Provident Data Center, Hillsboro, Texas

Provident Realty Advisors has just under 300 acres under contract in north Hillsboro, in Hill County, Texas, for a data center campus, and the project cannot go ahead unless the city approves a development agreement. The land, the site of the former city airport, belongs to the Hillsboro Economic Development Corporation, is already zoned heavy industrial and sits inside city limits. No megawatt figure, tenant or cost has been published.

Provident, a real estate firm, runs a data center platform, Provident Data Centers, with sites in eight states, including a 768-acre project in Dallas with PowerHouse. The development corporation extended Provident's pre-sale contract by four months to allow more due diligence before deciding whether to sell, with the contract running through November 2026 and closing about 45 days after the review period ends.

The city has proposed a municipal management district through the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, under which the project would pay extra property taxes to fund its own infrastructure. "They pay the tax payments inside that district for that infrastructure," City Manager Megan Henderson said. "It's over and above the taxes they pay to the city."

Residents turned out against it. A crowd packed Historic City Hall for a meeting with Henderson on April 28 that ran more than two hours, and many there opposed data centers. The city then proposed requiring data centers to obtain a specific use permit, which economic development director Jessica Trew said would make a development agreement mandatory. Without it, she said, a data center "could come into a heavy industrial zoned area without an agreement because they do not need a specific use permit."

Linda Pauley, founder of Save Hill County, argued that writing data centers into the code would "open the flood gates for a data center." On May 11, after more than two hours of public comment, the Planning and Zoning Commission tabled the change to keep working on it.

The county went further. On May 12, 2026, Hill County commissioners voted 3-2 for a one-year moratorium on new data centers in unincorporated areas, the first by a Texas county, with residents citing the Provident plan's noise, water and power use. "The data center folks have found a sweet spot in the state that has limited regulations, limited enforcement, limited code, and they're coming faster than we can keep up with," Commissioner Jim Holcomb said. County Judge Shane Brassell said at least eight data centers are in the works in the county. The county rescinded the moratorium a month later after a developer sued for $100 million.

Statewide, Governor Greg Abbott ordered on August 3, 2026 that new data center connections to the ERCOT power grid wait for a state audit, and in September told the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop issuing data center permits until the audit is done. In Hillsboro, the decisions rest with the City Council, which must approve any development agreement and the proposed zoning rules, and with the Economic Development Corporation, which decides whether to sell the land. The contract runs through November 2026.