A company planning a data center near Princeton has quietly secured one of the few approvals available to it: a permit to drill a well outside city limits that could eventually pump more than 5.5 million gallons from an aquifer already showing signs of strain. BT Aycock Data Center LLC applied for the permit, which the North Texas Groundwater Conservation District approved in June, for a well on a nearly 50-acre property owned by Aycock Enterprises, located roughly 40 miles north of Dallas.
The approval comes as the company behind the project has only early plans for a facility near Princeton, according to The Dallas Morning News, which first reported on the permit. BT Aycock Data Center is tied to a developer that announced plans last year for six data center sites across North Texas representing a combined power load request of 1,435 megawatts, according to a PR Newswire release tied to Belltown Power Texas. Belltown Power did not respond to multiple requests for comment, per the Morning News report.
District records cited by the paper show the well could draw 5.56 million gallons of water through 2028 to support construction, then 1.65 million gallons annually after that for commercial operation. The well has a production capacity of 150 gallons per minute and draws from the Woodbine Aquifer, which stretches across 17 counties in North Texas. Residents in the area have begun raising questions about whether a data center is actually coming, the report notes.
A Statewide Freeze Collides With a Local Approval
The Princeton well permit landed in the middle of an aggressive state crackdown on the data center boom. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has moved to rein in the industry, issuing an executive directive on August 3 to audit data center projects and pause new grid connections, according to the Office of the Texas Governor. He followed that on September 21 with an order instructing the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to freeze environmental permit approvals for new data centers pending statewide audits, a move Hoodline detailed in its coverage of a fourth Skybox project in Hutto.
The pressure on the grid is immense. ERCOT reported evaluating more than 474 gigawatts of total connection requests in August, over five times the state's record peak demand of 91.1 gigawatts, with data center projects accounting for roughly 90 percent of all new interconnection requests, according to reporting on a similar fight near Sealy. Dallas-Fort Worth is now the world's No. 1 primary data center market, the Morning News reports, a status that has fueled outrage in rural communities where projects can fall outside nearby cities' and counties' regulatory reach.
Why Princeton and Collin County Can't Say No
Princeton officials say the project remains at the preliminary inquiry stage. City spokesperson Erin Mudie told the Morning News that Princeton has received no formal development application, plat, permit, or entitlement request for the prospective data center, even though city officials are aware of it. Because the well site sits in an unincorporated part of Collin County, the city cannot approve or prohibit a project there — it simply lacks zoning authority in that area.
Collin County's own powers are similarly thin. The county has limited zoning authority in unincorporated areas, with narrow restrictions such as limits on junkyards and animal slaughter operations, and developers must obtain permits only for specific activities like construction and sewage disposal, according to county officials cited in the Morning News report. Clarence Daugherty, a Collin County official, said the county had received no permitting requests from BT Aycock Data Center as of the week before publication, and that any future applications would be reviewed under the same standards as other commercial construction projects. Daugherty added that the county is limited by its statutory authority and would not review or permit any other data-center-specific matters.
That regulatory gap is not unique to Princeton. A nearly identical dynamic is playing out in far West Texas, where Hudspeth County officials are seeking answers about a $15 billion data center proposed on unincorporated land without county zoning oversight. Under Texas law, county officials across the state lack general land-use zoning authority in unincorporated areas, leaving groundwater district permitting as one of the few active checkpoints on these projects.
The Woodbine Aquifer's Troubled History
The North Texas Groundwater Conservation District regulates extraction across Collin, Cooke, and Denton counties, enforcing registration and production reporting for non-exempt wells pumping more than 17.36 gallons per minute. That gave the district authority to approve BT Aycock's 150-gallon-per-minute request. Water-level declines of 10 to 60 feet have been reported in some areas of the Woodbine Aquifer, and water quality sampling of Woodbine water found that 61 percent of samples exceeded EPA secondary drinking water standards for both iron and sulfate.
Rapid population growth has only sharpened local sensitivity to groundwater strain. Collin County added nearly 43,000 residents between July 2024 and July 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates highlighted in Hoodline's coverage of the county's $817.5 million infrastructure bond vote, making it the second-fastest-growing county by volume in the country and pushing its total population to nearly 1.3 million. Residents across these fast-growing data center corridors have voiced concern about water and power use, noise and light pollution, and potential health and environmental impacts, the Morning News reports.
Developer Points to a Dry Design, Critics Point to the Request
Separate from the BT Aycock well, Solstice Data, a Dubai-based company that designs, builds and operates data centers powering artificial intelligence, has submitted its own records to the groundwater district concerning a potential AI compute campus in the area. According to Solstice Data's own report, that campus would need water mostly for construction and initial setup, with peak demand during an 18-to-24-month construction window, and is designed with a cooling architecture that does not consume water during normal operation.
Industry claims of water-free cooling have drawn scrutiny elsewhere. Research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that U.S. data centers directly consumed about 66 billion liters of water on-site in 2023, while their indirect water footprint from off-site electricity generation reached nearly 800 billion liters — a federal benchmark Hoodline examined in its report on conflicting claims about data center water use. A Public Utility Commission of Texas survey received responses from 28 of 377 companies.
Nearby Denton has already moved to weigh a temporary pause on new data center applications, even as a Core Scientific expansion and a Qumulus AI campus there proceed toward 2027 and 2028 operational dates. For Princeton residents, the BT Aycock well permit may be the first concrete sign of how that same fight could unfold on their own doorstep.
