Project Rise 1A and Project Rise 2A data center, Oklaunion, Texas

About seven miles southeast of Vernon, in Wilbarger County, Texas, Google is building a data center campus that its state filings value at $1 billion. Two registrations with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, Project Rise 1A and Rise 2A, each describe a $500 million, 991,000 square foot data center at FM 2897 South, owned by Planton Investments LLC and Platon Investments LLC at Google's Mountain View headquarters address. The filings put the work between March 31, 2026 and the end of March 2028.

Vernon depends entirely on groundwater from the Seymour Aquifer, drawn from five well fields. In September 2026 the city asked customers to cut their use by 20 percent under Stage 2 of its drought plan, after the static aquifer level fell to 37.82 feet, about 3.8 inches above the point at which restrictions become mandatory. Google says the campus will be air-cooled, with water use limited mainly to domestic needs such as kitchens. On September 1 it gave the city $4.5 million to replace an aging water pipeline, but did not say which section, how long it is or when the work would happen, and the Vernon Daily Record noted the money is not an agreement to supply more water to the data center. "Without Google's support, this project would not have been possible," Mayor Pam Gosline said.

The clearest public numbers about the people who will work there come from wastewater permits rather than from Google. Platon has applied to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for a plant near Oklaunion treating up to 130,000 gallons a day, sized for about 2,215 people on site across a 24 hour period, and for a second plant of 20,000 gallons a day sized for 440, which would discharge into Boggy Creek and on to Beaver Creek and the Wichita River. Neither application names Google or a data center, and the paper cautioned that the figures are engineering assumptions, not job commitments; Google has given no job figure for the site.

Power is to come from generation that AES is building alongside the campus and will sell to it under 20-year agreements. County Judge Greg Tyra said the county had "worked closely with the Google and AES teams for the last couple of years" before the February 2026 announcement.