Sometimes I just want to get on my hobbyhorse, which for about a year now has been the middle ages but surely will soon be something else. (Please hyperfixation gods, make it financial literacy.) Anyway, I meandered around the nation (online) in search of another opportunity to play another round of America Does Medieval. It took me a while for fortune to reward me but it finally did in the long-running McMansion Hell of Denton County, Texas.

2007 McMansions are pretty rare and it’s even rarer for them to have the original interiors. This one, clocking in at 5 beds, 6 baths, and almost 7200 square feet will set you back a reasonable $2.3 million. We complain a lot about the hegemony of gray these days, but this is hindsight bias. Longtime readers will recall that the color beige walked so gray could run, and this house is emblematic of that fact.

It’s…uncommon to see ordinary contractors try their hands at gothic arches and for all intents and purposes, I think this one did a pretty good job rendering the ineffable in common drywall. Credit where credit is due. Unfortunately the Catholic in me can’t help but feel that this is the house equivalent of those ultra trad converts on Reddit who have Templar avatars and spend their days complaining about Vatican II.

Sometimes I still get the ever-dwindling pleasure of seeing the type of room that has never before existed in human history and definitely won’t ever exist again. Certain material conditions (oil, lots of it, a media ecosystem in which historical literacy is set primarily by cartoons, adjustable rate mortgages) brought this space into the world in a way that cannot be recreated organically. Let us marvel.

Christ might need to be invoked should I choose to make a sweet potato casserole.

You can tell that ornament is fabricated because they made precisely TWO of them that are IDENTICAL. You could have fooled us into thinking a craftsman did this by hand from local Texas marble (or whatever), but alas greed got in the way of guile.

As someone who writes fiction on the weekends, I often feel the acute pain of having an imagination greater than my talent and an artistic vision detached from being able to effectively execute it. In this respect, this room speaks to me.

RIP Trump btw. Don’t know if y'all saw the news yet.

I know a lot about medieval bathing for completely normal reasons (writing fiction, winning online arguments, stoned youtube binges)

I feel like most of my forms of social adaptation as a person on the spectrum comprise of sneaking in my holy autistic interest du jour into conversations as subtly as I can manage. I’m doing it right now.

Okay, so, there were no rear exterior photos of this house because, having used every square inch of lot, the whole thing is smashed up against a fence and there is simply no way of getting that desired perspective without trespassing and that’s a mortal risk in the state of Texas. So I’ll leave you with this final room, the completely medieval in-home theater.

That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for next month, where we will be going down a cult compound rabbit hole in the Great Plains.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

The Stranger's Morning News Roundup by Hannah Murphy Winter

Good Morning! We’ve got a mild one today: highs in the low 50s, no rain. The sky’s bright, even if it’s gray. If you’ve been complaining about the Big Dark, today’s the day to walk that extra couple blocks to the next bus stop or keep your coat on and drink your coffee outside.

But in the meantime, let’s do the news.

Trump Surprises No One: Four New York Times reporters sat down with Trump for a two-hour interview, and the paper has been talking about it nonstop for four days now. (Did you know the transcript is 23,000 words? We do, for some reason.) The interview was, as usual, unsettling for readers who are typically grounded in even the loosest understanding of facts. Trump said that the Civil Rights Act was “reverse discrimination,” claimed that his administration “didn’t even know about all the oil” in Venezuela, said he captured Maduro because too many Venezuelans were coming into the US, and that he doesn’t need international law to govern his decisions because he had his “morality” and “that’s very good.” Oh, and he said that it was very “psychologically” important for him to own Greenland.

Crush ICE: Thousands of people hit the streets across the country this weekend to protest ICE and memorialize the people that have been killed by the agency since Trump started his anti-immigration campaign. In Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson spoke to the crowd gathered at Cal Anderson Park. “I grieve with the people who have lost their lives this week in Minneapolis, the people who were snatched away from their lives in Seattle,” she said. “And all of those in our history, who have been subject to violence and oppression from a government that should belong to them, too. So today we grieve, and we mourn, and we organize.”

