s charter.
Deanna Maldonado-Rocha and Cynthia Boyer Trejo can be recalled under the city rules.
No one has officially announced a formal recall against any of the city representatives as of this morning.
A citizen activist group in San Angelo Texas is seeking to oust San Angelo’s mayor, Tom Thompson and city representatives Harry Thomas and Joe Self over their support of the Skybox datacenter.
El Paso is not the only hot spot for datacenters. Texas recently surpassed Virginia as the top state for datacenters with 250 datacenters in Texas currently in operation and close to another 500 under consideration, including the El Paso META datacenter. Across the border in New Mexico, another mega-datacenter is being built in Santa Teresa. In March, Fort Bliss was announced as one of two U.S. Army locations to begin building and operating a commercial hyperscale datacenter.
Investment Firm Carlyle was provisionally selected by the Army to begin negotiating the building of a datacenter on 1,384 acres of land at Fort Bliss. The proposed Fort Bliss datacenter is in the negotiation stages and no final authorization to begin the project has been made.
The rise in datacenter development in Texas has led Texas Governor Greg Abbott to pursue proposals that force Texas datacenter developers to shoulder the cost of their developments, including reducing energy bills for Texans.
In a June 10 letter to the Public Utility Commission (PUC), Abbot tasked state regulators with creating state regulations “to ensure everyday Texans are not burdened with the costs of infrastructure driven by data center expansion.”
Among the concerns brought forth by Texas activists against the datacenters includes the threat of rising utility bills as electricity companies build capacity to provide electricity to them.
Abbott wrote in his letter that he is directing the PUC to ensure that the electrical connections to datacenters “will result in reduced residential electrical bills” and require the datacenter developers to pay for electrical generating plants. The governor expects the PUC to deliver a report to his office by July 17 summarizing the actions it took to follow his directives with the datacenters.
Among the tax incentives that datacenters enjoy in Texas is an exemption for sales taxes for their equipment. Texas is expecting to lose over $3 billion in sales tax revenues by 2028 because of the sales tax exemption. The City of El Paso is also losing its portion of the sales tax revenues from the META datacenter in addition to the property tax incentives it gave the company. El Paso officials have not released the amount of sales tax revenues they expect to lose under the sales tax exemption from the META development.
Opposition to datacenters is rising across America with 65% of people polled in March saying they are opposed to building artificial intelligence (AI) datacenters in their communities.
The Seattle city council voted unanimously on Tuesday to ban new construction of datacenters in Seattle for a year. Two weeks ago, the El Paso city council unanimously approved moving forward on the city’s proposed Data Center Policy Framework creating stricter limits on city incentives for future datacenters and enhancing oversight over them.
The city is collecting feedback on the proposed plan through Monday.
Readers with questions about the city’s proposed framework can get answers at the city’s webpage for datacenters. Those interested in learning more about the activities of the two organized groups – Amanecer People’s Project and Sembrando Esperanza – opposed to the META datacenter can visit their webpages. (click on the organization’s name to visit the page)
The city council is expected to vote on the datacenter framework in the coming weeks.
Like Us and Follow Us On Our Social Media!