The US needs a data center deal — not a moratorium

Texas’s grid operator is sitting on requests for more than 225 gigawatts of new electricity demand. About three-quarters of it is from data centers. The entire grid, which powers 90 percent of Texas and serves more than 26 million people, tops out at roughly 85 gigawatts.  

This isn’t just an energy story, though. It is one visible symptom of a broader governance failure — one that spans power, water, land use and community trust, and is arriving faster than anyone in Washington, Austin or Silicon Valley is equipped to handle. 

Earlier this year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) answered by proposing a national moratorium on data center construction, pausing all new development until Congress passes sweeping AI legislation covering worker protections, environmental standards, civil rights, chip exports, and wealth distribution from AI. I have some sympathy for their frustration, but this isn’t the answer.  

I have spent my career at the intersection of energy, environment and community trust, in Texas and nationally. I have watched infrastructure booms and busts up close. I have seen what happens when infrastructure scales faster than governance. Communities get run over, backlash builds, projects stall, and policymakers reach for the blunt tools — a moratorium, a preemption law, a federal mandate. That’s where we are.

Data centers are becoming as essential to the U.S. as the national highway system or the electric grid. But unlike those earlier systems, they are being deployed at exponential scale without a modern framework to align their effects with their benefits.

Their effects are intensely local — on power systems,........

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