Meanwhile, in Portland: Luis David Nino-Moncada, the man who Border Patrol Agents shot in the arm while in his on Thursday, was arrested and booked by the feds yesterday. Court records don’t show his charges, but they claim they’re investigating an assault, so it appears that they might be setting up another “self-defense” claim for the officer who shot him. Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras, the passenger in the car, was shot in the chest and is still in the hospital. 

ICYMI: On Friday, Rep. Emily Randall co-sponsored articles of impeachment against DHS head Kristi Noem. “Kristi Noem’s lawless agents are out of control,” Rep. Randall wrote. “We cannot have rogue government agencies killing its own people in our communities.” The Hill reported that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that he hasn't ruled out impeaching Noem—if Democrats win the House in the 2026 midterms, as if protecting citizens is a treat we only get if we do what he wants.

Case in Point: A Guatemalan family in South Seattle “self-deported” last week, and a reporter for KUOW followed them throughout the process. Diland, the family’s 10-year-old boy, had never been on a plane before, and sobbed through his time at the airport. “Thanks for being my best friend,” he wrote in a letter to his classmates, “and I will never forget that time that you gave me snacks.” His mom, who left Guatemala in 2021 after getting robbed and physically threatened, cut off her immigration ankle monitor with scissors she borrowed from a desk agent. It took ICE 12 hours to get her travel papers, and now she and her two kids have to start over. “She's gonna need to get set up with a job, long-term housing, children need to get enrolled in school,” said Raiden Kallberg, with the advocacy group that helped the family plan the trip and get a motel room in Guatemala City. “There's not, like, people waiting for her there necessarily in Guatemala.”

Trump Still Fighting the Fed: On Sunday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the DOJ served the central bank with a subpoena, and threatened a criminal indictment. Theoretically, this is about the fact that the Fed remodeled their offices, covering them in white marble. But it’s actually about the fact that Trump doesn’t like that the Fed is an independent entity that doesn’t do what he says.

The Golden Globes Still Happen in an Autocracy: And they were weird. The award show was the weekend after the United States invaded Venezuela and an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Good in her car, but speakers “kept it festive.” Producers booted “Best Score” from the broadcast to make space for the new podcast category which, inevitably, rewarded a celebrity showing up in a studio with their friends (Amy Poehler’s Good Hang), and gave journalism (NPR’s Up First) a shrug. The audience seem to be the only people in the country who haven’t watched Heated Rivalry. And announcers spent a weird amount of time talking about Polymarket betting on the award categories.

Plus, whatever this was:

 

Leonardo DiCaprio during the commercial break at the Golden Globes

 

#GoldenGlobes2026 #LeonardoDiCaprio

[image or embed]

— Every Film Now (@everyfilmnow.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 11:57 PM

 

Oh, and the Winners! One Battle After Another and Adolescence swept the show. The Pitt and The Studio both took home fresh, shiny Globes. And for some reason, they gave Ricky Gervais the award for stand-up comedy? You can see the full list here.

Nurses on Strike: Almost 15,000 nurses went on strike today in New York City. Let this be a warning to Seattle Children’s Hospital, whose nurses already approved a strike if execs refuse to come to the table with a real offer. Don’t fuck with nurses.

White Out: Two skiers died in an avalanche this weekend in the Cascades. Four skiers had snowmobiled about 10 miles out into the backcountry at Longs Pass, just south of the Enchantments. Two were fully buried by the avalanche and killed, while the other two survived and were rescued. It’s the first deadly avalanche of the year.

Let the Race Begin: Seattle Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa announced in The Stranger this morning that she’s throwing her hat in the ring for Girmay Zahilay’s old seat on King County Council. She’s running against State Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, who announced in December. Hasegawa is ambitious and really pissed off about ICE. “I want to see King County arrest, prosecute, and convict Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who should be equally as afraid that when they break the law that somebody is going to come knocking at their door,” she told The Stranger’s Nathalie Graham. 

