Two Records, Ten Days Apart: What Armstrong County's Own Documents Say About the Data Center Near Claude, Texas

Here is the first record. On November 12, 2024 the Armstrong County Commissioners Court held a public hearing, created Armstrong County Reinvestment Zone 8, and approved a Phase 1 and a Phase 2 tax abatement agreement with GN DC1, LLC. On June 9, 2025 it amended the zone, adding 100 acres out of the northwest portion of Survey 318, Block B4, and rewriting the zone's stated purpose to cover "renewable and wind generated power generation and behind the meter uses for such power, to include data centers." On July 14, 2025 it approved first amendments to both agreements. On October 14, 2025 it approved and authorized execution of the amended, restated and consolidated agreement that the county now posts. The electronic contract record on the last page of that posted PDF gives a contract title of "Real Estate or Property Agreement (Armstrong County, Texas and Crusoe)" and a signature timestamp of November 4, 2025 at 12:11 a.m. UTC, from an email address at the crusoe.ai domain. The signature block on page 25 is dated November 3, 2025.

Here is the second record. On November 14, 2025, Google announced a $40 billion Texas data center investment naming Armstrong County and Haskell County. As the Texas Tribune reported it that day, the announcement covered one data center in Armstrong County and two in Haskell, with statewide workforce commitments and a solar and battery pairing described for one of the Haskell sites. No site specific investment figure, workforce figure or timeline for Armstrong County appeared in that coverage, and none appears on Google's own locations page, which lists Armstrong County alongside Haskell County, Pampa and Wilbarger County as in development with no accompanying detail. No developer or partner was named.

Nothing in either record refers to the other. Google's locations page does not name GN DC1, LLC or Crusoe. Crusoe's own website, which we checked, describes Texas campuses at Abilene and a joint venture at Childress and makes no mention of Goodnight, Armstrong County, or Claude. The county's agreements never mention Google. Trade press has used the name Goodnight Campus for the Armstrong County project; the county's own exhibit calls it Llano, and the federal permit file calls it Project Llano.

The agreement itself is worth reading on this point, because it is built for exactly this ambiguity. Section IX contemplates three ownership structures: GN DC1 building, owning and operating everything; GN DC1 and affiliates owning the buildings while "one or more third parties or Affiliates are lessees of the Building Improvements and equip, own and operate Data Center Equipment Improvements located within the Building Improvements"; or "any other structure that segregates the ownership and operation of the Building Improvements and/or the Data Center Improvements among multiple owners." The parties' stated intent is that the owner "shall have flexibility and a unilateral right to select and implement an ownership and operation structure of its choosing."

Assignment to an affiliate or to what the agreement calls an Other Owner, a defined term that includes a lessee, sublessee or tenant, requires only notice to the county, not consent. Assignment to anyone else requires the county's written consent, which "shall not be unreasonably withheld." Exhibit F is a blank Form of Synthetic Lease Assignment Agreement. In other words, the contract on file is drafted so that the operator on the county's tax records and the company whose servers run in the buildings need not be the same entity, and so that a change of that kind would reach the county as a notice rather than a hearing. That is a structural fact about the document, not an allegation about anyone's plans.

Reinvestment Zone 8 is large. The legal description attached to the November 12, 2024 resolution runs 45 tracts across Blocks 1, 4, B4, B6, C, E3, E4, W, Z-6, Z-7 and Z-8, and the acreages in it sum to 42,562.79 acres. The June 9, 2025 amendment adds 100 acres. That is about 42,663 acres, or 66.7 square miles. The Census Bureau's 2024 gazetteer puts Armstrong County's land area at 909.123 square miles, so the zone covers roughly 7.3 percent of the county. The city of Claude covers 1.716 square miles, so the zone is about 39 times the land area of the county seat.

The project site inside it is smaller and specific. Exhibit E, headed "Possible Site Plan," is a Kimley-Horn drawing titled Project Llano, Building 1 and 2, at 10001 Lima Road, Claude, TX 79019, showing a project site boundary across Section 284 at 652.83 acres and Section 283 at 384.77 acres, plus a 100 acre expanded utility easement. The two sections total 1,037.6 acres, about 1.62 square miles, which is roughly 94 percent of the land area of the city of Claude. The drawing's title block carries the consultant and contractor names Crusoe, AlfaTech, HKS, Rosendin, Brandt, Kimley-Horn and BW Design Group.

