Abbott halts Texas data center grid approvals as Trump calls crackdown a mistake

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has delivered his sharpest rebuke yet of the artificial-intelligence data center industry, ordering state regulators to pause new grid-connection approvals while an audit of pending projects is completed. The Republican governor said companies rushed facilities into communities with little advance notice, fueling anger over electricity demand, water consumption and neighborhood disruption.

“They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve,” Abbott said Sunday in an interview on ABC News’ This Week. He framed local support as a prerequisite for future approvals: “If you’re a data center and you want to operate in Texas, you have to first get the approval of those in local communities.”

The regulatory action, directed earlier this month at the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, halts new grid-connection approvals until regulators complete a “comprehensive verification and audit” of pending projects, according to the Governor’s office and Houston Public Media. The move marks a striking reversal for a governor who spent years courting the industry as the cornerstone of his effort to brand Texas the “epicenter” of AI investment.

The pause has stalled roughly 1,800 data center projects tied to interconnection requests totaling approximately 474 gigawatts — more than five times ERCOT’s all-time peak electricity demand — according to Utility Dive and Yahoo Finance. Abbott’s office says the audit is necessary in part because fewer than 10% of data centers have been complying with existing state reporting requirements on power and water usage, according to press secretary Andrew Mahaleris, per Newsweek.

The scale of the Texas buildout is visible in independent market research. An August 16 analysis by Apollo Global Management’s chief economist, Torsten Sløk, found that Texas alone accounts for roughly 100 gigawatts of planned data center capacity, citing data from Cleanview — more than the next two largest states, Virginia and Utah, combined. Sløk wrote simply that “the data center boom is a Texas story.”

That dominance is almost entirely prospective, however. Virginia still leads the nation on capacity that is actually up and running, at 17 GW, versus Texas’s much larger pipeline of proposed projects. Texas isn’t yet the country’s biggest data center market in operation — it’s on track to become the biggest by a wide margin if even a fraction of that planned capacity gets built. That gap between what’s proposed and what’s actually constructed is the bottleneck Abbott’s new audit is designed to address.

Abbott’s tone has shifted markedly since data center proposals began drawing organized resistance in towns from Abilene to Sulphur Springs. Residents have packed local planning meetings, filed petitions, staged protests and pursued legal challenges against projects they say will strain power grids, drain water supplies and generate constant noise. Public polling backs up the scale of the resistance: a Gallup survey this year found seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area, with nearly half “strongly opposed.” A July Emerson College poll put opposition at 63%, up 21 percentage points from December 2025, while a Reuters/Ipsos survey in June found only 14% of Americans said they’d be comfortable living near one.

Some developers have already moved to fall in line. Abbott announced last week that Power House Data Centers, CoreWeave and Emergent Data Centers had agreed to comply with the new standards, while at least one prospective project chose to abandon construction plans rather than meet the requirements, according to the Governor’s office. Abbott has separately pointed to a Meta-linked facility near El Paso — which sits outside the main ERCOT grid — as a model project that intends to comply voluntarily, per Newsweek.

The comments also land amid an unusual public rift with President Donald Trump, who has called Abbott’s crackdown an economic “mistake.” The tension highlights a growing bipartisan political backlash against the data center industry even as Washington and state capitals compete to attract AI investment.

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Delaney Sawyer

Society Reporter

Delaney Sawyer covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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