WTF: Six puppies survived a suspected fentanyl overdose in Gold Bar on Saturday when firefighters gave them CPR and administered Narcan. The pups are now at an emergency clinic and looking for their forever homes. The lesson: Narcan works on puppies, and not everyone is allowed to have a dog.

Buckle Up: Seattle has some fun new traffic for you. This weekend marked the start of two years of lane closures on the Ship Canal Bridge. The 65-year-old bridge needs a lot of love, so we’ll be playing this game for most of 2026 and 2027. “I think if you are leaving your house and going somewhere, you are probably going to be affected by Revive I-5,” said Tara Peters, communications director for Commute Seattle. She is urging businesses to let employees arrive before 7 a.m. or after 10 a.m., and to provide carpool parking, secure bike storage, and transit fare cards. If you aren’t already a light rail/bus rider, now seems like a great time to start. 

A Song for Your Monday: If you’re not already listening to Cate Le Bon, now’s the time to start. This Welsh alien queen is coming to Seattle at the end of the month—first at KEXP and then at the Neptune—promoting her new album. Here’s one of my favorites from it. It sounds like it could be a B Side from Ziggy Stardust.

In 2021, crypto was all about hype. Enthusiasts swore the “killer app” was just around the corner — the thing that would finally reveal blockchains’ vast potential to the normies who still couldn’t see the vision. It was suddenly everywhere: Fortune 500s pushed NFT drops and on-chain metaverse wearables; celebrities flaunted Bored Apes as status symbols; crypto firms plastered their names on sports arenas and ran supermodel-fronted ad campaigns. Zero-interest-rate-fueled venture capitalists flung cash at any pitch deck that featured buzzwords like “democratization” and “trustlessness”. Early adopters expected a windfall when the crowds of latecomers poured in, and so they manically tried and tirelessly promoted each new app. “WAGMI” — we’re all gonna make it — was the chorus, as “communities” sprung up around tokens and apps and assured one another that everyone was going to wind up rich.

2022 was the collapse. Prices slid, and businesses built on the premise that “number go up, forever” went with them. The Terra algorithmic stablecoin lost its peg in May, entering a death spiral that vaporized $40 billion. In June, the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital blew up, exposing the fragile web of high-risk lending endemic to the industry. As margin calls mounted and lenders demanded repayment, we saw bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy. The forced unwinds dragged prices even lower; bitcoin fell more than 60%. The year culminated in the dramatic implosion of FTX, and by Christmas, its CEO and former industry darling Sam Bankman-Fried had been arrested and extradited to the United States to face criminal charges.

2023 was the cleanup. Crypto winter dragged on as prices stagnated, users drifted away, and venture capital redirected its firehose to shiny new AI projects. After years of treating the sector as a fringe curiosity that might just go away on its own, regulators began enforcing long-standing financial regulations and pursuing the rampant fraud. I spent the year buried in court documents as I tracked dozens of bankruptcy cases, regulatory enforcement actions, and criminal prosecutions. Outside the die-hards, most people tuned out, believing crypto to be well and truly dead. But within the industry, the previous year’s destruction was reframed as a necessary cleansing that would strip away the froth and fraud to expose the potential they swore was still only moments away from being realized.

2024 was a year of grievance. Despite the last year’s obituaries, crypto lived on, nursing a grudge and building a political machine. When adoption stalled, executives insisted the problem wasn’t the tech or business models, but “regulation by enforcement”, “debanking”, and a “war on crypto”. The industry threw itself into politics, establishing super PACs with nine-figure war chests, hiring armies of lobbyists, and dispatching executives to Washington to warn that innovation was being strangled and the US could be ceding a technological revolution. Political candidates were assured an unusually engaged bloc of “crypto voters” and a flood of money — so long as they signed on to the industry’s deregulatory wishlist. By summer, crypto had emerged as a topic on the presidential campaign trail. Donald Trump took the stage at the annual Bitcoin Conference and promised to make the US the “crypto capital of the world”. Kamala Harris added an eleventh-hour cursory nod to crypto in her platform documents, suggesting the pressure had reached her, too. And crypto’s aggrieved posture aligned with a broader tech executive class that had begun to cast itself as under siege — whether from antitrust scrutiny, AI safety discussions, content moderation demands, labor organizing, or “wokeness”. Tech leaders increasingly positioned themselves as a nationalist vanguard essential to American supremacy, framing their rightward turn as merely pragmatic. But they were borrowing from authoritarian playbooks: democratic constraints strangled innovation, and regulation posed existential threats to America’s manifest destiny of technological dominance.

