ABILENE, Texas (WTOC) – Effingham County could soon be home to one of the largest AI data centers in the country. To show what having an AI data center next door actually looks and sounds like, WTOC traveled to Abilene, Texas — the town already living with one. What sits eight miles outside Abilene is Stargate — an 875-acre campus and the first campus of OpenAI’s broader AI infrastructure effort, developed by Crusoe with cloud capacity from Oracle. It is already operating. Project Camellia is different — it is a future campus OpenAI itself is designing for Effingham County, with power delivery planned in phases between 2028 and 2032. In two days in Abilene, two themes emerged: thousands of workers to build it, and the strain they put on housing, roads, water and power. To build Stargate, between 5,000 and 9,000 temporary workers poured into the area, residents and city officials said. The city didn’t have enough housing — or roads built for the extra traffic. Residents and city officials say the influx caused rental rates and cost of living to double, even triple. Many homes were turned into rental properties to house the workforce. The shortage led to dozens of RV parks in and around Abilene to house workers. “They were coming into town and filling up everything available and really pretty quick,” said Scott Senter, of Better Homes and Gardens Realtors. “We kept hearing, oh they’re going to have to build more and we need to build more. That meant more people. It’s…
*This content (including text, artwork, graphics, photography, and video) was provided by the third party(ies) as referenced above. Any rights or other content questions or inquiries should be directed to such third-party provider(s).
