Bastrop County seeks hearing on gas plant for Anthropic-linked data center
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
On Tuesday Oct 13, 2026 Bastrop County commissioners unanimously asked the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to hold a public meeting on the air permit for Pacifico Energy’s proposed 48-turbine, 710 MW gas plant in Cedar Creek.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 15 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra166 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5105 days after its cutoff
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None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 105 days before it.
Key facts
- Plant: 48 gas turbines, 710 MW generating capacity; Bastrop County’s 44,700+ homes need about 224 MW at peak (Austin American-Statesman)
- Campus: over $2.2B, at least two data-center buildings, on 2,800+ acres off Earl Callahan Road; developers say about 600 acres will be developed. Developer BlackChamber; ‘primary tenant is reportedly Anthropic’, according to public filings
- First building ‘Project Longhorn’: filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation in October, ~500,000 sq ft, ~$366M; construction to start late November 2026 and finish January 2028
- Water: the utility allows up to 6,900 gallons of potable water a day; the developers say they plan about 2,000 gallons a day
- Process: the developers dropped a tax-abatement request after months of public comment, which removed the requirement for a public hearing; the county’s resolution asks TCEQ to hold one anyway
What happened
After months of resident opposition in Cedar Creek, Bastrop County’s commissioners voted unanimously on Tuesday to ask the state environmental regulator for a formal public meeting on the gas plant’s air permit. The plant would power a large data-center campus near family neighbourhoods, farmland and a middle school. Anthropic has not publicly confirmed it is the tenant; the link comes from public filings as reported by the Statesman.
Why it matters
It is one of the first local fights over on-site gas generation tied by name to a frontier AI lab, as data-center opposition grows into a bipartisan political issue before the midterms.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 press
Press
Changes
- Filed (the article is dated Oct 14 and describes Tuesday’s vote)