Lacy Lakeview Data Center, Lacy Lakeview, Texas

InfraKey Capital wants to build a 1,000 megawatt data center and gas-fired power plant, the Lacy Lakeview Data District, on more than 520 acres of farmland it bought near Elm Mott, north of Waco in McLennan County, Texas. The Lacy Lakeview City Council approved a memorandum of understanding with InfraKey on December 9, 2025 and passed an annexation resolution on January 13, 2026, but the project is still proposed: it still needs an agreement with Waco, which controls water and sewer service to the site, before construction can start.

Water is the fight residents keep raising. InfraKey's memorandum of understanding says the finished data district would use and reuse 15 to 16 million gallons of water a day; by comparison, all of Lacy Lakeview bought just over 18.7 million gallons from Waco in the whole month of December, a small fraction of the project's daily need.

Mayor Charles Wilson says the city has room: it uses only 20% of the 2.1 million gallons a day it already contracts from Waco, and plans to buy another 665,000 gallons a day of treated wastewater.

County Judge Scott Felton was more cautious: "The amount of water needed is a big issue, and then also emissions, air quality. All those things have to be analyzed so that we're totally understanding what the consequence of operations would be besides the positive impacts of growing the tax base." At $10 billion of taxable value, the campus would become the county's largest taxpayer, well above Lacy Lakeview's current tax base of $649 million, with money also going to the Connally school district and McLennan Community College.

Residents are not persuaded. A petition against the project reached nearly 3,000 signatures, and a Facebook group opposing it has about 2,500 members. Bob Beechner, a retired Waco firefighter who lives a quarter mile from the site, said he feared a "techno industrial zone" would consume his rural community: "That's a bombshell, man." Bryant Stanton, who runs a stained glass studio a mile away, said of the mayor: "For our mayor not to consider us, I take that as an affront. It's like, who cares about you guys?"

The biggest obstacle is Waco, which owns the regional sewer system and holds the water service rights to the site. Lacy Lakeview would have to annex not just the data center property but a three-mile corridor 1,000 feet wide, and InfraKey would have to build a sewer plant to treat up to 2 million gallons a day of wastewater for reuse as cooling water.

Waco City Manager Ryan Holt learned of the project from a news article in November 2025, and in April 2026 said his officials still lacked basic information: "If this is so urgent, wouldn't you think engineers would have been in the same room by now?"

On May 2, 2026, Lacy Lakeview voters elected a data center opponent to the city council. Mayor Wilson said afterward he hoped to reach an agreement with Waco on the wastewater plan within weeks; no update on that agreement has been published since.