For years Texas was the easiest place in America to break ground on an AI campus. That door is swinging shut.
Texas voters handed the Senate seat to Democrat James Talarico and the governor’s mansion to Gina Hinojosa, ending Greg Abbott’s tenure and Ken Paxton’s Senate bid. Her party also took the state House for the first time in 24 years. Both statewide winners campaigned hard against data centers.
Developer patience frayed before the polls closed. At an industry conference in Ashburn, Virginia, panelists said Texas stopped being friendly in September, when Abbott ordered a regulator to halt data center permits. Hinojosa, who once backed sector tax breaks, spent her campaign demanding a moratorium.
The prize is enormous. Stargate Frontier in Shackelford County is designed for 1,820 megawatts, roughly the size of SpaceX’s Colossus 2 in Tennessee and more than double any operating Texas site. Nexus Hubbard, built largely for Anthropic, is planned at 6,400 megawatts, second in the country only to Meta’s Hyperion in Louisiana.
Lenders had already grown choosier about the projects they finance.
Voters split, county by county
The ballot was not a clean mandate. Dallas County went blue, yet nearby Ellis County, which leads the state in permit requests, stuck with Abbott and Paxton. Cameron County on the southern border shifted Democratic. Mitchell and Scurry out west stayed red.
That patchwork matters because no single office grants or denies a permit. City councils, county commissioners and state agencies each hold a piece of the decision. Local officials who want the tax revenue may resist a blanket freeze.
So the midterms sent a signal without settling the outcome. Texas still hosts the largest concentration of AI construction in the country. Whether it keeps that title now depends on local fights far messier than any campaign speech.
