Texas, long the easiest place in the US to build data centers, may be losing that status after the November midterm elections. Democrats James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, and others won key races, and data centers were a central campaign issue, according to the source report.
The source says Democrats will take control of the Texas House for the first time in 24 years. It also says Gina Hinojosa beat Republican incumbent Greg Abbott for governor. Hinojosa supported tax breaks for data centers in 2023 but later pushed for a full moratorium on them, the report says.
Developers told the source's panelists that the governor's office had stopped responding to their emails. On September 21, Abbott directed a key state regulator to halt data center permits, according to the report. Panelists at the DCD conference in Ashburn, Virginia, expected existing projects might slow and new ones could be halted.
The report describes several large projects now underway in Texas. The Stargate Frontier data center in Shackelford County is projected to serve 1,820 megawatts. Nexus Hubbard, intended mostly to serve Anthropic, has a planned size of 6,400 megawatts. The report says Nexus Hubbard is the second-largest data center being built in the US, behind Meta