Ten Straight Years of Tax Cuts
The county that pays for its schools and streets with data centers — and six towns closer to home using the same mechanism. In plain English, both columns.
Your city, county, and school district each charge a rate — a set number of cents for every $100 of property value. The combined value of everything taxable in town is the tax base. The rates, applied to the base, have to produce the budget. When a large new taxpayer joins the base, the same budget can be collected at a lower rate from everyone else. When the base does not grow, the rate stays where it is. Wichita Falls’s taxable base has grown little since 2000.
Loudoun County, Virginia is where a huge share of the world's internet physically lives. Here is their tax rate, from the county's own published rate table and budget documents:
The rate was cut in each of ten consecutive budget years. At the 2026 rate, the owner of a $100,000 home pays about $340 less per year than at the 2016 rate. Data centers paid about $894 million in county property taxes in 2025 and now account for 42 cents of every dollar of the county’s local tax funding — the county’s own data-center FAQ states both figures.
| Pryor, OK · 170 mi · Google | schools’ taxable property $80M → ~$1B; biggest bond ever, no rate hike · KWCH |
| Abilene · 120 mi · Stargate | school district refused a discount; its rate fell 99.2¢ → 95.8¢ · KTAB |
| Prince William, VA · Loudoun’s neighbor | raised the data-center tax specifically to cut the homeowners’ rate · county announcement |
| Temple · Meta | school district paid full freight: ~$50M over 15 years · KDH News |
| El Paso · Meta | even with a big discount, Meta becomes the city’s largest taxpayer · El Paso Matters |
| Cheyenne, WY · Microsoft | no incentives at all — #1 city taxpayer, expanded anyway · Microsoft |
| The Dalles, OR · Google | first deal paid ~$250K/yr; renegotiated to ~$13M/yr. First contracts matter. · CCC News |
Wichita Falls’s tax rates and bases are published in the city’s audited financial reports. Applying the arithmetic from the towns above — a campus built here, taxed on its full value, with officials lowering rates rather than raising budgets — gives the following for the median home:
For a $250,000 home, the same calculation gives roughly $823, $1,584, and $2,290 a year at the three buildout levels. These figures are projections, not commitments. They depend on four conditions: the state’s grid audit permitting the connection (expected around spring 2027); no tax abatement being granted (none appears on any public record today); the property being assessed near its construction cost; and officials choosing rate cuts over larger budgets (the county cut its rate in 2023). If any of the four does not happen, the savings are smaller, or zero. Each condition is a matter of public record, and this article will be updated as they resolve.
The multi-year projection: the city tax rate if the campus is built and rates are cut, and the rate if it is not built:
Not building is also an outcome with measurable effects. Some favor it: no construction boom and its housing pressure, no noise or water questions, no dependence on a single industry. Others carry costs: the projected savings above do not occur, and the city rate stays at 68.25¢. The state demographer’s forecast puts this region near 143,500 people by 2040; the city and county’s ~$103M in combined levies, spread across fewer residents, works out to about 4.4% more per person before inflation. Grid records show roughly 474 gigawatts of connection requests pending statewide for a limited number of viable sites, so a project declined here can be built elsewhere. Both paths are presented with the same numbers so either choice can be weighed on the record.
The most frequent concern raised in local discussion is water. The reference point is real: Google’s campus in The Dalles, Oregon reached about 29% of that city’s water use, because it cools by evaporating water. What Skybox has described for this site is a different technology — closed-loop, air-cooled: sealed pipes, filled once, topped off at about 2% a year, per the company.
The company’s description is a claim, not yet a permit condition. Three checks exist on the record: (1) the city’s DataNovaX permit already prohibits evaporative cooling, and the same condition can be written into any Skybox permit; (2) water use can be metered and published annually — The Dalles’s figure became public through a lawsuit; (3) the proposed Archer County site is a separate project with a different cooling design and its own water requirements. A related item to track: whether data-center demand appears in future filings for the proposed $550M Lake Ringgold reservoir, which the state’s review found was not needed.
