(Just The News)—SpaceX is constructing a multi-phase industrial complex near the Gibbons Creek Reservoir in Grimes County with the help of millions of dollars in tax incentives.
The complex will include semiconductor manufacturing, power generation, an AI advanced computing campus, supporting power generation, a space compute test facility, among other projects.
The office of Gov. Greg Abbott and SpaceX announced the first phase of the development: a vertically integrated semiconductor fabrication plant is being built.
SpaceX says it’s investing $16.8 billion to build the 100-million-square-foot facility to accelerate semiconductor manufacturing. It’s expected to create 3,000 new jobs, including engineers, technicians and plant operator personnel.
SpaceX, owned by multibillionaire Elon Musk and valued at $1.7 trillion, received a $30 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant (TEF). Two local school districts approved its application to not pay local school property taxes for 10 years through the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) program.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a strong advocate of using taxpayer funds as incentives for businesses to relocate or expand operations in Texas, supported SpaceX receiving both grants.
“The first-of-its-kind Terafab facility will accelerate chip production in Texas at an unprecedented scale, create thousands of good-paying jobs in Grimes County, and expand economic opportunity for generations of Texans,” he said.
The TEF grant, awarded through the Texas Economic Development & Tourism office, “may be awarded to a business relocation or expansion project for which one Texas site is in competition with out-of-state locations to create new, good-paying jobs in the community and attract significant new capital investment to the state,” the office says.
Abbott signed House Bill 5 into law to create the JETI program “to attract large, capital-intensive economic development projects that bring new capital investment and create new, good-paying Texas jobs while ensuring robust reporting and transparency.”
The program gives tax breaks to corporations at the expense of school districts and local taxpayers, critics argue. It allows a company to enter into an agreement “for a 10-year school district maintenance and operations (M&O) tax appraised value limitation of 50%, based on qualifying job and capital investment minimums. Projects located in qualified Opportunity Zones are eligible for an additional 25% limitation on taxable value.”
Critics argue TEF is corporate welfare and companies would expand operations in Texas anyway because of Texas’ business friendly policies. The grants impose additional costs on cities “in the form of reduced revenues and increased liabilities,” and there’s no meaningful measurement to quantify incentives to economic well-being, the Better Cities Project has argued, The Center Square reported.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation argues TEF should be eliminated and has proposed an alternative solution, noting that “The interstate subsidy race represents an ever-spiraling stairway to more government intervention in the market.”
Despite the tax revenue loss, Anderson-Shiro Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Dr. Sarah Borowicz said the JETI agreement “will strengthen our district, expand opportunities, and better prepare our students for their future. There are defining moments in the life of a school district, and this is one of those moments. Our commitment now is to ensure that every opportunity created through this agreement is managed wisely, transparently, and always with students at the center of every decision.”
Iola ISD Superintendent Jeff Dyer also said the district’s Board of Trustees voted for the JETI agreement “after much thought and consideration. The Board’s stated priority has always been to do what’s best for Iola ISD. Throughout this process, the Board welcomed public input, regularly communicated with SpaceX’s representatives, and engaged a school finance consultant about the impact of this project. Ultimately, the Board determined that providing the requested tax incentives for this project was in Iola ISD’s best interest.”
Grimes County Citizens for Responsible Development published extensive information about the project, including maps of where the industrial complex will be built. It’s encouraging residents to review “the public documents, understand what was approved, and follow the potential impacts to land, water, roads, emergency services, taxes, and rural quality of life.”
“A project of this size is not just a private business decision. It has the potential to affect schools, roads, water, emergency services, land use, utility demand, and the long-term character of Grimes County,” GCCRD says.
When it comes to the impact on local taxpayers, it points to public records that “indicate that school finance consultants were preparing to discuss the potential impact of the JETI agreement on taxable value, M&O revenue, I&S revenue, tax rates, and existing taxpayers.” This reinforced GCCRD’s concern “that citizens are being forced to piece together a major public incentive package through Public Information Act requests rather than receiving one clear, complete explanation before public votes and long-term commitments are made.”
GCCRD said that what’s being built “is not simply one building or one factory.” Public documents describe a multi-phase industrial campus that includes multiple buildings, plants, transformers, water treatment and recycling facilities, industrial waste treatment facilities, gas turbines, utility scale battery storage, among others.
Grimes County Judge Joe Fauth said SpaceX expansion was “a generational change” and developing an industrial site next to a major reservoir “makes all the sense in the world.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.