Texas

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 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. ...