Nolan County, Texas

County ranked by announced AI data-center load

2.0 GW Announced AI load

Campuses

Lead operator

IREN

Resi rate Δ (AEP Texas)

n/a

Home price Δ (3y)

n/a

Property tax Δ (3y)

+4.8%

Population (2024 ACS)

14K

Median HH income (2024 ACS)

$50,747

Key takeaways

Sweetwater has 10,484 residents and the surrounding Nolan County has 14,565. IREN's 2 GW Sweetwater campus is roughly 200 kW of AI compute per Nolan County resident, the highest per-capita load of any top-10 county.Source: Census ACS 2023 B01003 (Sweetwater city, Nolan County)
Nolan County hosts more than 1,500 MW of installed wind capacity, including the Roscoe Wind Farm. Wind paid the county about $18 million in landowner royalties and $12 million in school taxes in a single year, the existing rural-electric template that AI is now joining.Source: sources[0] (Wikipedia: Sweetwater, Texas)
Median household income in Nolan County is $50,160 and the median home value is $98,300, the lowest in any top-10 AI county. Only 13.7% of residents over 25 hold a bachelor's degree.Source: Census ACS 2023 B19013, B25077, B15003
Property tax assessments rose 4.8% over three years, the most restrained of any top-10 AI county. ERCOT's deregulated retail market means there is no published residential rate delta for AEP Texas, so the bill-side impact of 2 GW of new IREN demand is invisible in the standard data.Source: data/cache/property_tax_yoy.csv (FIPS 48353) + data/cache/utility_rate_yoy.csv (no AEP Texas residential row)

37.0% of Nolan County residents are Hispanic, roughly triple the share Sweetwater carried in the 1980 census. The IREN campus is landing in a county where the wind-farm boom already brought Latino transmission-line crews.Source: Census ACS 2023 B03003 (FIPS 48353)
12.8% of Nolan's working population is in manufacturing, the highest mfg share of any batch-4 Texas county outside Ellis. Sweetwater's cement and gypsum plants plus wind-tower fabrication anchor the existing industrial wage floor.Source: Census ACS 2023 C24050 (FIPS 48353)
18.8% of Nolan residents live in poverty and 5.7% are unemployed, with only 80.7% of households on home broadband. The IREN 2 GW campus is moving into the second-poorest county in batch 4 after Hale.Source: Census ACS 2023 B17001, B23025, B28002 (FIPS 48353)
66.1% of Nolan households own their home and median gross rent is $866. The 200 kW per resident IREN density is the per-capita extreme of batch 4, in a county whose existing rental stock is about 1,800 units.Source: Census ACS 2023 B25003, B25064 (FIPS 48353)