Greg Abbott turned from data center 'epicenter' booster to skeptic—and Trump is calling it an economic 'mistake'

Greg Abbott has gone from cheerleader to critic of the data center boom he once sold as Texas’ future. On Sunday, the Republican governor said the companies brought the backlash on themselves by moving into communities with too little warning and too little local buy-in, and by stirring anger over power use, water use and disruption.

That shift is not just rhetorical. Earlier this month, Abbott told Texas regulators to stop approving new grid connections for data centers until they finish a “comprehensive verification and audit” of pending projects. By Abbott’s account, that pause is already affecting roughly 1,800 projects tied to interconnection requests totaling about 474 gigawatts. That is far beyond ERCOT’s all-time peak demand, and Abbott says data centers account for about 90% of the load.

The scale is why the politics have changed so fast. An August 16 analysis by Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk, using Cleanview data, found Texas has roughly 100 gigawatts of planned data center capacity — more than Virginia and Utah combined. Virginia still leads on capacity that’s actually operating, but Texas has the bigger pipeline by a huge margin. If even part of it gets built, the state is staring at a very different power map.

Abbott is now leaning hard on local consent. He says data centers need approval from communities before they can operate in Texas, and he’s tying the audit to complaints that fewer than 10% of data centers are filing the state’s required power and water reports. Some developers are already adjusting: Power House Data Centers, CoreWeave and Emergent Data Centers have agreed to comply with the new standards, while at least one prospective project walked away rather than meet them.

The backlash is no longer just a Texas story, either. Polls show broad public resistance, and politicians in other states are now running against projects their own parties once welcomed. Trump’s claim that Abbott’s move is an economic mistake fits the old playbook. Abbott’s new one is simpler: if the industry wants Texas, it has to earn the right to be there first.