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.

Documents Compared

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.

Presented to the publicCloudBurst — Commissioners Court slideCounts only the air-cooled campus, residential, fire and cooling. No power-generation bar.

Rebuilt with power generationActual demand — FOIA disclosure addedAdds the 1,154,130,000 gal/yr power-generation bar reconstructed from the FOIA disclosure.

1.17 BGY

Total site demand

3.16 MGD

Daily peak (power gen)

3.75×

Power gen vs. all residential

132×

Power gen vs. the campus

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.

From the presentationCloudBurst — Closed-Loop Water Cooling System slideCommissioners Court presentation. Marked “Confidential – Draft.”

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.

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.

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:

1. Trade secret — §552.110(b)Argued the records reveal confidential development methodology, project timelines, design and engineering specifications, and CloudBurst's "competitive position."
2. 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.
3. Computer-network security — §552.139Argued the documents identify technical details and vulnerabilities of CloudBurst's network and information systems.
4. 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.

Source documents

Primary-source records are linked below. They open in a new tab.

Palomino Alpha Data Center

Overview

Palomino Alpha is a proposed 360 MW data-center campus on roughly 942 acres just south of the unincorporated community of Zorn, hugging State Highway 123 and wrapping around the LCRA Transmission Services "Zorn Site" substation — a power-readiness factor cited in the project's own description.

The Reinvestment Zone #1 assemblage spans 20 parcels. Four of them — 186.4 acres in the northeast corner — are held by members of the Kutscher family, including Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher.

The tax break

Watch — Commissioners Court meeting

2:40:49Palomino Alpha Tax Abatement agenda item begins

2:46:30Court reconvenes from Executive Session and approves the Tax Abatement Agreement

Important Note A copy of the Tax Abatement Agreement was not included with the Agenda for the December 17, 2024 Guadalupe County Commissioners Court meeting — meaning the public had no way to review the agreement before it was approved.

Dec. 17, 2024 Guadalupe County Commissioners Court agenda — no Tax Abatement Agreement document attached to the Palomino Alpha item.

The hearing where the Palomino Alpha Tax Abatement Agreement was discussed. Source: Guadalupe County — Granicus clip 994.

The original Tax Abatement Agreement between Guadalupe County and Palomino Alpha was signed on December 17, 2024. The First Amendment, also effective February 24, 2026, doesn’t change the financial terms — it extends the construction timeline: start by Dec 31, 2027 (was Dec 31, 2026); first phase complete by Dec 31, 2029 (was Dec 31, 2027); all phases complete by Dec 31, 2034 (was Dec 31, 2032). All other terms of the original abatement carry through.

Those underlying terms are the same architecture as the Cloudburst deal:

Share of county property taxes abated each year, per building (Original Agreement §IV.C). Each building runs its own 10-year clock from its certificate of occupancy.

In exchange, Palomino commits to a minimum investment of $400 million ($125 million per phase) and a minimum of 50 full-time-equivalent jobs across the entire campus by one year after all phases are completed (Original Agreement §V.C). The applicant's own narrative in Attachment 3 forecasts 75 jobs at full build-out with a total payroll of about $4.5 million — meaning the per-job public investment in this deal compares unfavorably to most economic-development benchmarks.

A question of disclosure

Even though Judge Kutscher’s family land was part of the project on the day the original Tax Abatement Agreement was approved, the public had no way of knowing — and the abstention was never explained on the record.

On the public record, the Kutscher family parcels (64243, 149858, 139579, 140259 — 186.39 acres adjacent to the LCRA “Zorn Site” substation) were inside Palomino Alpha Reinvestment Zone #1 from the day the Court designated it. They were inside the project on the day the Tax Abatement Agreement was signed. Judge Kyle Kutscher abstained from that vote. The minutes do not say why.

Three questions the record leaves open

1. Why were no documents made available to the public before the meeting?No copy of the proposed Tax Abatement Agreement was attached to the December 17, 2024 agenda. Members of the public showing up to comment had no way to learn, before the vote, where the project would sit, who was behind Palomino Alpha, how large it would be, or what the tax break was projected to be worth. How is a member of the public supposed to make an informed comment on terms they have not been allowed to see?
2. If this project was so good for the county, why no public discussion of why?The agenda item was followed by a closed-door Executive Session. The Court reconvened at 2:46:30 in the meeting recording and approved the agreement — with no substantive open-session discussion of how this deal would actually benefit Guadalupe County, what it would cost the County in foregone tax revenue, what it would mean for water, power or roads, or what was negotiated behind closed doors. A deal pitched as a generational economic win is normally explained in public, not voted on after a recess.
3. Why didn’t Judge Kutscher clearly state, on the record, that he was abstaining because his land and his family’s land were part of the project?An abstention with no stated reason appears in the minutes as a one-line non-vote. Stating the actual reason — direct land ownership inside the Reinvestment Zone — would have given the public the single most important piece of context for evaluating the deal they were watching being signed. The record does not show that explanation being given.

None of the above is an accusation. The Kutscher family’s ownership of parcels inside Palomino Alpha Reinvestment Zone #1 is documented in the Reinvestment Zone records linked below. The vote on December 17, 2024 is documented in the meeting recording linked above. What is not documented — on the public record — is an explanation, in open session, of any of it.

The development agreement — and what the amendment added

Guadalupe County and Palomino Alpha, LLC signed the original Development Agreement on April 15, 2025. The First Amendment — executed effective February 24, 2026 — does two substantive things:

1. Re-states the property as 940 acresThe recitals were updated to describe the assemblage as “an approximately 940-acre tract located on the west side of State Highway 123,” aligned with the Reinvestment Zone expansion order adopted the same day.
2. Adds Article III, Section 3.08 — Power Generation FacilitiesGrants Palomino the right (but not the obligation) to design, construct, install, operate, expand and replace on-site electric generation and related energy infrastructure on the Property, including: natural-gas-fired electric generation units, fuel supply lines and connections, electric substations, switchyards and transformers, battery and energy-storage systems, control buildings and cooling systems, and any utility extensions or easements needed to serve them. This brings Palomino into the same on-site-gas-plant posture Cloudburst already occupies.

Source documents

Primary-source records are linked below. They open in a new tab.