Texas Tech professor Kassandra McQuillen doubts a hyperscale data center will come to Lubbock, even as major projects elsewhere in West Texas give her students a close look at the industry’s opportunities and costs.
“I don’t think we’ll have a hyperscale data center in Lubbock,” McQuillen said Friday on The Wake Up Call with Benji Snead on 92.3 The Hub.
A hyperscale data center is a very large computing facility supporting services such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
McQuillen, an assistant professor of practice in energy commerce and business economics at Tech’s Rawls College of Business, pointed to water access and annexation as steps she believes a project would need to address. She offered that as her assessment of Lubbock’s prospects.
Her course examines the questions behind such developments: What infrastructure will they require, what benefits will remain after construction, and what does the host community want?
Taking the debate out of the classroom
McQuillen said about 36 students from agriculture, energy and other business programs are taking the class. On Wednesday, she took them by charter bus to the Panhandle to visit Fermi America’s Project Matador and the Crusoe campus under construction for Google in Armstrong County.
Students questioned developers about subjects they had studied in class, including power, water, taxes and economic development.
“I can’t tell you how proud I was of my kids and the questions they were asking these developers,” she said.
The course brings in speakers with different perspectives. McQuillen said guests have included Lubbock Mayor Mark McBrayer, rural county judges and an attorney who negotiates tax agreements. A neighboring landowner unhappy with a development was scheduled to speak next.
Instead of exams, students submit weekly reflections on current events and class discussions. McQuillen calls the assignment “Free Electron Friday,” giving students who prefer not to speak in class another way to explain their thinking.
What a small community wants
Conversations with Armstrong County Judge Adam Ensey challenged McQuillen’s assumptions about what a rural community should seek from a major development, she said.
Her account distinguished temporary construction jobs from permanent operating jobs and emphasized the pressures a large workforce can put on housing, roads and public services.
“And we all get so hyped up on it, we forget we need those people to make their own decisions.”
Kassandra McQuillen, Texas Tech professor
McQuillen praised the county’s approach to negotiating predictable payments and weighing the cost of future property-valuation disputes. In her view, those decisions reflected local priorities and the county’s ability to manage a project over time.
Crusoe said in a September announcement that construction on Google’s Armstrong County campus began in June 2025. The company says the campus will use closed-loop, non-evaporative liquid cooling designed to limit its water footprint primarily to domestic uses such as kitchens.
The power behind the computers
McQuillen said communities also need to consider the electricity generation supporting data centers, including the water required by the chosen generation and cooling systems.
She questioned whether the Panhandle has adequate water for Project Matador’s planned large nuclear reactors and warned about developers getting buildings ahead of available power.
“I’ve built this building and I’m gonna fill it with computers, and I don’t have electricity,” she said, describing the risk.
Fermi’s published cooling plan offers the company’s explanation of how it intends to address water constraints. It describes hybrid dry-wet cooling for the campus’s planned gas and nuclear generation, relying on air cooling during milder conditions and stored water during hotter periods. These are planned systems; their performance has not been independently established by this reporting.
ERCOT describes its wholesale market as “energy-only,” with generators paid for electricity delivered rather than simply for keeping generating capacity available. The interview’s reference to a “capacity market” does not match ERCOT’s description.
Lubbock Lights has also reported on local discussions of data-center safeguards, including limiting water commitments and addressing potential environmental impacts.
Learning to question a proposal
McQuillen identified potential careers in development and site operations, including maintaining cooling equipment and replacing computer hardware. But the course’s broader aim is to help students evaluate a proposal’s effects on a community.
For her, the field trip offered evidence that they were doing that.
“The questions some of these kids asked just showed me that that light bulb was on,” she said.