2025 was the year of technoligarchy. The tech industry’s political investments paid off spectacularly as Trump returned to the White House with a Republican trifecta. Some technology executives secured Cabinet and other advisory roles, and far more were regularly invited to policy- and lawmaking conversations to write their own rules with little concern beyond expanding their power and profit. The installation of tech oligarchs into positions of political power was part of a broader dismantling of institutional checks — enabled by a Supreme Court that granted the presidency sweeping immunity and a Congress that declined to exercise its oversight powers — in a year that also saw mass immigration raids, military deployments to US cities, and extrajudicial killings of supposed drug traffickers in the Caribbean.

Unelected billionaire Elon Musk was given broad authority through DOGE,^a gleefully slashing critical government funding while positioning his own companies to reap billions in federal contracts and favorable regulatory treatment.¹² Tech VC David Sacks was installed as the AI and Crypto Czar, rolling back regulatory frameworks that had begun to constrain industries where he retains financial interests.³ He negotiated controversial AI chips and weapons deals, appearing to grant favorable treatment to the UAE and Saudi Arabia in exchange for lucrative crypto partnerships with Trump’s companies [I93, I97]. Second in command at the DOJ is Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer to Trump who holds significant personal crypto investments.⁴ Nearly immediately upon appointment, he dismantled the agency’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and directed the Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to “cease cryptocurrency enforcement” [I81]. Industry cheerleaders were installed to lead the SEC, CFTC, and other regulators, and more cautious commissioners were pushed out without replacement.^b

And the Trump family themselves modeled this new era of shameless profiteering, building a sprawling cryptocurrency empire spanning memecoins, NFTs, a defi platform, and stablecoins while systematically dismantling the regulations that might constrain it — all while scoffing at the legislators who occasionally raised weak objections to such brazen self-dealing from the office of the presidency. Trump also issued sweeping pardons to industry figures including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, BitMEX executives, and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, telegraphing that consequences for crypto crime were a thing of the past.

Technoligarchy unchecked

If there was any doubt that Trump has amassed essentially unconstrained power, it vanished several days ago when US military forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro under the pretense of a drug bust. Congress was not consulted before what amounted to an act of war that left around 75 people dead, including civilians.⁵ Oil executives were, and Trump almost immediately let slip the operation’s true purpose: seizing control of Venezuela’s substantial oil reserves.⁶

In late December, Vladimir Putin claimed that the US had expressed interest in partnering with Russia to manage the Russian-occupied Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, and was interested in establishing crypto mining operations nearby.⁷ If true, such interest would tacitly endorse Putin’s insistence that Russia retain control of the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. In effect, Trump would be negotiating with Putin over Ukrainian assets to enable bitcoin mining ventures — a betrayal of Ukraine to serve American financial interests and Russian territorial conquest.

Trump’s pursuit of oil and bitcoin demonstrates how thoroughly checks on presidential power have collapsed — and it’s a collapse directly engineered by the technoligarchy. They bankrolled Trump’s campaign, demolished regulators, installed themselves in positions to write policy for industries where they hold significant financial interests, and actively encouraged the destruction or defanging of any institution that might limit presidential power — or their own.

