Lea County has a lot going for it in the burgeoning realm of data centers needed to meet the growing demand for computing power to feed the growing artificial intelligence industry.

Lea County has lots of open land, is seismically sound, has natural gas close at hand, lots of sun as well as lots of produced or brackish water that could be used to feed the massive cooling system AI data centers need.

Earlier this month Midland-based New Era Energy and Digital announced plans to acquire 3,500 acres of land in Lea County near Caprock for the construction of a project almost too colossal to be believed — a massive data center with its own natural gas-fired power plant and a modular nuclear reactor power plant to feed AI’s insatiable need for power.

The company announced on Nov. 6 it had ent

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