Campus Location
Abilene Campus (Residential)
Date of Award
5-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Department
Communication
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Jonathan Camp
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
Randall Fowler
Third Committee Member or Committee Reader
Neal Coates
Abstract
In the past several years, artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm. It has enabled numerous innovations across all sectors, and its usage continues to grow daily. This increase in demand for AI products has led to the development of AI data centers nationwide. Fueled by competition between the public and private sectors, many projects are underway. This study focuses on one such project in West Texas: the Stargate Data Center. This project is being constructed near Abilene, Texas, and has had an instrumental impact on the daily lives of its citizens. This research project seeks to answer the following question: What are the perceptions of community leaders and elected representatives of a mid-sized West Texas city on how to communicate to a largely blue-collar and working-class population that one of the biggest AI data center projects in the U.S. should be built in their “back yards”? This question is answered and analyzed throughout this project using an executive decision-making case study design and a qualitative interview methodology. From those interviews, five overarching themes emerged: the Reactivity of the message creation process, the necessity to Address Public Concerns, communicating the Overall Benefits of the Project, specific information regarding the Message Dissemination process, and overall takeaways from the participants of how to best Look Forward in future projects. This study integrated those responses and key themes with the communicative theories of Inoculation, Framing, and Stakeholder Communication to pinpoint the beneficial and detrimental approaches in the messages provided to the public and to extrapolate recommendations for public-facing communication for future AI data center projects.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Sorensen, Thomas, "The New Wild West: A Case Study Analysis of the Communication Methods Surrounding AI Infrastructure in West Texas" (2026). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1012.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/1012
Included in
Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Organizational Communication Commons, Social Influence and Political Communication Commons