The commercial terms are these.

Set the investment figure against the county. The Armstrong County Appraisal District certified the county's 2025 taxable value for the general fund at $350,494,230. One phase at the anticipated $1,000,000,000 would be about 2.9 times that entire roll. Four phases would be about 11.4 times it. Against the 19 jobs a phase must produce, the anticipated capital works out to roughly $52.6 million per required job, and no job is counted until the third calendar year of that phase's ten year abatement. Four phases running would produce $5,441,500 a year in payments in lieu of taxes, and $13,603,750 over each phase's ten year term.

We ran both posted agreements through optical character recognition at 350 dots per inch, because every page is a scanned image with no text layer, and then searched them. Here is what is absent from both.

• Water. The word does not appear in either agreement except inside the force majeure list, as "high water washouts." There is no water supply commitment, no source, no volume, no cooling method, no reuse or replenishment obligation, no wastewater provision and no baseline testing requirement.
• Power. There is no megawatt or gigawatt figure anywhere in either document. The definitions describe power delivery systems, power generation equipment and standby generators as abatable improvements, and a Cooperation section states that the reinvestment zone "is in proximity to a major ERCOT point of interconnection," but the campus's own load is never stated.
• Air. No emissions term, no limit on generator hours, no restriction on running generators during grid peaks. Compare Barber County, Kansas, where the development agreement bars operating generators to reduce electrical usage during peak hours.
• Environmental monitoring. No baseline or periodic soil, water or wastewater testing, and no obligation to give the county any environmental results. The only representation is that the project will not be built without obtaining necessary permits.
• An estimate of future taxes. Armstrong County's own Guidelines and Criteria, adopted August 26, 2024, require that any tax abatement agreement include "an estimate of the amount of ad valorem property taxes to be paid to Armstrong County after expiration of the abatement agreement." The word estimate does not appear in either agreement. Section XIV resolves this: to the extent the agreement modifies any requirement in the Guidelines, "those Guidelines are deemed amended for purposes of this Agreement only," and the agreement controls.

The county's Guidelines are worth quoting on their own terms, because they set a standard the file does not then measure anything against. They state that it is "the express intent of the Armstrong County Commissioners Court to promote economic development, but not at the expense of the County's natural resources or services provided to the general public," and that "no application submitted under the following schedule deemed to have a substantially adverse effect on natural resources in the County or on County infrastructure (including roads and bridges) will be approved, unless the applicant can demonstrate just cause for such an exception." Among the criteria the court is directed to weigh are "any costs to be incurred by Armstrong County, if any, to provide facilities or services directly resulting from the new improvements," "the impact upon County infrastructure including roads, bridges and the use of County services," "the impact upon depletion of natural resources of the County," and "the potential impact upon neighboring landowners." No analysis of any of those four is posted with the agreements.

One further timing point, offered as a records observation and nothing more. Texas Tax Code Section 312.002 provides that abatement guidelines and criteria "are effective for two years from the date adopted," may be amended or repealed during that period only by a three fourths vote, and must be posted on the taxing unit's website. Armstrong County's posted Guidelines were adopted August 26, 2024 and say on their face that they "remain in force for two (2) years." As of September 3, 2026 the county's website posts no reauthorized or amended version. It also posts no 2026 commissioners court minutes at all, so whether the court has reauthorized them cannot be determined from the website either way.

The county file names a project. The federal file gives it coordinates. EPA's Enforcement and Compliance History Online returns 24 Clean Water Act permitted facilities in Armstrong County, FIPS 48011. Four of them are the story.

Every one of them is assigned to the same hydrologic unit, coded 111201030505 and named, in EPA's own watershed vocabulary, "Town of Claude-Mulberry Creek." The receiving water listed for Project Llano and West Llano is Mulberry Creek. Measured from the Census Bureau's coordinates for the city of Claude, the Project Llano permit point is about 6.9 miles away and the Goodnight Power Plant Project point about 6.7 miles. Two points are worth making carefully. A hydrologic unit is a surface drainage boundary, not a groundwater boundary, so shared watershed does not by itself say anything about wells. And a construction stormwater general permit is a routine authorization for disturbing land, not a finding about anything. What it does establish is that grading is authorized and under way at those coordinates, under those industrial classifications, through March 2028.

