Data center approvals could remain paused in Texas until legislators pass new state laws next year if Democrat Gina Hinojosa keeps her campaign promises after winning the governor’s race in a stunning victory last week.
Her statements on the campaign trail went beyond Gov. Greg Abbott’s current freeze on environmental permitting and grid connections for data centers during an audit period expected to be completed this year.
Grassroots opposition to data centers has mounted in communities across Texas, where critics across the political spectrum expressed concerns about the almost unbelievable projections for how much power the facilities could draw from the state’s grid and the unknown amount of water they would need to operate in a state with serious drought concerns.
Hinojosa attacked Abbott’s handling of the matter. She called for a data center moratorium to last until the Texas Legislature meets in January to pass “real protections so Texans can have a seat at the table to decide if and how data centers come into their communities.”
During her campaign, the governor-elect outlined a slate of priorities for lawmakers that included requiring data center operators to hire union workers, protecting communities’ water supplies, and stopping data center companies from using nondisclosure agreements that make it harder for the public to track project developments.
Similar to Abbott, Hinojosa also said she would push to ensure Texans wouldn’t pay more for electricity because of data centers and to stop tax subsidies depriving the state of billions in sales tax revenue.
“We can have economic development, and we can have protections for Texans,” she said in a September interview with Politico. “These things are not mutually exclusive.”
Hinojosa will be working with a Democrat-dominated Texas House. She takes office Jan 19.
Abbott slowly cracked down on the facilities, turning from a politician who in November 2025 heralded Texas as the “epicenter of AI development” to one who, starting in August, began issuing pauses on data center approvals at the state grid, then the environmental permitting agency so information about the facilities could be audited and collected.
How that information would be used remained to be seen, but Abbott had demanded data centers pay for their own electrical infrastructure — a process being worked out by state regulators — in addition to using water-efficient technology. He promised to pursue getting rid of tax breaks for data centers during the legislative session.
Data center-related donors, meanwhile, gave Abbott around $9 million since July 2025, The Texas Tribune reported, and in October, environmental and community advocates identified some environmental permits related to data centers they said had gotten approval anyway despite Abbott’s pause, forcing the permitting agency to shut down its online filing system.
Some county officials had also expressed frustration with their lack of authority under current state law to regulate data centers.
Data Center Watch found that 43% of the 74 gubernatorial candidates they studied in 36 states supported a data center moratorium or ban.
“We’ve just seen real anger in communities — big, small, in solid red counties and in deep blue counties alike,” said Kathryn Guerra, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality watchdog campaign director for Public Citizen, which identified the errant permit approvals. “What happened [last week] just seems to have been a reflection of that anger. We’re in a position now to listen to Texans and help advance solutions to those concerns that they have raised over the past year with the massive influx of data centers that Texas has seen.”
Elon Musk, who founded artificial intelligence company xAI and supported Abbott, posted on X: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”
A version of this story originally appeared in The Texas Tribune.
