Omaira Garcia found out that OpenAI was building its flagship Stargate data center next door only after the bulldozers arrived. Today, a natural-gas power plant sits roughly 500 yards from the Air Force veteran’s ranch in Abilene, Texas, its exhaust stacks visible from her kitchen window. “We weren’t given any time to understand what this impact was going to be on us,” she says.
Her story, uncovered by a Floodlight investigation, is becoming disturbingly common. Texas already hosts some 300 data centers, with 200 more in development, and could overtake Virginia as the nation’s leading market by 2030. Powering all that AI compute takes electricity on a staggering scale — and developers have found a quiet way to build the fossil-fuel plants that deliver it.
The trick is a regulatory loophole. Building a major new source of emissions normally requires a major air permit, complete with environmental reviews and public comment. But Texas regulators have let some data centers use so-called minor permits — the “permit by rule” and “standard permits” more commonly handed to dry cleaners and autobody shops. They’re granted fast, with minimal review and often no public notice.
Stargate itself is part of a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, first announced in January 2025. The 1,100-acre Abilene campus includes a 360-megawatt onsite gas plant, and it broke ground as one of the first hyperscale AI facilities in the state.
The numbers are what make it remarkable:
- Stargate operates 10 turbines and 62 backup diesel generators under minor permits alone.
- Those sources are allowed to emit more than 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases and over 1,000 tons of combined harmful air pollutants per year.
- Its developer, Crusoe, says the turbines will only be used for backup power.
Former EPA air enforcement chief Bruce Buckheit isn’t convinced the permit fits the project. “Normally that permit by rule was conceived of… where an operator wanted a backup generator or three,” he says. “When you get to 62, you start thinking, ‘Well, wait a minute, maybe the scale is wrong here.'”
Stargate is far from alone. Since 2024, at least 38 Texas data centers have received minor permits, quietly sanctioning more than 2,100 backup diesel generators — permitted to release nearly 2,500 tons of nitrogen oxides annually, more than triple the state’s newest coal plant.
Watchdogs describe a “small first, big later” playbook. A year after its minor permits, Stargate’s developers filed their first major air permit — for 41 more turbines and 18 more generators. If approved, it would become one of the largest fossil-fuel power plants in Texas, capable of powering over 1 million homes.
For Abilene residents, the fight may already be lost. “If a data center gets its operating permit, it’s too late,” says former regulator James Doty. “The only chance to stop something like this is to do it at the very, very, very beginning.”
