The Gallup City Council on April 28 night voted 4-1 to delay a vote on an agreement that would deliver nearly 110 million gallons of wastewater each year to a proposed 330-acre data center.
Greg Thompson, the co-founder of Teraplex Data Centers LLC, told the City Council that he wanted to build a data center in the Gallup Tradeport with a tenant like Oracle, Meta, Amazon or Microsoft. Much like the Oracle and OpenAI Project Jupiter data center under construction in Doña Ana County, Thompson said the Teraplex data center would supply its own electricity — in this instance, through a mix of solar power and natural gas. Once built, Thompson said the data center would employ about 300 people.
Proposals for data centers to provide their own power have proven controversial in New Mexico. Project Jupiter’s developers recently revised their plans to build two natural gas plants that would annually emit more greenhouse gases than Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined.
The Gallup vote came two hours into the council meeting. Outside the chambers before the meeting began, a small group of protesters gathered with signs opposing the data center and accused the company of targeting Gallup along with other parts of rural New Mexico for centers they say degrade the environment.
“They’re going to ruin our sky. They’re going to ruin the dirt. They’re going to ruin the precious breath that I have left,” Toni Pinedo, an Indigenous activist and Gallup resident, told Source NM. “All for what?”
While a majority of the council argued that they needed more information before casting a vote on the agreement, Mayor Marc DePauli said he was impressed by the data center developer’s presentation.
“I was always skeptical and still kind of am about data centers…but bringing us the option of using our wastewater, it’s kind of a deal-changer,” DePauli, who was the lone elected official opposed to deferring the vote, said during the meeting. “Overall, on the water side, it works out pretty well for us.”
Thompson told Source NM after the meeting that the Washington, D.C.-based Teraplex, which incorporated late last year, has had “informal conversations” with Gallup officials about a data center for the past several months. The company has not yet reached an agreement with a potential tenant for the complex, he said, though he listed Oracle, Microsoft or Meta as possibilities.
He also stressed that the April 28 evening meeting was the “first of many steps” and said he welcomed the community’s input, as well as the council’s decision to defer a vote.
“This was just a ‘hello,’” he said. “We’re going to come back with our entire team to explain what’s going on, and we want to address all of their concerns, because we share them, too. We are attempting to make a more-green data center compared to some of our other competitors, and we hope that’s felt by the community.”
If approved, the agreement before the council would have let Teraplex buy nearly 110 million gallons of wastewater from Gallup annually. The city treats about 2.3 million gallons of wastewater each day, DePauli said.
Approximately a dozen residents spoke against the agreement during the meeting’s public comment period, many of whom referenced Gallup’s depleting aquifer and ongoing interstate compact negotiations regarding the state’s access to water.
“Gallup has an unclear future concerning water rights,” Larry Winn, who previously chaired the local water board, told the mayor and councilors, adding that data centers have come to earn a national reputation as “the biggest single problem there is…It’s amazing to me how such a thing could be taken at face value,” he said of Teraplex’s vision for building a data center in the area.
Eirena Begay, an Indigenous mother of four, urged councilors to be skeptical of the promises Teraplex was making about its environmental impacts or water usage. Even though the company seeks to use wastewater, she said the company’s ambitions still amount to “rerouting a shared resource to serve a private enterprise.”
After listening to the community pushback, Councilor Ron Molina said he agreed that city leaders needed more information before making a decision. However, he said he didn’t want people in attendance to “lose sight of the fact that we need to bring industry” to Gallup.
From behind the dais, Councilor Sierra Yazzie Asamoa-Tutu held up a printed copy of a lawsuit that the New Mexico Environmental Law Center filed over Project Jupiter and said she wanted to urge her colleagues to defer the vote before going too far down the same road as Doña Ana County officials.
“I understand the appeal,” she said. “What I’m concerned about is what does this open the door to?”
