Data-Centers

In February, residents in San Marcos packed city hall for eight hours to fight a proposed data center that would have pulled more than 25 million gallons of water a year from the river the town is named after. One protester wore a blow-up salamander costume, a nod to the endangered Texas blind salamander that lives in those springs. A crowd of hundreds sang and chanted outside. Inside, resident after resident told the council to reject the zoning change the project needed. The council voted it down. ...

Texas is in the middle of building one of the largest transmission infrastructure projects in its history: three 765-kilovolt power line corridors stretching over 1,200 miles across the state. The stated purpose is grid reliability for the Permian Basin. The real story is more complicated, and it involves eminent domain, a generation shortfall nobody’s fixed yet, and a bill that every Texas ratepayer will help pay whether they ever see one of these towers or not. ...

Texas spent the last few years marketing itself as the place AI companies go to build without friction. Cheap land, a deregulated grid, and a governor who called the state the “epicenter” of AI. That pitch just hit a wall. On August 3, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to conduct a full audit of every data center currently working its way through the state’s grid interconnection process. Until that audit wraps up, no new data center gets approved to connect. That single directive touches roughly 1,800 projects and 474 gigawatts of power requests, more than five times the grid’s all-time peak demand. ...

On May 11, 2026, the Cooke County Commissioners Court passed a resolution asking the state of Texas to give counties more say over how data centers get built and run. The resolution doesn’t oppose the industry outright. It says plainly that these facilities will matter to the state’s economy, then says just as plainly that they use enormous amounts of water and electricity, and that rural communities like this one are left with little control over either. Cooke County isn’t an outlier here. It’s one of a growing list of rural Texas counties reaching the same conclusion at close to the same time. ...