If you drive northwest out of Dallas, past the exurbs and the endless billboards for Buc-ee’s and roadside barbecue, you eventually hit a very different Texas. Out here, near the Oklahoma border, the land flattens, the sky gets bigger, and Wilbarger County—home to just over twelve thousand people—goes about its business at a small-town pace that hasn’t always benefited from the digital boom remaking the rest of the state. That is about to change in a very big way.

Google has picked Wilbarger County, near the city of Vernon, as the site of its latest data center campus, a new North Texas hub designed to feed the company’s insatiable demand for computing power as AI becomes the backbone of its products. On paper, it sounds like yet another hyperscale facility in yet another quiet county. In reality, it’s a test bed for two things Silicon Valley keeps talking about but rarely delivers at this scale: building AI infrastructure without crushing the power grid, and doing it while barely touching local water supplies.

For a place that has spent decades grappling with population decline, modest incomes and the long shadow of a shrinking agricultural base, this is the kind of announcement that can redefine a local story. Wilbarger County’s population has been drifting downward since the mid‑20th century, with roughly 12,500 residents today, a median household income around the low‑$50,000s and a poverty rate close to one in five. Major corporate investments don’t exactly roll through here every quarter. So when the county judge calls it a “major opportunity for our community to participate in the expanding global digital economy,” that isn’t boilerplate—it’s almost a mission statement.

At the most basic level, this is Google doing what every big tech firm is doing right now: racing to build out compute for AI. Every new AI model, every smarter search result, every “help me write this” button in Workspace sits on top of racks of servers that have to live somewhere. Google already has data centers in Midlothian and Red Oak near Dallas, plus new sites under construction in Armstrong and Haskell counties, and has committed a massive $40 billion investment in Texas through 2027 for cloud and AI infrastructure. Wilbarger County is the latest puzzle piece in that build‑out, and one that carries some symbolism: AI infrastructure is no longer just a big-city suburb story—it’s moving into historically rural counties.

But this site is being framed as more than just another concrete‑and‑steel box full of servers. Google is pairing the Wilbarger campus with new clean power projects developed by AES, one of its longstanding energy partners, in what both companies are calling a “power first” approach. Rather than plug a huge new load straight into an already stressed Texas grid and sort out the consequences later, the idea here is to stand up new generation capacity alongside the data center itself. Think of it as building the power plant and the data center as a single campus, tuned to each other from day one.

AES has secured land and interconnection agreements, and it will own and operate the co‑located generation assets under 20‑year power purchase agreements with Google, while also handling retail supply, cost optimization and long‑term energy management for the site. For Google, that means predictable, contracted power for decades. For AES, it is exactly the kind of long‑duration, AI‑driven load that utilities and power developers have been chasing as data centers emerge as one of the fastest‑growing sources of electricity demand in the U.S.

This “power first” language is not marketing fluff; it’s a subtle acknowledgment of the political and technical tension around AI and the grid. Texas has already seen debates over crypto mines and data centers sucking up cheap power, leaving everyone else exposed when the grid gets tight. Google is trying to position itself differently—saying that each new campus brings its own net‑new generation to the table, and that its 7,800 megawatts of contracted energy in Texas are meant to make the grid more resilient, not more fragile. Whether regulators and residents agree will depend on how these projects actually perform when demand spikes in August, not just on the promises made in February.

There’s also the cost‑of‑living angle. Google is tying this project to a broader push on energy affordability, including a $30 million Energy Impact Fund it announced for Texas to support things like home and school weatherization, efficiency upgrades and workforce programs over the next few years. Those are relatively small sums in the context of a trillion‑dollar company, but in a county where median household income floats just above fifty thousand dollars and where public institutions often run on tight budgets, a well‑designed local grant can be the difference between “nice idea” and “we actually did the retrofit.” The question, as always, is how much of that money and attention finds its way to places like Wilbarger versus getting concentrated in bigger metros.

On the waterfront, Google is trying something that will likely become the new default in dry or water‑stressed regions: an air‑cooled data center that effectively eliminates operational water use for cooling. Traditional data centers often rely on evaporative cooling systems that can consume large amounts of water, a feature that has become a flashpoint in communities where aquifers are under pressure. Here, Google says water use will be limited to “critical campus operations” such as kitchens, and that it aims to replenish more water than it consumes, working with Texas‑based organizations like Texan by Nature and Texas Water Trade to support local watershed projects across the state.

