Texas Tech professor doubts Lubbock will land a hyperscale data center

Texas Tech professor Kassandra McQuillen doubts a hyperscale data center will come to Lubbock, even as major projects elsewhere in West Texas give her students a close look at the industry’s opportunities and costs. “I don’t think we’ll have a hyperscale data center in Lubbock,” McQuillen said Friday on The Wake Up Call with Benji Snead on 92.3 The Hub. A hyperscale data center is a very large computing facility supporting services such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence. McQuillen, an assistant professor of practice in energy commerce and business economics at Tech’s Rawls College of Business, pointed to water access and annexation as steps she believes a project would need to address. She offered that as her assessment of Lubbock’s prospects. Her course examines the questions behind such developments: What infrastructure will they require, what benefits will remain after construction, and what does the host community want? Taking the debate out of the class