Following Texas's data center boom -- energy demands, water use, economic impact, and communities navigating rapid tech expansion.
Governor Greg Abbott's deadline for regulators to spell out how they will keep data-center costs off Texans' electric bills arrives Friday, but the state's push to rein in the industry is running into a problem it cannot regulate away: the calendar.
Texas utility regulators have two days to answer the governor.
As the Public Utility Commission of Texas approaches a cluster of routing decisions on the state's first 765-kilovolt transmission lines, the fight increasingly turns on a single question: whether the demand forecast for West Texas — driven largely by oil-and-gas electrification in the Permian Basin and, increasingly, by data centers — justifies stringing ultra-high-voltage lines across ranchland.
Tech giant Meta Platforms, Inc.
The numbers sound almost implausible: more than 400 gigawatts of prospective new electricity users are asking to connect to the Texas grid — roughly four times the state's all-time current demand — and the vast majority are data centers.
Texas' effort to control who pays for the power that data centers demand reaches two hard markers this month.
Texas is learning to adjust quickly to rapid population growth and increasingly frequent extreme weather.
One of the largest single data-center projects yet planned in Texas is approaching an operational milestone in a rural county west of Fort Worth.
A new statewide survey finds that a majority of Texas voters do not want a data center built in their own community, a result that lands as the state races to become the country's largest market for the AI and crypto facilities.
In much of Texas, a data center can sink a well and pump as much groundwater as it wants, and no state agency is empowered to stop it.