That “water positive” language has been part of Google’s corporate sustainability narrative for a while, but in a county whose economy has been tied to agriculture and where climate volatility is increasingly visible, the politics of water are very concrete. If the company can prove that its AI build‑out doesn’t come at the cost of local wells and rivers, it makes it easier to replicate this model in other rural regions that are understandably wary of becoming someone else’s industrial cooling system.

Economically, Wilbarger County is in the category of small Texas counties that have seen their fortunes wax and wane with agriculture, oil, and broader population shifts. Its population has shrunk from historical peaks, and while per‑capita income has improved over time, it still trails state and national averages, with poverty close to 19%. That backdrop is why local leaders have spent “the last couple of years” courting and negotiating this project, trying to make sure the upside doesn’t just fly over on fiber and high‑voltage cables. Data center projects typically bring a construction boom, followed by a smaller but stable set of permanent jobs in operations, maintenance and security, plus the induced jobs that arrive with new businesses and contractors.

The company hasn’t published public job figures for Wilbarger the way it sometimes does in other states, but past Google data center builds in comparable communities have translated into hundreds of construction roles during the build phase and dozens to a few hundred long‑term positions on site, plus local vendor work. For a county with only a few thousand jobs total, that’s a noticeable jolt. The additional twist here is workforce development: Google has been talking more broadly about training electricians, technicians and other skilled workers who can support data center infrastructure over the long haul, and Texas is already a focal point of that narrative. If those programs land in Vernon’s schools, colleges and trade pipelines, this doesn’t just become a project you can see from the highway—it becomes a career path kids can actually plan for.

For Texas as a whole, the Wilbarger announcement slots neatly into a bigger story: the state has become Google’s single largest destination for planned U.S. investment, with that $40 billion commitment covering multiple new data center campuses and expansions. The Lone Star State offers relatively cheap land, a business‑friendly regulatory climate, a huge and growing customer base, and—crucially—an energy system that, for all its challenges, is still adding generation and transmission at a pace many other states can’t match. When Google executives talk about Texas being “at the center of the world’s AI leadership,” they’re not just flattering local officials; they’re telegraphing where they think the next wave of AI infrastructure will be physically anchored.

There’s an interesting political dimension to this, too. Rural counties have sometimes felt left out of the “tech boom,” even as the state touts headlines about innovation and AI. By dropping a flagship AI‑driven data center in a place like Wilbarger, Google is effectively saying: this revolution is not just for Austin and Dallas. Of course, that framing only holds if residents see tangible benefits—jobs, tax revenue, infrastructure improvements—and not just higher land prices or more trucks on the road.

For AES, meanwhile, Wilbarger is an important signal to investors and regulators that the company can move quickly and profitably to serve hyperscale AI demand with long‑term, co‑located clean power deals. Utilities and developers all over the U.S. are chasing similar partnerships, and a 20‑year PPA anchored to a marquee customer like Google is as close to a golden ticket as this industry gets. It sends a message to other AI players: if you want to grow fast and keep regulators off your back, you come to the table with a plan that adds generation, not just demand.

For people in Wilbarger County, though, the story is going to be far more local and grounded. It will be about whether this project stabilizes the tax base enough to keep schools funded, whether it supports upgrades to roads and basic services, whether the construction jobs go to local workers or get filled from outside, and whether small businesses in Vernon see new customers or simply watch a fenced‑off campus rise on the horizon. It will also be about whether Google and AES stick around once the ribbon‑cutting photos are done—showing up at town meetings, supporting local initiatives and not disappearing into the cloud, figuratively or literally.

What is clear is that Wilbarger County is stepping into the AI era in a way that most places of its size have not. A decade from now, residents may look back and say this was the moment the county truly plugged into the global digital economy—not as passive users of other people’s platforms, but as hosts of the physical infrastructure that makes those platforms possible. In a state that prides itself on powering the country, there’s something fitting about a small North Texas county becoming a quiet but critical node in the world’s AI grid.