The SEC and CFTC have been turned from watchdogs into cheerleaders responsible for propping up technoligarchs’ industries, embarking on “Crypto Sprints” and “Project Crypto” and insisting that they “must do more than just keep pace with the digital asset revolution. We must drive it.”⁸ The DOJ effectively walked away from crypto enforcement. The House voted to prohibit state-level regulation of AI for a decade (though it was later blocked by the Senate). Days into 2026, xAI’s Grok chatbot was generating nonconsensual deepfake pornography across Twitter — including sexualized images of minors — while Musk’s xAI holds a $200 million Pentagon contract. Foreign regulators opened inquiries; US agencies stayed silent.⁹ Prediction markets — the tech sector’s end run around gambling regulators — have surged. Polymarket’s election‑fueled boom drove massive volume and a post‑election valuation that made its founder a billionaire. One by one, agencies were handed over to the very industries they were meant to regulate. And crypto and AI super PACs are already building toward 2026, promising nine‑figure spends to solidify this capture and punish any lawmaker who’s not on board.

This consolidation of power is happening while ordinary Americans face a collapsing social contract. The majority of Americans can’t afford to buy a median-priced house.¹⁰ Millions of Americans ration or skip necessary medical care due to cost,¹¹ a number that’s only likely to increase as health insurance premiums have spiked heading into 2026.¹² Wages are stagnant, job stability is eroding, and the threat of AI-driven displacement hangs over workers as unions have been systematically weakened.

Where the technoligarchs claim to offer solutions, they’re extractive schemes repackaged as opportunities. World Liberty Financial promises it will “democratize finance” while onboarding financially vulnerable people into high-risk crypto schemes and funneling wealth to the Trumps.¹³ Fifty-year mortgages are being pitched as making housing “affordable” while locking borrowers into a life of debt.¹⁴ Both schemes profit from problems their architects helped create.

An economy built on stripmining its populace cannot be sustained. When housing costs consume half or more of people’s income, when medical emergencies mean bankruptcy, when wages can’t keep pace with basic necessities — demand collapses, trust in institutions evaporates, and the very markets the technoligarchs depend on begin to seize up. You can’t financialize your way out of a crisis caused by financialization.

In 2021, the rallying cry was “WAGMI” — we’re all gonna make it. It was a lie then, and the people chanting it loudest knew it. They knew all just meant them: the VCs, the founders, the early whales positioned to dump on latecomers. The retail investors buying at the top, the workers being paid in tokens, the communities being “democratized” — they were exit liquidity.

But now the lie has scaled. The industry that promised it would free us from captured institutions has captured them itself. The anti-establishment rebels are now the establishment, their survival dependent on the very centralized power structures they once claimed to make obsolete. And crypto is being woven into the fabric of traditional finance — integrated into banking and pension funds and retirement accounts, deepening systemic exposure that was once largely quarantined. When it collapses this time, the contagion won’t be contained.

But the foundation is shaky. The AI bubble shows signs of popping.¹⁵ The crypto industry is scrambling to pass market structure legislation before the 2026 midterms, terrified they’ll lose their window.¹⁶ Trump is feeling precarious ahead of the midterms too, recently admitting that he expects to face a third impeachment if Republicans lose control of the House¹⁷ — a threat made more real by his persistently low approval ratings and an Epstein scandal he can’t seem to make go away.

They know it. The technoligarchs aren’t confident their hold will last. That’s why they’re dismantling oversight, rushing through favorable legislation, securing pardons, amassing wealth — grabbing everything they can reach right now.

History offers little comfort here. Authoritarian regimes have maintained power through incredible economic devastation. Economic ruin alone doesn’t topple those who control the security apparatus, the flow of information, and the distribution of patronage. And the technoligarchs are building precisely these mechanisms. Trump is asserting unilateral control over the military; technoligarchs own the largest social media and news outlets; and billions of dollars have flowed to Trump through both crypto ventures and unchecked political contributions. Traditional accountability mechanisms, such as they were, have shown little sign of fighting back.

But the technoligarchs are also creating instabilities they may not be able to contain. The center of it all is a 79-year-old man in visibly declining health whose cult of personality is the strongest thing holding the coalition together. And they’re doing this all while elections still happen, while some democratic mechanisms still function, while that coalition still needs convincing it made the right choice.

The more frantically they loot, the more visibly they dismantle institutions, the more brazen their overreach — with the Epstein files, extrajudicial murders at sea, assertions that this president can depose any other president based on flimsy reasoning — the harder it becomes to maintain the fiction that any of this is normal or sustainable. Meanwhile, extractive economics collapse demand, gutted enforcement incentivizes fraud and erodes market integrity, financial fragility threatens collapses that will spread beyond crypto, and social fractures deepen as people realize the game is rigged.

And technoligarchs’ consolidation of power makes them visible architects of these systems. When the economy they’ve hollowed out seizes up, when the markets they’ve destabilized implode, when the legitimacy of the institutions they’ve captured evaporates, and when everyday people suffer, their names are on all of it.

We’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down offices around the world. Ever since, employers have pushed for workers to return to the office—with varying degrees of success. In a piece on return-to-office mandates for The Walrus, Toronto writer Kathy Chow writes about modern office design, worker productivity, and employer control; and also reflects on her own lackadaisical office experiences early in her career.

Employers are so terrified at the prospect of their employees not working or thinking about work that they would risk cutting into their profit margins. Perhaps they are right to be afraid. If people weren’t locked up in offices for eight to ten hours a day, they might have time to take care of themselves. They might have time to reflect on whether their jobs actually bring them happiness or contribute meaningfully to the world. They might have time to discover other ways of experiencing pleasure beyond the fleeting dopamine hits occasioned by retail therapy. Instead of buying things to fill the voids in their lives, they might make art, they might experiment sexually, they might organize a protest, they might read a book, or they might spend time caramelizing onions for a leisurely dinner with their friends—and God, what a frightful world that would be.

Billionaire Toby Neugebauer laughed when the Amarillo City Council asked him how he planned to handle the waste his planned datacenter would produce. 

“I’m not laughing in disrespect to your question,” Neugebauer said. He explained that he’d just met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had made it clear that any nuclear waste Neugebauer’s datacenter generated needed to go to Nevada, a state that’s not taking nuclear waste at the moment. “The answer is we don't have a great long term solution for how we’re doing nuclear waste.

The meeting happened on October 28, 2025 and was one of a series of appearances Neugebauer has put in before Amarillo’s leaders as he attempts to realize Project Matador: a massive 5,769 acre datacenter being built in the Texas Panhandle and constructed by Fermi America, a company he founded with former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.

If built, Project Matador would be one of the largest datacenters in the world at around 18 million square feet. “What we’re talking about is creating the epicenter for artificial intelligence in the United States,” Neugebauer told the council. According to Neugebauer, the United States is in an existential race to build AI infrastructure. He sees it as a national security issue.

“You’re blessed to sit on the best place to develop AI compute in America,” he told Amarillo. “I just finished with Palantir, which is our nation’s tip of the spear in the AI war. They know that this is the place that we must do this. They’ve looked at every site on the planet. I was at the Department of War yesterday. So anyone who thinks this is some casual conversation about the mission critical aspect of this is just not being truthful.”

But it’s unclear if Palantir wants any part of Project Matador. One unnamed client—rumored to be Amazon—dropped out of the project in December and cancelled a $150 million contract with Fermi America. The news hit the company’s stock hard, sending its value into a tailspin and triggering a class action lawsuit from investors.

Yet construction continues. The plan says it’ll take 11 years to build out the massive datacenter, which will first be powered by a series of natural gas generators before the planned nuclear reactors come online.

Amarillo residents aren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect. A group called 806 Data Center Resistance has formed in opposition to the project’s construction. Kendra Kay, a tattoo artist in the area and a member of 806, told 404 Media that construction was already noisy and spiking electricity bills for locals.

“When we found out how big it was, none of us could really comprehend it,” she said. “We went out to the site and we were like, ‘Oh my god, this thing is huge.’ There’s already construction underway of one of four water tanks that hold three million gallons of water.”

