The political data-center backlash is gathering steam — and turning bipartisan, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott delivered his sharpest rebuke yet of the artificial-intelligence data center industry on Sunday.
“They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve,” Abbott said in an interview on ABC News’ This Week. The Republican governor argued that companies rushed facilities into communities with little advance notice or engagement, fueling anger over electricity demand, water consumption and neighborhood disruption.
The rhetorical shift has been accompanied by concrete regulatory action. Earlier this month, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to halt new grid-connection approvals for data centers until regulators complete a “comprehensive verification and audit” of pending projects, according to the Governor’s office and Houston Public Media.
The comments mark a striking reversal for a governor who spent years courting the data center industry as the cornerstone of his effort to brand Texas the “epicenter” of AI investment. They also land amid an unusual public rift with President Donald Trump, who has called Abbott’s crackdown an economic “mistake” — and at a moment when Texas’ dominance of the industry’s pipeline is larger than Wall Street analysts had previously appreciated.
The rhetorical shift has been accompanied by concrete regulatory action. Earlier this month, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to halt new grid-connection approvals for data centers until regulators complete a “comprehensive verification and audit” of pending projects.
A Texas-sized bet
The scale of the buildout Abbott shows up in independent market research. An August 16 analysis by Apollo Global Management’s chief economist, Torsten Sløk, found that Texas alone accounts for roughly 100 gigawatts of planned data center capacity, citing data from Cleanview — more than the next two largest states, Virginia and Utah, combined. Slok wrote simply that “the data center boom is a Texas story.”
That dominance is almost entirely prospective, however. Virginia still leads the nation on capacity that is actually up and running, at 17 GW, versus Texas’s much larger pipeline of proposed projects, meaning that Texas isn’t yet the country’s biggest data center market in operation — it’s on track to become the biggest by a wide margin if even a fraction of that planned capacity gets built. That gap between what’s proposed and what’s actually constructed is the bottleneck Abbott’s new audit is designed to address.
From booster to skeptic
Abbott’s tone has shifted markedly since data center proposals began drawing organized resistance in towns from Abilene to Sulphur Springs. Residents have packed local planning meetings, filed petitions, staged protests and pursued legal challenges against projects they say will strain power grids, drain water supplies and generate constant noise.
The governor now attributes much of that backlash to the industry’s own conduct. “Gaining the support of people in local communities is essential,” Abbott said, framing local buy-in as a prerequisite for future approvals. “If you’re a data center and you want to operate in Texas, you have to first get the approval of those in local communities.”
Public polling backs up the scale of the resistance Abbott described. A Gallup survey this year found seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area, with nearly half “strongly opposed.” A July Emerson College poll put opposition at 63%, up 21 percentage points from December 2025, while a Reuters/Ipsos survey in June found only 14% of Americans said they’d be comfortable living near one.
The grid numbers driving the pause
The rhetorical shift has been accompanied by concrete regulatory action. Earlier this month, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to halt new grid-connection approvals for data centers until regulators complete a “comprehensive verification and audit” of pending projects, according to the Governor’s office and Houston Public Media.
After Abbott’s call for an audit, roughly 1,800 data center projects are now stalled, tied to interconnection requests totaling approximately 474 gigawatts — more than 5x ERCOT’s all-time peak electricity demand, and by Abbott’s account, driven roughly 90% by data centers, according to Utility Dive and Yahoo Finance. That interconnection-queue figure measures something related to, but not identical with, Apollo’s 100 GW “planned capacity” estimate — ERCOT’s number reflects raw grid-connection requests, many of which will never be built, while Cleanview’s figure is meant to capture projects further along in planning. Abbott’s office says the audit is necessary in part because fewer than 10% of data centers have been complying with existing state reporting requirements on power and water usage, according to press secretary Andrew Mahaleris, per Newsweek.
Some developers have already moved to fall in line. Abbott announced last week that Power House Data Centers, CoreWeave and Emergent Data Centers had agreed to comply with the new standards, while at least one prospective project chose to abandon construction plans rather than meet the requirements, according to the Governor’s office. Abbott has separately pointed to a Meta-linked facility near El Paso — which sits outside the main ERCOT grid — as a model project that intends to comply voluntarily, per Newsweek.
Abbott’s rift with Trump
Abbott’s turn against the industry he once championed is part of a much broader political phenomenon. In races from Ohio to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, candidates in both parties are scrambling to distance themselves from data center projects their own leaders spent years courting.
In Ohio, former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown has spent millions branding Republican Sen. Jon Husted “the face of data centers,” prompting the National Republican Senatorial Committee to privately warn AI companies that a Husted loss could chill industry support nationwide. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro — who spent years courting data-center investment from Amazon, Microsoft and Google — signed an executive order this month requiring local community approval before granting building permits, after Republican challenger Stacy Garrity accused him of “rolling out the red carpet” for developers. In Wisconsin, GOP gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany is attacking his Democratic opponent as “data center David Crowley,” while in Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed called for state and federal moratoriums days before winning his primary, and Republican Mike Rogers has since embraced a one-year moratorium of his own.
More than 200 data centers are under construction or planned in competitive House districts, and 40 of the 69 most competitive districts nationwide have a data center either planned or under construction, according to a Data Center Map analysis cited by Politico and Business Insider. Eight states have enacted legislation this year rolling back data center tax subsidies, with 17 more considering similar measures, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, cited by Politico. Even Virginia, the nation’s largest data center market by operating capacity, imposed a new consumption tax on data centers’ energy usage this year to help close a budget gap.
Industry insiders describe the moment in stark terms. “Some are viewing it as an ‘oh s—‘ moment,” one AI industry advocate told Politico. If even Texas is turning against you, you’ve got a mounting problem.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