Jobs are few relative to the investment: a billion dollars of data center supports roughly 30–100 permanent jobs; the fiscal effect is on the tax base, not employment. Electric bills are a second channel: around Washington, D.C., data-center growth coincided with household power bills rising about $21 a month; Texas’s SB6 requires large users to fund their own grid costs, with implementing rules due December 31. Construction arrives before any benefit: Abilene’s ~9,000 construction workers raised rents before tax effects reached residents. Projected revenue can fall short: Loudoun missed its projection by $60M in one year, and the Abilene operator’s tenant is contesting its appraisal in court. None of it exists here yet: Skybox has bought land, the state has paused large grid connections pending an audit, and the first answers are expected around spring 2027.
The fair challenge to everything above: electric bills in data-center country went up. Run the two columns honestly. The costs: around Washington, D.C., Pepco residential bills rose about $21 a month in 2025, roughly half of it from capacity-market prices; the grid’s independent monitor attributes 63% of that price spike — $9.3 billion — to data centers. In Virginia, regulators approved increases of $11.24/month in 2026 and $2.36 more in 2027, plus a fuel surcharge of roughly $8/month. Call it $230–$260 a year per household by 2027 — real money, and a meaningful share of it traceable to data-center demand (not all: inflation, grid upgrades, and fuel are in there too).
The savings: the rate gap between Loudoun’s 2016 and 2026 rates is worth about $340 a year per $100,000 of home value. On a typical Loudoun home (~$713,000, Census 2019–23), that is roughly $2,400 a year. Even charging every dollar of the power increase against the tax cut, the Loudoun homeowner comes out well ahead.
A set of figures about Abilene is circulating in local discussion — a large jump in taxable value, a small permanent revenue number, and rising water and electric rates. They deserve the same treatment as every other number on this page: run each one to its source.
“Taxable value up 36%, about $2 billion of it data centers.” Close. The city’s FY 2027 budget shows taxable value up about 26%, more than $2 billion, over $1 billion of it from data-center construction; sales-tax receipts ran 34% above the prior year through May, which may be where a 36% figure comes from.
“The city expects only a few million a year in permanent revenue.” Also close — the city projects roughly $90 million over 20 years, about $4–4.5 million a year — and it is the most important number in the set, because of why it is small: Abilene granted an 85% tax abatement. A campus taxed on 15% of its value produces roughly one-seventh of what full freight would. That arithmetic is not an argument against data centers; it is an argument against abatements — the argument this article already makes. The no-abatement cases read differently: Cheyenne’s campus pays full freight and is the city’s #1 taxpayer; Abilene’s own school district, which refused the discount, cut its rate as the value landed.
“Water rates up 16%.” Abilene’s council did approve five years of annual water and sewer increases — about $25 a month by 2027. The city’s stated drivers are aging infrastructure and population growth, not data-center draw; the Stargate campus cools closed-loop. Growth pressure from a construction boom is real and belongs partly in the data-center column — which is why the cost column above counts Abilene’s rent spike against the project.
“Electricity up 39%.” Texas residential rates have risen about 40% since 2020, from roughly 11.5¢ to 16.1¢ per kWh — statewide, with most of the climb predating the Abilene campus (online September 2025). Drivers include fuel costs, grid buildout, and demand growth of which data centers are a growing part. The forward-looking share is the real issue, and it is the reason SB6’s large-load rules — making 75 MW-plus users fund their own grid costs — are one of the four conditions this article tracks.
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Loudoun rates: official rate table (loudoun.gov) · shares: county data-center FAQ. "$5,800": NVTC/Mangum Economics 2026 — industry-funded, labeled. Pryor: KWCH · The Frontier (state reimbursement fine print). Abilene: KTAB · KUT. Prince William: FY2027 adoption (pwcva.gov). Temple: KDH News. El Paso: El Paso Matters. Cheyenne: Microsoft, Apr 2026. The Dalles: tax agreements · water-records lawsuit. Power prices: Monitoring Analytics (PJM) · E&E News · Virginia SCC approval. SB6: PUC rulemaking, due Dec 31, 2026.