08/11/2026
The President says data centers could be bigger than oil in Texas. Maybe. But that's not the question that matters — and on August 3rd, Texas quietly proved it.
Governor Abbott ordered a pause on new data center grid connections pending a full audit of what these projects are actually asking for. Not because AI is bad. Because somebody finally has to pay the electric bill.
Here's what's really going on:
ERCOT — the grid operator for most of Texas — is sitting on roughly 474 gigawatts of large-load interconnection requests. About 90% of that is data centers. For scale, that's more than five times the state's all-time record peak demand. Requests aren't the same as projects that get built, and I say so in the video. But when 1,800 people show up asking for the keys to a very large truck, you don't just hand them out and hope everybody watched the safety video.
Meanwhile, in Pecos County, Amazon is tied to a campus that would run on a giant on-site natural gas plant — 35 turbines, up to 7.65 gigawatts, permitted for as much as 33 million tons of CO2 a year. That's a permitted ceiling, not a promise, and plants routinely run below permit. But if built as described, it would be the single largest source of climate pollution in the country.
That's not a footnote to the AI boom. That IS the AI boom.
In this one I get into:
• What "bigger than oil" actually means — and why oil is a whole system, not an industry
• The 474 GW number, and the honest caveat nobody attaches to it
• "They'll generate their own power" — great, but with what?
• Why the cloud is a building, and somebody lives next to it
• The jobs question, with honest labels: construction jobs vs. permanent jobs
• Five things a community should demand before saying yes
I'm not anti-data-center. I'm anti-magical-thinking. AI has to live somewhere, and that somewhere is a real county, on a real grid, near a real family's water and air. If a project is good, it survives the questions. If it can't survive the questions, it was never a good deal.
—
📘 MY BOOK — "Make the Show" is available now on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HBS2X6N9
The show you keep almost starting is not going to make itself.
🔔 SUBSCRIBE for practical AI and tech explained for people who remember dial-up:
https://www.youtube.com/?sub_confirmation=1
—
SOURCES / GO READ IT YOURSELF:
Texas pauses data center interconnections (Utility Dive, 474 GW figure):
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-hits-pause-data-center-interconnections/827046/
Abbott orders ERCOT + PUCT audit (Houston Public Media):
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-environment/2026/08/03/558529/gov-greg-abbott-pauses-new-data-centers-until-ercot-puct-audit-energy-water-usage/
What the pause means procedurally (Akin, legal analysis):
https://www.akingump.com/en/insights/alerts/texas-pauses-data-center-interconnections-pending-statewide-audit
Amazon's Pecos County gas plant (TechCrunch):
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/08/planned-amazon-data-center-could-become-the-biggest-climate-polluter-in-the-u-s/
The 7.65 GW / 35-turbine / 33M ton permit detail (Tom's Hardware):
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/amazons-new-7-65gw-texas-ai-data-center-power-plant-could-become-the-largest-source-of-co2-pollution-in-the-us-custom-35-turbine-gas-plant-authorized-to-emit-33-million-tons-of-annual-greenhouse-gases
https://youtu.be/ksZ0h96Wwlg
