Some of the biggest companies building data centers in Texas are lining up to say they will meet Gov. Greg Abbott’s new standards for an industry facing growing scrutiny over its use of electricity and water.
Meta, Google and OpenAI are among the companies that have said they will comply with Abbott’s standards, which are intended to keep data center development from raising costs for Texans, straining the state’s resources and disrupting nearby communities.
“We’re seeing the floodgates open of data centers across the state, companies I’ve never heard of before, saying they will fully comply with the standards that I’ve established,” Abbott said Monday at a press event in Austin.
The commitments come as data centers become an increasingly political issue in Texas and around the country.
Texas is now the fastest-growing market for the massive facilities filled with computers that power artificial intelligence tools. With that growth has come concern about what the projects mean for electricity prices, water supplies and rural communities.
The numbers facing the Texas grid help explain the concern.
Facilities seeking to connect to the grid have submitted requests totaling 474 gigawatts, according to Abbott’s office. That is nearly five times the grid’s all-time peak electricity demand. About 90% of those requests are from data centers.
And with the midterm elections approaching, elected officials on both sides of the aisle increasingly view data centers as a political issue.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican who is not seeking reelection, has been particularly outspoken about the potential consequences for his party.
“We’re going to get our ass kicked, we really are if we don’t get on this. We should own this issue,” Miller told Straight Arrow in July.
What is Texas doing about data centers?
Abbott made his first official statement acknowledging potential problems with the state’s data center boom in June.
“The rapid scale of data center development requires oversight to ensure everyday Texans are not burdened with the costs,” Abbott wrote in a June 10 letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Abbott called for data centers to pay for new power infrastructure required by their projects and bring new sources of electricity onto the grid. He also called for developers to use water-efficient technologies, report annual water and electricity data to the PUCT and address impacts on surrounding communities, including excessive noise.
Then, on Aug. 3, Abbott announced a “comprehensive verification and audit” of data centers seeking to connect to the ERCOT grid.
Projects that do not meet the state’s requirements will not be allowed to connect, Abbott said. He has also said new data centers should help lower Texans’ electricity bills.
Abbott has not called the policy a moratorium. But under his announcement, projects cannot move forward until the audit is completed.
That approach has drawn criticism from President Donald Trump.
Trump called Texas’ pause on data center grid connections a mistake in a Friday interview with Punchbowl News, saying “data centers could be bigger than oil” for the Texas economy.
Trump has backed his own set of standards through the nonbinding Ratepayer Protection Pledge. Dozens of technology companies and more than 100 power providers have signed the pledge, along with Abbott and 22 other Republican governors.
The two approaches share some of the same goals. But Trump’s pledge does not include clear verification requirements that a data center must satisfy before being allowed to connect to the grid.
Tech companies say they’ll meet Abbott’s standards
Over the past week, companies behind data center projects have started publicly committing to Abbott’s requirements.
OpenAI was among the companies to do so.
“AI infrastructure should pay its own way, support a reliable grid, use water responsibly, protect neighboring communities and operate with transparency and accountability,” Uday Ruddarraju, chief technology officer of compute at OpenAI, wrote in a letter to Abbott.
Meta said in a press release that it supports Abbott’s audit and “efforts to protect ratepayers, conserve water and promote responsible data center development in Texas.”
Mara Holdings, a major cryptocurrency mining company in Texas, has also said it intends to comply.
Amazon, Google and at least seven lesser-known data center companies have publicly said they will follow Abbott’s standards as well.
Those announcements, however, do not mean the projects have cleared the state’s review.
Each project still has to go through the PUCT and ERCOT process. And exactly how the audit will work remains unclear.
ERCOT is seeking approval from the PUCT to pause the process of connecting data centers to the grid.
“The audit and verification process has not started yet,” Rich Parsons, communications director at the PUCT, said in an email. “All data centers will have to respond to questions related to their eligibility to be interconnected in ERCOT.”