For Kay and others, water is the core issue. It’s a scarce resource in the panhandle and Amarillo and other cities in the area already fight for every drop. “The water is the scariest part,” she said. “They’re asking for 2.5 million gallons per day. They said that they would come back, probably in six months, to ask for five million gallons per day. And then, after that, by 2027 they would come back and ask for 10 million gallons per day.”

During an October 15 city council meeting, Neugebauer told the city that Fermi would get its water “with or without” an agreement from the city. “The only difference is whether Amarillo benefits.” To many people it sounded like a threat, but Neugebauer got his deal and the city agreed to sell water to Fermi America for double the going rate.

“It wasn’t a threat,” Neugebauer said during another meeting on October 28. “I know people took my answer…as a threat. I think it’s a win-win. I know there are other water projects we can do…we fully got that the water was going to be issue 1, 2, and 3.”

“We can pay more for water than the consumer can. Which allows you all capital to be able to re-invest in other water projects,” he said. “I think what you’re gonna find is having a customer who can pay way more than what you wanna burden your constituents with will actually enhance your water availability issues.”

According to Neugebauer and plans filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the datacenter would generate and consume 11 gigawatts of power. The bulk of that, eventually, would be generated by four nuclear reactors. But nuclear reactors are complicated and expensive to make and everyone who has attempted to build one in the past few decades has gone over budget and they weren’t trying to build nuclear power plants in the desert.

Nuclear reactors, like datacenters, consume a lot of water. Because of that, most nuclear reactors are constructed near massive bodies of water and often near the ocean. “The viewpoint that nuclear reactors can only be built by streams and oceans is actually the opposite,” Neugebauer told the Amarillo city council in the meeting on October 28.

As evidence he pointed to the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona. The massive Palo Verde plant is the only nuclear plant in the world not constructed near a ready source of water. It gets the water it needs by taking on the waste and sewage water of every city and town nearby.

That’s not the plan with Project Matador, which will use water sold to it by Amarillo and pulled from the nearby Ogallala Aquifer. “I am concerned that we’re going to run out of water and that this is going to change it from us having 30 years worth of water for agriculture to much less very quickly,” Kay told 404 Media.

The Ogallala Aquifer runs under parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. It’s the primary source of water for the Texas panhandle and it’s drying out. 

“They don’t know how much faster because, despite how quickly this thing is moving, we don’t have any idea how much water they’re realistically going to use or need, so we don’t even know how to calculate the difference,” Kay said. “Below Lubbock, they’ve been running out of water for a while. The priority of this seems really stupid.”

According to Kay, communities near the datacenter feel trapped as they watch the construction grind on. “They’ve all lived here for several generations…they’re being told that this is inevitable. Fermi is going up to them and telling them ‘this is going to happen whether you like it or not so you might as well just sell me your property.’”

Kay said she and other activists have been showing up to city council meetings to voice their concerns and tell leaders not to approve permits for the datacenter and nuclear plants. Other communities across the country have successfully pushed datacenter builders out of their community. “But Texas is this other beast,” Kay said.

Jacinta Gonzalez, the head of programs for MediaJustice and her team have helped 806 Data Center Resistance get up and running and teaching it tactics they’ve seen pay off in other states. “In Tucson, Arizona we were able to see the city council vote ‘no’ to offer water to Project Blue, which was a huge proposed Amazon datacenter happening there,” she said. “If you look around, everywhere from Missouri to Indiana to places in Georgia, we’re seeing communities pass moratoriums, we’re seeing different projects withdraw their proposals because communities find out about it and are able to mobilize and organize against this.”

“The community in Amarillo is still figuring out what that’s going to look like for them,” she said. “These are really big interests. Rick Perry. Palantir. These are not folks who are used to hearing ‘no’ or respecting community wishes. So the community will have to be really nimble and up for a fight. We don’t know what will happen if we organize, but we definitely know what will happen if we don’t.”