Denton, Texas residents get their pitch this Thursday: show up at Emily Fowler Central Library at 6:30 p.m. and organize against two AI data centers finishing construction this fall, according to KERA News's coverage. DSA Denton and Revolutionary Front are hosting the town hall, backed by Cooperation Denton and the Denton County Green Party. The recruiting pitch: the two projects will contract enough wattage off the ERCOT grid to match 8.5 DFW International Airports, 495 H-E-B stores, or 82,000 homes, inside a city that has only 57,000 households total.
The organizers are running one campaign against two different builds. Core Scientific and QumulusAI reject heat through entirely different architectures. Core Scientific's Denton campus sits on 78 acres, targeting roughly 260 megawatts of AI-ready capacity across more than 400,000 square feet, cooled by direct-to-chip liquid loops that pull heat straight off the silicon. QumulusAI's site, four acres near Western Boulevard and Jim Christal Road, tops out around 20 megawatts spread across eight modules. Spencer Smith, QumulusAI's director of engineering, has said the system runs on a closed loop of non-conductive fluid: no water draw at all, chasing a PUE of 1.1.
Freshwater consumption is one of four objections on the organizers' list, alongside power draw, diesel generator noise, and carbon output. Some of that pushback is generic. Organizers bring the same complaint to hyperscale projects everywhere, part of how coordinated opposition to data center permits has taken shape nationally. But the water claim does not apply evenly here. QumulusAI's closed dielectric loop needs zero water by the company's own account. Core Scientific has not published how it rejects heat from its direct-to-chip loops, whether through dry coolers, a closed fluid loop, or the kind of open evaporative towers that draw from the same municipal supply residents are worried about. That gap matters.
Diesel generator and cooling system noise made the list too, the same complaint driving pushback at sites where air-cooled equipment routinely hits 80 decibels at the property line. Laura Coate, DSA Denton's co-chair, said the town hall "is intended to bring Denton residents together to organize against AI data centers and an AI drone factory in our community." Riley Quinn, organizing across DSA Denton and Revolutionary Front, credited the coalition's partner groups with "countless amount of hours doing meetings and research." Denton's city council, which includes Mayor Chris Watts and Mayor Pro Tem Nick Stevens, has already approved both projects. Core Scientific has not said publicly which heat rejection method it uses. The city now sits inside a state pipeline of 335 existing data centers and 248 more planned, 86 of them in North Texas alone.
Denton's fight will not stay local. Box Elder County residents kept organizing a referendum months after Stratos got its sign-off, proof a permit approval settles nothing. Every one of the 86 North Texas projects still in the pipeline faces the same choice: open evaporative towers that show up on a water bill, or closed loops and dry coolers that trade water for more steel and a bigger electric bill. QumulusAI has already put its answer on the record. Denton's activists are organizing around a megawatt number. The cooling architecture decision, still unpublished at Core Scientific, is the one that actually decides whether the next fight is about water.