45 Texas ZIP Codes Got a Data Center. Home Values Barely Moved.

Sooner or later, almost every fight over a Texas data center reaches the same argument: the thing will wreck the value of the houses around it. You hear it in county commissioner meetings, in zoning hearings, and now in the interim charges the Legislature is using to decide how to regulate the industry. The logic feels obvious. A big windowless building, humming transformers, two years of construction traffic. Who pays full price to live next to that?

It feels obvious. In the Texas data we can actually measure, it doesn't hold up. For our latest special report, we ran the numbers ZIP code by ZIP code, and the short version is this: across the Texas data centers that have been operating long enough to study, moving in next to one has had no measurable effect on nearby home values.

Why Texas needs its own answer

The most-cited evidence on this question is a March 2026 white paper from Tract, a data center land developer. It found that homes closer to Northern Virginia data centers sold for slightly more on average, and that of 130 U.S. ZIP codes with large data center campuses, only one saw values fall over five years. Useful work, but it carries a problem a Texas policymaker shouldn't wave away. It's industry-funded, and its core comparison is between homes near data centers and homes far away. Data centers get built in already-thriving, infrastructure-rich suburbs that were going to appreciate anyway. A comparison like that mostly captures the kind of neighborhood that attracts a data center in the first place. The effect of the data center itself stays buried inside it.

Texas adds a second wrinkle. We're a non-disclosure state, so actual sale prices aren't public, and the Virginia-style sale-by-sale regression can't be run here. So we used the Zillow Home Value Index, the same monthly ZIP-level index Tract used for its national trend numbers, and built a design that answers the question the industry study skips.

How we tested it

The method is a matched difference-in-differences study, and the idea behind it is simple. For every Texas ZIP code that gained its first data center, we found a set of comparison ZIP codes in the same metro area that looked just like it beforehand: same home-value level, same appreciation trend, same regional housing market. Then we tracked the gap between the two over time. If a data center drags down nearby values, the host ZIP should fall behind its matched twins after the data center opens.

One discipline matters more than any other here, and it's the clock. A facility that opened in 2025 hasn't had time to move a smoothed home-value index, and the Texas boom is overwhelmingly a 2022-and-later story. So the primary analysis anchors on the 45 ZIP codes that got their first data center at least three years ago, by mid-2023, measured against 168 same-metro comparison ZIPs. That's the question a skeptic asks first: is the "after" long enough to mean anything? Three years is long enough.

What the numbers show

The effect on nearby home values is about +0.2 percent. The margin of error runs a few points in either direction, which tells you two things at once: the data can't separate the effect from zero, and it rules out any large move up or down. That result held across nine different specifications and four ways of calculating the statistics, including matching only within the same metro, varying the number of comparison ZIPs, and re-running the whole thing with a bootstrap built for small samples. Not one specification produced a statistically significant drop in home values.

This is a null result, and the report treats it as one: no evidence that data centers raise nearby home values, and none that they lower them. The property-value-harm claim simply has no support in the Texas data.

The honest part

There's one place a careful reader can push, and the report puts it in plain view instead of burying it. On the full set of sites, the pre-arrival trends for host and comparison ZIPs aren't perfectly identical, and the test that checks for that flags a difference.

Two things keep that from changing the answer, and a third makes it cut the other way. The difference is tiny, a few tenths of a percent, far too small to matter for any home price anyone is worried about. It comes from the lowest-confidence sites; restrict to the cleanest data and the test passes clean with the same zero result. And the direction is the important part. In the years before their data centers arrived, host ZIPs were drifting slightly up relative to their matches, not down. A placebo test that pretends each data center arrived two years early picks up a phantom +5.7 percent, which confirms that the pre-existing drift runs upward. That tilts the study, if anything, toward finding a positive effect, and it still finds essentially nothing. To read hidden harm into these numbers, you'd have to assume a real decline is being perfectly masked by that upward drift, and nothing in the data gives a reason to think so.

What the schools show

Property values are only half the local story. The other half is the school tax base, and here the Texas data is richer than anything in the national debate, because district finances are public.

The mechanism that makes data centers fiscally attractive is that they add taxable value without adding kids to educate. The data backs that up cleanly: host districts didn't see enrollment grow any faster than comparable districts after a data center arrived, an effect of +1 percent that's statistically indistinguishable from zero. Whatever a data center puts on the tax rolls, it doesn't show up at the schoolhouse door asking for new classrooms.

The benefit is real, and it's concentrated rather than uniform. In a tiny rural district a single data center can be a large share of the entire tax base. Patton Springs ISD's data centers are roughly 47 percent of its tax base; Del Valle ISD's Tesla site is about 14 percent; Northwest ISD's Meta and Amazon campuses about 5 percent. In a big urban district the same facility is a rounding error, a few tenths of a percent. And for the wealthier districts that pay into the state's recapture system, part of that added value gets equalized to the rest of Texas instead of staying home. A data center is a major fiscal event for a small or rural district and a minor one for a large urban district, and policymakers should resist anyone selling it as uniform.

What it means for the siting debate

Strip it down and the empirical case looks like this. The property-value harm that gets cited to justify restricting where data centers can be built does not show up in the Texas data through mid-2026. A rule that limits data center siting to protect nearby home values would have the Texas evidence pointing the other way. On the fiscal side, the measure that matters is net contribution, what a facility pays in against the services it consumes, and a data center adds tax base without adding students.

None of this settles every question about data center growth in Texas. Power, water, and grid reliability are real constraints, and we cover them here every week. But the specific claim that these facilities hurt the neighbors' home values is one the Texas data does not support.

The full report, with the complete methodology, every robustness test, the school-finance analysis, and the limitations, is available to Hyperscale News annual subscribers below.