Texas Maintains Datacenter Moratorium as Audit of Power and Water Demand Continues

Texas continues its moratorium on new datacenter approvals for grid interconnection while regulators audit the industry’s power and water use. Governor Greg Abbott ordered the pause earlier this month after resident complaints over rising electric bills and water consumption.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas interconnection queue holds roughly 474 gigawatts of proposed demand, more than five times the state’s record peak load. About 90 percent of the requests come from datacenters. BloombergNEF estimates the pause puts nearly 50 gigawatts, or 20 percent of the total US pipeline, at risk of delay.

Abbott said many projects had not worked in collaboration with the state or local governments. Fewer than one in ten companies informed the state of their power needs. Since the freeze, Meta, Google, OpenAI and Amazon have pledged to cover their own power and water costs. Several other firms, including Galaxy, Compass Datacenters and Montera Infrastructure, have committed to the governor’s standards.

President Trump called the freeze a mistake, arguing that datacenters could become bigger than oil. State regulators say the audit will take several months. The moratorium remains in place until it is complete. Any project that fails the verification process will be denied connection to the grid.

The action follows a similar one-year pause in New York and reflects growing concern in multiple states about the scale of electricity and water demand from the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom.