President Trump,
You ought to know that I am one of your strongest supporters. I think I proved it many times.
However, I have to tell you that you are on the wrong side of the issue in regards to our communities not wanting data centers in our rural areas. Do you understand why we choose to live in the rural areas?
There's a particular kind of quiet in rural Texas that you don't find anywhere else not silence exactly, but a stillness that lets you actually hear yourself think. Out here, the sky isn't just something you glance up at; it's the whole show. It stretches from one horizon to the other, uninterrupted, unclaimed by skylines or streetlights, and at night it fills with more stars than you knew existed a reminder of how small and how connected you really are.
Sunrises come slow and generous, spilling gold and rose-colored light across miles of open land before the world wakes up. Sunsets do the opposite they take their time leaving, painting the whole sky in colors that feel almost too rich to be real, like the day itself doesn't want to let go without one last show.
There's room to breathe out here. Room for your thoughts, your family, your faith, your work without the noise and crowding of city life pressing in on all sides. You can watch weather roll in from thirty miles away. You can raise kids who know what real dark and real quiet feel like, who grow up knowing the stars by name instead of the wifi password.
Rural Texas isn't empty it's full. Full of sky, full of land, full of the kind of peace that doesn't get sold in a subdivision. It's a life lived closer to the ground and closer to what matters and once you've watched a sunset stretch clean across an open horizon with nothing in the way, it's hard to imagine wanting anything less.
The quiet you'd go to rural Texas for gets replaced by a constant industrial hum data centers run cooling fans and backup diesel generators 24/7, unlike farm equipment or traffic that comes and goes. Residents near existing facilities have described a persistent low drone that never stops, day or night, audible for miles in open country where there's nothing else to compete with it.
The same groundwater that fills stock tanks, irrigates crops, and fills your well can get pulled hard by a single hyperscale campus up to 5 million gallons a day for cooling. In much of rural Texas, that draws straight from the same aquifers families and ranches have relied on for generations, and under Texas's rule of capture, a data center can often pump that water without needing to compensate neighboring landowners.
Those wide-open, star-filled night skies are exactly what industrial-scale facilities erase security lighting, exterior floodlights, and 24/7 operations mean a data center campus effectively never goes dark. A single large facility can throw a visible glow for miles, turning a horizon that used to hold nothing but stars into one with a permanent artificial haze.
Even without the noise or light, the visual character changes sunrise and sunset views that used to run clean and unbroken now compete with server buildings, transmission towers, and security fencing that can stretch a mile or more across what used to be open pasture or crop.
Put simply: everything that makes the case for rural Texas the silence, the dark sky, the unbroken horizon, the water under your own land is exactly what a hyperscale data center campus consumes or interrupts. That's the core of why the opposition you're seeing isn't really partisan; it's about whether rural life stays rural.
If these are so important, put them in the cities with vacant industrial parks. They can be revitalized. If they are so important to our national security, put them on our military bases.
President Trump, please quit taking our rural land and ranches. We need American beef and American food.
