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The data center backlash reaches Texas

Texas is auditing hundreds of proposed data centers as communities across the U.S. push back against rising costs of the AI boom

Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

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Last week, Greg Abbott $ABT, the governor of Texas, ordered regulators to audit every data center waiting for a spot on the state's electricity grid. The order froze the first stage of ERCOT’s new review process for large power users. The Texas grid operator is sorting through requests for 474 gigawatts of new electricity — more than five times the state’s record peak demand — and Abbott says roughly 90% of it is for data centers.

Less than a month earlier, New York had imposed the country’s first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers. In between, city councils and county commissions from Minneapolis to rural Alabama adopted pauses of their own.

Texas is where this gets interesting. Few states have pursued the AI buildout more aggressively, or advertised themselves more enthusiastically as places where industry can build quickly. When even Texas decides hundreds of proposed projects need to prove they will not leave residents........

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