RED OAK, Texas — While coastal elites and their media allies wring their hands over the artificial intelligence boom, one Texas town of roughly 20,000 people is quietly cashing in — and a data center CEO is naming names about who actually benefits.
Compass Datacenters CEO Chris Crosby told Fox News Digital that his company's hyperscale campus 20 miles south of Dallas now employs about 900 people on site — roughly 600 for Compass and 300 for Schneider Electric — plus thousands of construction workers who have cycled through the project over the past five years, according to reporting first flagged by WFMD Free Talk.
And the investment didn't stop at the server racks.
Compass donated $15 million to build an animal shelter in Red Oak after the SPCA ended its contract with the town last year, Crosby said. The company also partnered with Texas State Technical College on a $12.6 million training facility that expands the school's Mechanical, Electrical and IT Data Center Pathway program — a 12-week course that puts regular Americans on a path to careers as electricians, mechanics, technicians, carpenters, welders and concrete workers.
The Red Oak campus, which Compass began developing in 2019, now includes 10 data center buildings, a Schneider Electric manufacturing facility and the training center.
NOT A SINGLE DROP OF WATER FOR COOLING
Crosby said the facility was built with "no noise, no light pollution" and a completely water-free cooling system — a direct answer to the resource and infrastructure complaints that have dogged the data center industry as AI demand explodes.
"When you think about durability and putting a hundred-year-type asset into a community, you better do that really well and in conjunction with that community," Crosby told Fox News Digital.
That philosophy ran straight into the prevailing narrative from critics who insist these facilities drain local resources, jack up electricity costs and leave nothing behind but concrete shells.
Crosby wasn't having it.
"I am tired of the elitism that this doesn't create jobs," he said of his sprawling campus and the rhetoric that data centers don't bring lasting opportunity.
WHAT'S ACTUALLY AT STAKE FOR WORKING AMERICANS
Strip away the corporate talking points and the picture is simple: a small Texas town got a skilled-trades pipeline, a manufacturing facility tied to the campus, and enough ongoing work to sustain roughly 900 permanent positions.
For families in Red Oak and the surrounding Ellis County area, that means jobs that don't require a four-year degree and the debt that comes with it — the exact kind of work that both parties claim to champion but rarely deliver at this scale.
Compass is headquartered in Loudoun County, Virginia, the self-described data center capital of America. The Red Oak playbook — develop in partnership with the town, fund what residents actually say they need, and train locals for the trades — is one Crosby argues should be the standard, not the exception, as AI infrastructure spending continues to surge across the country.
Fox News Digital reported that the campus has faced broader skepticism about the industry's impact on resources and infrastructure, and Crosby said it's up to companies like his to work with communities, identify local needs, plan improvements and invest in projects that benefit residents. Compass committed to those investments as part of the Red Oak buildout, per Crosby's account.
Our Take
Here's the part the legacy media will never put in a chyron: a private company just spent $27.6 million on a town of 20,000 people without a federal mandate, a woke DEI quota or a single dollar of taxpayer money — and the result is an animal shelter, a trade school and 900 paychecks.
That's the America First economy in action. Not bureaucrats in Washington deciding which communities deserve investment, but free-market builders who understand that a hundred-year asset is only as good as the town it sits in.
Crosby's line about "elitism" cuts deep. The same crowd that lectures flyover country about green energy and equity has spent years telling working-class Texans that a data center is a parasite. Red Oak is the rebuttal. Welders, electricians and technicians aren't props in a press release — they're the backbone of the AI economy, and they're being trained for it right there in Ellis County.
Conservatives should be paying attention. This is the blueprint: build here, hire here, train here, and tell the professional naysayers where to go. The only question now is how many other American towns are next — and which cowardly corporations will keep shipping their jobs and their campuses overseas instead.
