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

The political data-center backlash is gathering steam — and turning bipartisan, as Texas Gov.

Greg Abbott delivered his sharpest rebuke yet of the artificial-intelligence data center industry on Sunday.

“They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve,” Abbott said in an interview on ABC News’ This Week .

The Republican governor argued that companies rushed facilities into communities with little advance notice or engagement, fueling anger over electricity demand, water consumption and neighborhood disruption.

The rhetorical shift has been accompanied by concrete regulatory action.

Earlier this month, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to halt new grid-connection approvals for data centers until regulators complete a “comprehensive verification and audit” of pending projects, according to the Governor’s office and Houston Public Media .

The comments mark a striking reversal for a governor who spent years courting the data center industry as the cornerstone of his effort to brand Texas the “ epicenter ” of AI investment.

They also land amid an unusual public rift with President Donald Trump, who has called Abbott’s crackdown an economic “mistake” — and at a moment when Texas’ dominance of the industry’s pipeline is larger than Wall Street analysts had previously appreciated.

The rhetorical shift has been accompanied by concrete regulatory action.

Earlier this month, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to halt new grid-connection approvals for data centers until regulators complete a “ comprehensive verification and audit ” of pending projects.

A Texas-sized bet The scale of the buildout Abbott shows up in independent market research.

An August 16 analysis by Apollo Global Management’s chief economist, Torsten Sløk, found that Texas alone accounts for roughly 100 gigawatts of planned data center capacity, citing data from Cleanview — more than the next two largest states, Virginia and Utah, combined.

Slok wrote simply that “the data center boom is a Texas story.” That dominance is almost entirely prospective, however.

Virginia still leads the nation on capacity that is actually up and running, at 17 GW, versus Texas’s much larger pipeline of proposed projects, meaning that Texas isn’t yet the country’s biggest data center market in operation — it’s on track to become the biggest by a wide margin if even a fraction of that planned capacity gets built.