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STARBASE — SpaceX has plans to build a $24 billion data center on property that it asked Brownsville to disannex at breakneck speed earlier this year, confirming suspicions that local environmental activists expressed over the summer.
The city of Starbase on Monday posted a public hearing notice on a proposed tax abatement for the project during its regular Dec. 9 meeting. The notice states the property consists of an approximately 444-acre tract that Starbase annexed after it was released from Brownsville’s city limits and extraterritorial jurisdiction in August.
SpaceX plans to build a gas-fired power plant alongside the “super-compute facility.” It’s not clear how the development will interact with Gov. Greg Abbott’s moratorium on data centers.
The South Texas Environmental Justice Network held a protest against the Starbase data center Tuesday outside the Cameron County Courthouse on Monroe Street. Speakers demanded county commissioners and Brownsville city commissioners speak out against the project.
“It just proves everything we’ve been saying, which is that SpaceX can’t be trusted,” Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the organization, told The Herald. “We don’t want our low-income Brownsville community to breathe in pollution from their gas facility.”
Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr. was not immediately available for comment.
Brownsville commissioners last week completed the months-long process of establishing a moratorium on data centers, and they have plans to extend the pause to the full 180 days permissible under Texas law.
Brownsville also reactivated its Environmental and Conservation Task Force to study the potential effects of data centers on the environment, residents’ health and local economy. City commissioners will use its recommendations to inform potential data center regulations.
While environmental activists and residents have speculated that SpaceX was attempting to circumvent a data center moratorium by pressuring the city for a speedy disannexation, Brownsville’s city attorney has said that any data centers that began development prior to the moratorium taking effect would not have been to its restrictions.
The disannexation of the 444-acre tract of land was finalized during a fraught Brownsville City Commission meeting in August, where residents packed the meeting room to urge commissioners against the move.
The process that normally would have taken weeks or months was sped up to about a week-and-a-half at the behest of SpaceX, who was purchasing the property from a private owner for an undisclosed project.
A representative from SpaceX told commissioners that if they did not finalize the disannexation during the meeting, the rocket company would rescind an offer of up to $220 million for critical water infrastructure projects.
Commissioners ultimately approved the disannexation, which the city attorney told them could alternatively be pursued by SpaceX through the courts.
Starbase annexed the 444-acre property in September, along with more than 7,100 additional acres of land.