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Texas Just Froze Every New Data Center on Its Grid — and the Waiting List Is Five Times the Whole State's Power Record · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the waiting list outgrew the power grid. The Texas Tribune reported Monday that Governor Greg Abbott has halted every new data center trying to connect to the Texas grid.
• 0:14
  [Guest] He ordered ERCOT, the state grid operator, to audit every data center in the interconnection queue. Nothing advances until they finish.
• 0:22
  [Host] Texas has never met a power plant it didn't like. Why now?
• 0:27
  [Guest] The queue holds over four hundred seventy-four gigawatts of requests. The Texas grid has never carried ninety gigawatts at once.
• 0:35
  [Host] That cannot all be real demand.
• 0:37
  [Guest] About ninety percent of those requests are data centers. Whether the demand behind them exists is what the audit exists to answer.
• 0:45
  [Host] So what set him off?
• 0:47
  [Guest] A survey. Regulators asked data center companies how much power and water they would actually use. Of the three hundred seventy-seven companies notified, twenty-eight answered.
• 0:57
  [Host] They wouldn't say how much water they'd draw, and they kept their place in line anyway.
• 1:03
  [Guest] State Representative Brad Buckley called that response rate pretty pathetic at a House hearing in June. This week, the governor stopped the line.
• 1:12
  [Host] Notice what Abbott didn't call this.
• 1:14
  [Guest] A moratorium. Governor Hochul used that word in New York in July, and the President went after her on Truth Social, calling data centers Money Machines and liquid gold.
• 1:26
  [Host] And he named where they should go instead.
• 1:29
  [Guest] Arizona, Florida, Alabama. And Texas.
• 1:31
  [Host] Weeks later, Texas closed its own door.
• 1:33
  [Guest] But Abbott's letter says audit, not moratorium. Same effect, a noun that picks no fight with the White House.
• 1:41
  [Guest] There are only so many places to stop a buildout. Zoning, state permits, environmental review, and the grid connection. The first three make headlines. The last one just puts you in line.
• 1:53
  [Host] If the demand is real, doesn't this move to Louisiana or Wyoming?
• 1:58
  [Guest] There's a bigger hole than that. Some developers are already skipping the grid entirely, building their own generation on site. No interconnection request, so no queue to audit.
• 2:09
  [Host] So the strongest veto has a door cut into it.
• 2:12
  [Guest] The companies with the most capital walk through it first. The queue only disciplines the ones who need somebody else's wires.
• 2:21
  [Host] And if you live there?
• 2:22
  [Guest] Abbott told regulators in June that data centers must fully fund the wires built to serve them, so Texans stop paying for lines to projects that never break ground.
• 2:34
  [Host] Is anyone building less instead of asking for more?
• 2:37
  [Guest] Wired reported last week that LinkedIn is holding its chip spending and its compute footprint flat for the whole fiscal year. Erran Berger, its engineering chief, told Wired they roughly doubled what the hardware they already own delivers, in six months.
• 2:53
  [Host] No new silicon. No new substation.
• 2:55
  [Guest] Utilization, distillation, smarter scheduling. Berger called that an unusual thing to say out loud right now.
• 3:01
  [Host] An efficiency gain that never shows up in a queue.
• 3:05
  [Guest] Patrick Deglon's essay The Electron Gap named this constraint: compute is no longer limited by chips, it's limited by electrons. Whoever controls the connection controls the buildout.
• 3:16
  [Host] Which makes four hundred seventy-four gigawatts a wish list, not a forecast.
• 3:20
  [Guest] The President pointed those companies at Texas in July. Texas spent August asking them to prove they exist. The ones who can't answer will build their own gas plant and never stand in anybody's line again.
• 3:34
  [Host] Deglon puts energy inside the Foundation in Unscarcity, the layer meant to flow like tap water, always on, no meter running. What Texas is auditing is who gets the tap.
• 3:46
  [Guest] For more on the electron gap, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.