The massive data center threatens to overload the grid, but OpenAI's future relies on securing as much electricity as possible. What does that mean for local residents—and the planet?
About 40 miles north of Dallas you'll find Denton, a small city that's home to two universities, a bustling farmer's market, and soon a massive, electricity-sucking data center for OpenAI.
The site is projected to double the city's electricity needs by 2030 and consume a whopping 390 megawatts of power, which is significantly larger than a typical data center, Bloomberg reports.
Denton's nearly 160,000 residents, including 55,000 college students, could be competing for power supply once the data center is up and running. It could also raise their electricity bills if demand outpaces supply, which is happening in 13 Northeastern states.
Local officials are scrambling to prepare for the increased load by constructing new grid infrastructure. The data center will require round-the-clock, unrelenting power consumption to keep ChatGPT available, along with OpenAI's developer API. The company needs as much electricity as it can get; it had to limit the release of two big features in early 2025 because it underestimated the required computing power.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is focused on growing the company's data center capacity. He helped put together President Trump's Stargate project, a $500 billion investment in AI data centers. The first Stargate-funded site is also located in Texas, used by Oracle. It's even larger than OpenAI's Denton site at 1.2 gigawatts—enough to conservatively support the load of 750,000 homes, according to R&D World.
Core Scientific technically owns the Denton site, not OpenAI. Core Scientific is a bitcoin mining company recently pivoted to renting out its data centers for AI companies, according to The Motley Fool. It's being acquired by another AI datacenter company, CoreWeave, in a $9 billion sale announced last week, CNBC reports. That makes CoreWeave the official future owner of the Denton site.
These kinds of data center projects are cropping up across Texas at a fast pace, threatening to strain the already-fragile grid. (The state made headlines in the winter of 2021, when record-low temperatures left millions without power.) Data centers also require an enormous amount of water for cooling, and the state is running out of water, The Texas Tribune reports.
"The region is forecasting unprecedented [grid] load growth that is primarily driven by...new data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) services," says the Texas Reliability Entity, an organization that assesses power reliability, in a June report. "The sheer amount of new demand represents a significant challenge that will require a comprehensive and proactive response to ensure electricity continues reliably flowing to Texans."
The health impact of living near giant data centers also remains unknown. In another Texas town, residents suffered a string of odd symptoms after a bitcoin mine began operating nearby, Andrew Chow of Time Magazine reports.
