OpenAI's Stargate boosts Abilene tax base

A data center is usually an invisible thing — wires, concrete, cooling pipes, power contracts. But in Abilene, Texas, OpenAI’s Stargate campus is turning into a very visible local story. The reason is simple: this isn’t just a tech project anymore. It’s becoming a tax-base project, a water-use project, and a test case for how cities will bargain with the next wave of AI infrastructure. ### What is Abilene actually building? The Abilene site is the flagship campus for Stargate, OpenAI’s giant U.S. infrastructure push. OpenAI launched Stargate in January 2025 as a plan to invest up to $500 billion over four years in AI infrastructure, with Abilene as the first major site. (openai.com) ### How big is this one campus? Very big — even by hyperscale standards. Crusoe, one of the main builders behind the site, said the Abilene project is planned as an eight-building campus totaling 1.2 gigawatts. The first phase started in June 2024, the second phase started in March 2025, and the fully built campus is meant to support hundreds of thousands of GPUs. (crusoe.ai)-enter-joint-venture)) ### Why are people talking about taxes? Because once a project gets this large, the economic footprint stops being theoretical. Local leaders were already framing Stargate as a way to diversify Abilene’s commercial tax base back in the city’s 2025 “State of the City” messaging. More recently, OpenAI has been pushing the sharper claim that Star(crusoe.ai)he city and local media have been treating Stargate as a tax-base and economic-development story for more than a year — but the specific 37% and one-third figures seem to come from OpenAI’s own social post rather than a standalone public filing I could open directly. (ktxs.com) ### Why does the cooling system matter so much? Because West Texas is not a place where you can wave away water use. Crusoe says the Abilene campus uses closed-loop, non-evaporative liquid cooling. In plain English, that means the cooling water is recirculated instead of constantly boiled off through evaporative cooling towers. Crusoe says the facility does n(ktxs.com)o build and maintain. (crusoe.ai) ### Is it really low-water in practice? That’s the local selling point. During a September 2025 tour, Abilene Mayor Weldon Hurt said the campus would use roughly 10 million gallons a year, while Abilene as a city uses about 21 million to 24 million gallons a day. That doesn’t mean “no water” in an absolute sense, but it does mean the cooling design is being used to argue that this AI campus is not a classic water-hungry data center. (bigcountryhomepage.com) ### What about jobs and construction? The campus is also large enough to matter before it is fully finished. Crusoe said the construction site had about 3,000 people working daily and could approach 5,000 during the second phase. Local reporting later cited more than 7,000 construction workers on site at one point, plus a long-term vision of more than 1,700 on-site jobs and over $1 billion in direct and indirect economic benefit. (crusoe.ai) ### Why is this bigger than Abilene? Because Abilene is becoming the model pitch for AI buildouts: bring cheap power, promise water restraint, and show local tax upside. OpenAI and Oracle have already used the site as proof that Stargate can scale beyond one campus, with additional U.S. sites announced after Abilene came online. (crusoe.ai)Abilene is showing what the next fights over AI infrastructure will look like — not “should we build it,” but who gets the tax gains, how much water it really uses, and whether a city can live with the power demands. (crusoe.ai)