Texas Just Froze Every New Data Center on Its Grid — and the Waiting List Is Five Times the Whole State's Power Record
About This Episode
On August 3rd, Governor Greg Abbott ordered Texas regulators to audit every data center in ERCOT's grid interconnection queue and barred any project from advancing until that audit is complete. The queue holds more than 1,800 projects asking for over 474 gigawatts — more than five times the Texas grid's all-time peak demand. Roughly 90% of those requests are data centers.
Our Take
The AI buildout is being planned against a number nobody has verified — 474 gigawatts of requests in a state whose grid has never carried 90 — and the first serious check on it is not a law but a line, while LinkedIn quietly shows demand itself can be engineered down instead of built up.
Continue Reading on Unscarcity
Data Center Moratoriums: Who Vetoes the AI Buildout?
The article maps where the AI buildout can actually be stopped, and Texas just demonstrated that the veto point is not a statehouse vote but the grid interconnection queue itself.
GPT-4 Training: 50,000 MWh and the AI Energy Crisis
It frames electricity, not chips or talent, as the binding constraint on AI — which is exactly the constraint the 474-gigawatt Texas queue and LinkedIn's flat-compute pledge are attacking from opposite ends.