I'm from Nevada, another state that people presume is all desert. (Really, it's all mountains.)
The only part of Texas I've driven is between Austin and S Antonio. It was perhaps the least-beautiful wilderness I've driven through. It really did just feel like desert and billboards - like if Walmart was a highway.
But I also presume Texas marketing itself as a less-regulated alternative (e.g. to California) is why it's easy to imagine Texas wanting infrastructure that Maine might not.
Nevada is a gem. Way too dry but incredibly beautiful with some truly unique features (ancient trees, hot springs, strange minerals, clear dark night skies). Eastern/central Texas is far less interesting.
Between Austin and San Antonio is so developed that it's considered by many to be a single "metro" area, DFW-style. There's very little not developed directly between the two.
I drove that way in 2024 for the solar eclipse. Some parts of that route struck me as a bit exurb-ish and spread-out, I wouldn't call it a single metro area, but there were definitely people living there. And it was way too green to be called a desert; I've driven through actual deserts in southern CA and nowhere that I saw in that part of Texas was anywhere near that dry (I guess you have to go further west to get to actual Texas desert, which we didn't do on that trip).
The deserts around El Paso are still quite a bit more alive than the ugliest desert I've ever seen (the stretch between Phoenix and San Diego gets that dubious honor).
Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means trees and forests and green in color
Okay, we'll give Nevada a participation award for "green in color". Maine wins the "green in color" category by a lot. It's orders of magnitude greener.
"Green" isn't everything though. Nevada has a lot of brown going for it!
Oh, Maine also has a tidal coastline of 3478 miles, but Nevada is landlocked. Nevada does have a couple of big lakes though.
Wallace Stegner said that to appreciate the arid west, “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns…”
I've spent at least a hundred weekends camping in the Mojave desert over the last 30 years. There is beauty there, but a lot of the beauty is more about what's not there than what is there. And what's green really stands out. The creosote is amazing and some of it has been there thousands of years. The King Clone circle has been there 11,000 years and is still going.
That said, if I had to choose between Nevada and Maine for a getaway, I'd choose Maine.
Folks have been conditioned to consider the deserts of West Texas, especially the Permian Basin, to be wastelands with no redeeming value.
Personally, while it isn't my favorite landscape or even my favorite desert landscape, I still think it is a landscape with intrinsic value and beauty.
Yeah, sorry that wasn't intended as a slight to Texas. Texas just does have a lot of barren landscape where datacenters wouldn't offend as much. I modified it to make that clear. Also, energy is playing a role here.
I've been watching a series on YT that is specifically about rural towns in Texas that are being abandoned or on the brink of total collapse. Much of it has to do with highways and routing around these communities decades ago. I don't know if a datacenter is the answer, but it has to be better then what looks like a post apocalyptic America.
Reviving Radiator Springs with a datacenter! The plot of Cars 4.
Those small towns are often positioned such that even if you plopped a billion dollar datacenter on top of them, it wouldn't change much, as even with second and third order effects it's adding 100-200 total population.
Is that really the primary concern about datacenters? Their aesthetics? I thought the major problem with them was that they muscle in on valuable resources like water and electricity, consuming what would otherwise be used by people, and driving the prices up.
Taking up land is one of the resources they use - consider cutting down trees to clear space for a large one, or the habitats that might have been in that space. That's not really an aesthetic thing.
Guessing some used swamp coolers to save electricity on chillers, and some motivated people decided to make a big stink about it? Now everyone seems to think that DCs inherently use up tons of fresh water.
They are definitely driving up electric costs for residential customers, though (along with EVs and heat pumps) which is a major problem.
I've driven through all of Texas twice, and had to spend time in Austin and Houston for work, but never had to live there, so I'd like to think I'm informed without being biased.
Besides the heavily oak covered hill country west of Austin it's pretty much the ugliest landscape in the country. I will admit the west Texas desert is less ugly than the desert of southern Arizona/eastern California, but north/east Texas is the flattest, least interesting part of the Mississippi basin (Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma are similarly meh but you don't have the insane humidity).
By size there should be more. That’s why they feel that way. Maine is significantly more beautiful than Texas. The ugliest part of Maine probably still looks better than most of Texas. I can’t even think of an example of “ugly Maine”.
