Cloudburst Data Center
Overview
The Cloudburst campus straddles the Hays–Guadalupe county line at the southwest corner of Frances Harris Lane and Center Point Road. It is master-planned for up to 1.2 GW of AI/HPC capacity, paired with an on-site natural-gas power plant supplied through an Energy Transfer pipeline contract. Water service is sought from the Crystal Clear Special Utility District.
Across both counties the assemblage now totals roughly 829 acres over 22 parcels — 16 in Guadalupe County and 6 in Hays County. Guadalupe County commissioners approved a tiered tax-abatement and development agreement on a 3–2 vote in April 2026.
The water figure that wasn't presented
The first slide is the "Water Supply and Demand" presentation CloudBurst gave to the Guadalupe County Commissioners Court. The second is the same chart rebuilt with the power-generation water demand drawn from CloudBurst's own FOIA disclosure — about 3.16 million gallons a day, or roughly 1.15 billion gallons a year. The public slide leaves that bar off entirely.
Putting 1.2 gigawatts in context
A gigawatt is an abstraction until you set it next to the places people actually live. At full build-out the Cloudburst campus is designed to draw about 1,200 MW — the kind of load normally associated with a mid-sized city, concentrated on a single site at the Hays–Guadalupe county line.
What's in the cooling loop: 1.44 million gallons of propylene glycol
CloudBurst's buildings are air-cooled, but each is filled once with a closed-loop cooling solution — water mixed with up to 20% propylene glycol. Per CloudBurst's own slide, that is about 600,000 gallons per building, scaling to 7.2 million gallons of cooling solution across the full campus, of which up to 1.44 million gallons is propylene glycol.
Food-grade, yes — but the question is scale and water
Thompson is right on the chemistry: propylene glycol is widely used in food, cosmetics and medicines, has low oral toxicity, and is not classified as hazardous under OSHA's hazard-communication standard. The slide's safety claims are accurate for human handling and ingestion.
What that framing leaves out is what happens if 1.44 million gallons reaches water. Propylene glycol carries an extremely high biochemical oxygen demand: as microbes break it down, they strip dissolved oxygen out of the water. It is the same compound used in aircraft de-icing fluid, where regulators treat runoff as a serious water-quality problem — the EPA notes its oxygen-depletion potential can run many times that of raw sewage, and large releases can suffocate aquatic life. This campus sits very close to the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone.
The risk on land is different, but real. Propylene glycol is highly water-soluble and binds poorly to soil, so a large spill doesn’t stay put — it moves with rainfall, infiltrating downward and laterally. As it breaks down, microbes consume oxygen in the soil; concentrated in the root zone that oxygen starvation can stress or kill crops, pasture grass and the soil microbiology that productive farmland depends on. Under cold or wet conditions the breakdown slows and unbroken glycol can migrate to shallow groundwater — the same shallow water that local farms and ranches use for stock tanks, livestock troughs and household wells. Propylene glycol is biodegradable (half-life on the order of days in warm, aerobic soil), so the contamination wouldn’t be permanent. The damage in a spill scenario is acute and local: dead vegetation, depleted soil microbes, and the chance of glycol reaching nearby wells or creeks before it breaks down.
The tax break
On April 21, 2026, the Guadalupe County Commissioners Court approved a tax-abatement and development agreement with CloudBurst Texas, LLC on a 3–2 vote — reversing a 3–2 denial two months earlier. The agreement abates a share of the county property taxes on each data-center building for ten years.
Share of county property taxes abated each year, per building (Agreement §2.3). Each of the planned buildings runs its own 10-year clock from its completion date.
What the break is worth — calculated from the agreement's own figures. Exhibit pages 32–33 project the campus's taxable value: about $4.49 billion in real property plus depreciating personal property once all ten buildings are online. Applying the §2.3 abatement schedule to each building at Guadalupe County's current rate:
| Full county tax owed over the abatement terms (no break) | ~$171 M |
| Abated by this agreement (≈77%) | ~$131 M |
| County tax CloudBurst would still pay | ~$40 M |
In exchange, CloudBurst commits to a minimum investment of $500 million (at least $125 million per building) and to creating, on average, just 30 full-time jobs per building by the fifth year — with an average annual payroll of $3 million per building (§1.4, §3.1). Local hiring is “best efforts,” not required. The abatement covers county taxes only; school-district (Navarro ISD) taxes are not abated.
Two things worth underlining.
First, the Zorn campus is CloudBurst Data Centers' first project — the company has not previously developed and operated a data center.
Second, co-founder Cynthia Thompson told the Commissioners Court that the abatement was required to secure the company's investment-bank financing — that is, the public tax break was presented as a condition of the project's private funding.
The fight to keep it secret
The 135-page FOIA release on this page didn't come out voluntarily. After a concerned citizen filed a Public Information Act request with Crystal Clear SUD on September 4, 2025, CloudBurst's attorneys (Seyfarth Shaw, LLP) sent the Texas Attorney General a five-page letter on October 7, 2025 urging that the records be withheld — on four overlapping grounds:
- Trade secret — §552.110(b)Argued the records reveal confidential development methodology, project timelines, design and engineering specifications, and CloudBurst's "competitive position."
- Commercial / competitive harm — §552.110(a) and §552.104Argued release would cause "substantial competitive harm" and tip off "bidders and competitors" in an ongoing competitive situation.
- Computer-network security — §552.139Argued the documents identify technical details and vulnerabilities of CloudBurst's network and information systems.
- Homeland Security / critical infrastructure — §552.101 with Texas Gov't Code Ch. 418 (§§418.176–418.182)Argued the records, if released, could enable “an act of terrorism or hostile act by a foreign adversary of the United States” against CloudBurst as critical infrastructure.
- §552.104 doesn't apply to a private party — it protects governmental bodies, not contractors.
- The trade-secret claim failed for lack of "specific factual evidence."
- The competitive-harm claim failed — no substantial competitive harm demonstrated.
- The network-security claim failed — the records did not identify vulnerabilities of the District's systems.
- The Homeland Security claim failed because the District never made the required determination that the records identify technical vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure to terrorism or a foreign adversary.
Source documents
Primary-source records are linked below. They open in a new tab.