Now the drinking water. EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System lists exactly three public water systems in Armstrong County, and all three run on groundwater.

That is the entire public drinking water infrastructure of the county: one town system with 700 connections, one water supply corporation with 59, and a camp. There is no surface water supply and no regional pipeline.

Part of Armstrong County sits inside the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District, which covers all of Carson, Donley, Gray, Roberts and Wheeler counties and parts of Armstrong, Hutchinson and Potter. Inside the district, the rules adopted July 9, 2026 cap an operating permit's total annual production at "the total number of acres of land included in the application x 1 acre-foot per year for all aquifers combined," and the district's management standard, the 50/50 Standard, is meant to leave at least half the current volume of the Ogallala after 50 years. The district's 2024 to 2029 management plan reports modeled available groundwater for the Armstrong County portion of the district at 56,940 acre feet a year in 2020 for the Ogallala, declining to 27,137 by 2080, and 5,313 acre feet a year for the Dockum, rising to 8,914. Reported current use in the Armstrong County portion totals 6,268 acre feet a year: 5,458 irrigation, 546 livestock, 264 municipal, and zero for manufacturing, mining and steam electric power. For scale, 264 acre feet is about 86 million gallons a year, roughly what a single mid sized data center cooling tower can consume in a matter of months. We could not determine from the records we retrieved whether the Lima Road site falls inside or outside the district's Armstrong County boundary, and that single question changes whether a large new well there would need a district permit at all.

Because the number is unpublished, the useful exercise is a conversion rather than an estimate. Using the Energy Information Administration's Texas electricity profile for 2024, which reports 168,317 megawatts of net summer capacity and 566,502,688 megawatthours of net generation, and EIA's figure of 10,791 kilowatthours a year for the average U.S. residential utility customer, here is what various loads would mean. These are arithmetic conversions of hypothetical loads, not claims about this project.

One more figure for context, and it is the county's own framing. Armstrong County's abatement guidelines make a data center eligible for abatement only as a "behind the meter" use of renewable power generated or stored under the same guidelines, and the amended reinvestment zone resolution designates Zone 8 for "renewable and wind generated power generation and behind the meter uses for such power, to include data centers." All 531 megawatts of wind nameplate capacity currently operating or under construction in the county, running at a generous 40 percent capacity factor, would produce about 1.86 terawatthours a year. Our guide to who pays for data center power covers what happens when a load like this arrives on a grid, and how the cost lands on other customers.

Everything above is prospective. The roads are not. The Texas Department of Transportation publishes crashes and injuries by county, and commercial motor vehicle involved crashes by county, and the three most recent published years for Armstrong County read like this.

Total crashes rose 61 percent from 2024 to 2025. Truck involved crashes rose 78 percent. In the same 2025 tables, Texas as a whole recorded 538,860 crashes and 38,533 commercial vehicle involved crashes, a statewide share of 7.2 percent. Armstrong County's 2025 share was 45 percent. These are counts in a county of about 1,809 people, so year to year swings are expected and a single year is not a trend. The 2026 tables, which would cover the year residents describe as the difficult one, are not published and will not be until roughly June 2027.

The county's own posted documents show the road work that anticipated this. In May 2025 the Commissioners Court packet included two exhibits. One, dated April 14, 2025 and titled "Lima Rd & Hwy 207 Roadway Adjustments," lists Lima Road changes: "widen road to ~50 ft. (2 lanes each way, East & West) from Hwy to east termination point," pave it in asphalt, build to "TXDOT specs to accommodate all construction traffic, equipment deliveries, etc.," level it and add water swale drainage, and "create semi-truck turn-around on Lima Rd @ Hwy 207 near intersection to redirect traffic immediately back to Hwy 207." It lists three Highway 207 changes: a turn lane onto Lima Road, an acceleration lane for right turns from Lima Road onto the highway, and a transitioned corner "for semi-truck right turn onto Hwy." The second exhibit, a Kimley-Horn TxDOT access drawing dated April 30, 2025, shows a 700 foot left turn lane.

