Panhandle 1st Coalition

Panhandle 1st Coalition is a grassroots community-organising coalition based in Amarillo, Texas working to stop the Fermi America Project Matador 11-gigawatt AI infrastructure campus proposed for a 5,800-acre site between Amarillo and Panhandle, Texas — a project sited on the Texas Tech University System's land next to the U.S. Department of Energy Pantex Nuclear Weapons Facility, designed to draw water from the Ogallala Aquifer through an Amarillo City municipal water-sale agreement, and built around what would be the largest gas plant in the United States once its full 5,100+ MW of gas-turbine capacity is operational. The coalition is named verbatim in the in-corpus Kairos Fellowship / MediaJustice Fight Data Centers campaign as the lead community-organising vehicle on the Project Matador fight and as the local fighter whose organising work supplied the public face of the campaign's clearest single named win to date.

Project Matador campaign

The coalition's organising work is concentrated on the Project Matador fight. The site sits between Amarillo and the town of Panhandle in Carson County, and the proposed perimeter of 93 gas-fired turbines would deliver more than 5,100 MW of gas capacity — what the Sierra Club Texas chapter records as the largest gas plant in the United States if built. The campus's water requirement is provided through an Amarillo City Council water-sale agreement signed in late 2025, drawing on the Ogallala Aquifer — already in long-running decline across the Texas Panhandle — and rated at 2.5 million gallons a day, expandable to 10 million.

The coalition's organising tactics have run along several lines.

• Public-meeting mobilisation against the TCEQ air-quality permit. Panhandle 1st convened community attendance at the 4 December 2025 Texas Commission on Environmental Quality public meeting in Panhandle, Carson County on Fermi America's air-quality permits — the principal regulatory pressure point on the project's turbine buildout — with the coalition's Facebook coordination post framing the meeting as "Protect our Air — TCEQ meeting on Dec 4th at 7 PM. 500 Main Street, Panhandle, Texas." The TCEQ ultimately recorded 279 total comments, 63 contested-case-hearing requests, and 21 additional-public-meetings requests on the permit, with the named adjacent group Panhandle Taxpayers for Transparency filing the formal Contested Case Hearing requests.
• Tenant-pressure organising — the December 2025 win. MediaJustice's 15 December 2025 piece records the campaign's clearest single named win: the first prospective tenant withdrew a $150 million funding commitment from Project Matador and Fermi America's share price fell by roughly 50%. Chase Brady, named in the same piece as Organizer with Panhandle 1st Coalition, framed the moment as evidence that "investors and other prospective clients are starting to realize what our community has known for some time now. This is an inexperienced and unproven company that should not be trusted with anyone's investments let alone our community's natural resources." MediaJustice's campaign specialist Danny Cendejas supplied the campaign's headline framing that "this moment shows that data centers are not inevitable," with Oracle, AWS, and Palantir named as the prospective tenant pool the campaign targets and the adjacent Purge Palantir coalition named as a coordinated track.
• Worker-relations pressure during the construction pause. When Fermi America paused Project Matador construction in early February 2026 pending TCEQ permit approval, the coalition's public statement on the worker dismissals from the construction site framed the pause as a vindication of its standing warning that the project lacked full permitting, secured funding, and adequate safeguards: "Building before obtaining all necessary permits and financial assurances is not innovation, it is negligence" and "This situation reinforces a troubling pattern of outside corporations cutting corners and treating both our community and workforce as expendable." The coalition's standing demand has been that any future industrial project in the Texas Panhandle be "fully permitted, properly funded" and "rooted in respect for both people and place."
• Coalition-building inside the wider U.S. data-centre community-organising network. The coalition's lateral relationships run laterally inside the in-corpus Fight Data Centers network, where the campaign's 142 activist groups across 24 states figure includes Panhandle 1st as the named West Texas anchor. MediaJustice's October 2025 Amarillo Fermi Data Center fact sheet and the Kairos / MediaJustice 18 August 2025 organiser guide The Cost of Data Centers to Our Communities — And How to Fight Back (cited in the campaign body) supply the national-network organising infrastructure on which the Panhandle 1st-led local fight has drawn.

Local context

The Texas Panhandle is in the early stages of becoming one of the United States' most contested data-centre regions, and Panhandle 1st operates inside a wider regional opposition ecology that the corpus's sources name in fragments. The September 2025 Potter County Courthouse protest — with the Amarillo Minority Coalition's Madison Boyle asking "Why are we using ground water that farmers could be using for agriculture, for AI data center?" and Amarillo citizen Ashlyn Major calling for a community vote — predates the public emergence of Panhandle 1st Coalition. The Sierra Club Texas chapter's 17 December 2025 piece names Panhandle Taxpayers for Transparency as the group that filed the formal Contested Case Hearing requests at TCEQ, alongside the wider community-comment volume. Panhandle 1st sits inside this regional ecology as the coalition that, on the public record, ties the West Texas fight most explicitly into the U.S. national community-organising network on data centres through its named partnership with MediaJustice's Danny Cendejas and through the December 2025 tenant-withdrawal moment.

Place in the movement

Panhandle 1st Coalition is the corpus's first West Texas / rural-Panhandle data-centre opposition local-group, the corpus's first local-group anchored on an AI-infrastructure fight in the U.S. interior outside the U.S. South, and the local-group anchor for the in-corpus Fight Data Centers campaign's clearest single named win — the December 2025 Project Matador tenant withdrawal. Together with Memphis Community Against Pollution and the named University of Memphis student coalition Tigers Against Pollution on the Memphis / xAI Colossus fight, Panhandle 1st completes the corpus's first cluster of named U.S. data-centre community-opposition local-groups. The three anchor structurally distinct organising-form templates inside the same national campaign: MCAP a Black-led urban environmental-justice organisation in the U.S. South; Tigers Against Pollution a single-university student coalition; Panhandle 1st a rural West Texas community-organising coalition anchored on water and air harms in a sparsely-populated agricultural region. The water-and-grid-stress / energy-extraction frame the Panhandle 1st campaign anchors — Ogallala Aquifer depletion, 5,100+ MW of gas-turbine capacity, the tenant-withdrawal model — runs parallel to but is structurally distinct from MCAP's environmental-racism frame on the Memphis fight, illustrating the on-ramp diversity in the U.S. data-centre fight the corpus is mapping.

The coalition's organising form is also structurally distinct from the corpus's U.S. AI-safety / Pause chapters (lg-pauseai-bay-area, lg-pauseai-nyc) and the U.S. youth / Encode Justice student-chapter network (lg-encode-justice-georgia, lg-encode-justice-north-carolina) — Panhandle 1st is locally-rooted, single-issue-concentrated on the Project Matador fight, and engaged with the make-AI-good landscape through the physical-infrastructure layer of frontier AI compute rather than through AI safety, AI policy, or AI ethics framings. The coalition's emergence in 2025 around a single named local fight — without a prior multi-issue civic-engagement track record on the public record — is itself a marker of how rapidly the U.S. data-centre buildout is now producing new community-organising vehicles in regions previously outside any AI-policy organising map.