Set against that, the county's 2025 Annual Road Report, generated April 4, 2025 and posted with the April packet, runs ten pages listing every county road by precinct, including Lima Road in precincts 2, 3 and 4. It has columns for road condition ranked one to five, cause of degradation, culverts needing repair or replacement, bridges needing repair or replacement, control devices needing repair, new roads needed, average maintenance cost for the coming year, and extra cost of identified repairs. Every one of those cells is blank on every page.

What the county's own officials have said on the record. NewsChannel 10 in Amarillo has reported the consequences repeatedly, quoting named public officials, and their accounts are the clearest measure of what construction at this scale does to a county of about 1,800 people.

Armstrong County Sheriff Melissa Anderson told the station on August 13, 2026 that thousands of workers travel to and from the construction site Monday through Friday, with the heaviest traffic between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. and again between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. She said vehicle wrecks in the county had risen from about two to three a month to as many as two to three a day, most of them minor. She repeated the same figures to the station on August 21. That is the single most important number in this piece, and it comes from the county's chief law enforcement officer rather than from an estimate of ours.

It also explains a gap in the state data. The TxDOT county tables above end with 2025 and show 71 crashes for that year, roughly six a month. The sheriff is describing 2026, the first full year of heavy construction, and TxDOT will not publish the 2026 county table until about June 2027. Both accounts can be true, and the state record simply has not caught up.

The response is documented too. Sheriff Anderson said the data center signed a contract to fund an additional deputy for her department for two years, that a fifth deputy would be added in mid September, and that a sixth was under discussion in budget season. Her office asked for volunteers to help with school crossings. TxDOT public information officer Jason Britsch said the agency reduced speed limits on State Highway 207 and FM 1151, funded radar trailers, repainted striping, and worked with the developer to add a turn only lane at the construction entrance. Claude ISD Superintendent Brent Kirkland said a new school zone was established on FM 1151, with classes beginning August 20.

Emergency response is the strain that gets least attention. On August 28, 2026 the station reported that Armstrong County's three volunteer fire departments, in Washburn, Claude and Wayside, have 18 members between them and are recruiting. County Fire Chief Jerry Johnson said the county has seen an increase in population and construction, that the increase can lead to more accidents and other situations the county does not have the manpower to handle, and that the decline in volunteers has been under way for years. A county with 18 volunteer firefighters is absorbing thousands of daily commuters on two lane roads.

The economic side is also on the record. On June 10, 2026 the station reported that construction workers had filled local short term rentals outside Amarillo, pushing other visitors into hotels and lifting hotel and motel tax revenue by 16 percent that year, and that Amarillo National Bank expected data center construction across the Panhandle to continue for about two more years. Officials at the data center have told the county that construction could continue for up to two years.

Two things in the abatement bear directly on all of this, and both cut toward mitigation. Section XVII makes the owner responsible for repairing damage beyond ordinary wear and tear to county roads, culverts and bridges, for leaving them in equal or better condition after construction, and for the entire cost of any required upgrade, with the county responsible only for normal routine maintenance afterward. And the safety training section requires the owner to provide annual training for county emergency management, emergency medical, law enforcement, dispatch and volunteer fire personnel at its own cost, and to give responders a map of project locations at the start of construction so that "location information may be quickly and accurately conveyed."

The road clause carries an important condition. It "shall become void and shall have no further effect upon the execution of a separate Agreement for Road Use, Repair and Improvement by and between Owner and County relating to the Project." No such separate road use agreement is posted anywhere on the county's website. Whether one exists, and what it says, is the single most consequential open document for anyone living on a haul route. It is also, unlike most of what is missing here, a document a resident can simply ask the county for.

Armstrong County's Commissioners Court page is well organized. It has an accordion for each year back to 2021 and, inside each year, one for each month, and inside each month a list of the county's standard document set: agenda, activity building report, AgriLife reports, commissioners court minutes, county clerk report, district clerk report, elections administrator report, emergency manager report, justice of the peace report, JP OCA report, sheriff's report, tax assessor collector report and two treasurer reports. For 2023 and 2024 those headings carry files.

For 2025, January through July carry files. August, September, October, November and December of 2025 carry the same headings with no files beneath them. Every month of 2026, January through December, carries the same headings with no files beneath them. The county's public notices calendar for September 2026 is empty. The last commissioners court document posted to the county's website is from the July 2025 packet.

That is a description of a website, not an accusation. Texas law requires agendas to be posted and minutes to be kept regardless of what a county's website shows, and small county offices lose the person who does the uploading all the time. But the practical effect is real: the period in which this project moved from a pair of phase agreements to a consolidated eight phase abatement, in which construction began, in which crashes rose 61 percent and in which the county's abatement guidelines reached their two year expiry, is the period for which no agenda, no minute, no sheriff's report, no emergency manager report and no road report is on the county website. The county's tax abatement documents are still posted, and they are the reason this article could be written at all.

Eight records would answer nearly everything this page could not, and every one of them is obtainable from a county or state office by written request.

• The separate Agreement for Road Use, Repair and Improvement, if it has been executed, plus the pre-construction road inventory and any security posted with it.
• Commissioners court agendas and minutes from August 2025 forward, which would show every action taken on this project since the consolidated agreement.
• The monthly Sheriff's Reports and Emergency Manager Reports for 2026, which are where call volumes, wreck responses and mutual aid actually appear before TxDOT publishes anything.
• Exhibits B-1 through B-4, the survey depictions and legal descriptions of the Phase 1 through Phase 4 abatement areas, which the agreement requires the owner to deliver within one year of the effective date, so on or about November 2026.
• Any recorded assignment of either abatement in the Armstrong County real property records, and any Annual Compliance Certificate, the first of which is due March 31 following the first certificate. That is the document class most likely to name an Other Owner.
• The tax abatement application GN DC1, LLC filed, which the county's guidelines require to include a time schedule, estimated taxable values and financial information, and which Texas Tax Code Section 312.003 makes confidential only until the agreement is executed.
• Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District records: whether the site is inside the district, and any drilling or operating permit application tied to it.
• Any reauthorization of the county's abatement guidelines after August 26, 2026, and the TCEQ notices of intent behind construction stormwater permits TXR1598UW, TXR1568YF and TXR1529XT, which name the operator and the acreage disturbed.

The honest summary is that Armstrong County obtained real things in these contracts and left out real things. It obtained a 15 year building in place covenant with liquidated damages, full recapture rights, annual sworn compliance certification, inspection access, an indemnity, a local hiring and spending plan, annual safety training for its responders, and road repair obligations that run to the owner rather than the taxpayers. It did not obtain a water commitment, a power figure, a cooling method, an emissions term, an environmental testing requirement, a defensible noise standard, or the estimate of post abatement tax revenue its own guidelines call for. Both halves of that are true, and neither cancels the other.

If you live near this site, the useful work right now is documentary and cheap. Get a water test from a certified laboratory, dated before the buildings operate, covering at minimum nitrates, chloride, sulfate, total dissolved solids and bacteria, and keep the report. Pull your own well's state well report. Photograph and date your property, your wellhead, your fence lines and the road surface in front of your place. If sound becomes an issue, take readings at your property line with the date, time, weather and instrument recorded, because the 80 dBA term in the county's contract has no measurement method and someone will have to supply one. Our evidence guide explains what documentation actually gets used later, and our guide to fighting a proposed data center covers the leverage points that exist in a county with no zoning.

Nothing on this page describes harm that has been adjudicated, because nothing has been. No lawsuit has been filed over this project in anything we retrieved. In Texas, where counties generally lack zoning authority in unincorporated areas, neighbors of industrial facilities have gone straight to common law: the pending Granbury cases against a crypto mining operation were brought as private nuisance claims seeking an injunction, with negligence and property damage theories alongside. Those claims carry filing deadlines, commonly a statute of limitations of two to four years in Texas depending on the claim, and an attorney will confirm which applies to yours. Our Texas page covers the state's litigation record, and if a facility is already affecting your home, our free case review connects you with an independent attorney in our network who handles these matters in Texas, at no cost and with no obligation.