Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has spent months positioning himself as a hard-liner on data centers, but newly obtained records and interviews show that less than a year ago, his top aides quietly reassured Big Tech that the Lone Star State wanted their projects and would help clear the way.
On Dec. 16, 2025, Abbott’s senior staff held a closed-door “transmission roundtable,” Politico reported. Google, OpenAI, Meta, Amazon Web Services and Nvidia were listed as confirmed attendees, along with the state’s top electricity regulator, the head of its grid manager and the four largest transmission companies. Representatives of the oil and gas and chemical industries also attended, according to a person in the room. No one from the state agency that represents residential ratepayers was on the list.
The records don’t show whether Abbott himself attended, and his office did not say whether he knew about the meeting. But according to the attendee, his staff made the state’s position plain: data centers were welcome, and officials would help the industry get past the obstacles holding projects back.
“The point of that meeting really was to say, ‘We’re committed to fixing this and finding a better path forward,’” the person said.
Two days later, the head of the state’s grid manager, ERCOT, unveiled a fast-track process for connecting data centers to the grid. It bore several key similarities to a joint proposal Google and another data center developer filed the same day. Within one quarter, requests from large power users to connect to the grid more than quadrupled, from 48 gigawatts to 198. Eventually the queue topped 470 GW, 90 percent of it data centers.
Then came the backlash, with furious residents packing town halls. A state Senate hearing ran 15 hours as rural landowners railed against data centers and massive new transmission lines. Facing the toughest reelection fight of his career, Abbott paused data center grid approvals in August.
His office now says the December meeting was meant to tell the industry that “data centers must make immediate changes and put Texas residents and communities first.”
Some Republicans aren’t buying the turnaround. State Rep. Wes Virdell said he warned Abbott’s chief of staff a year ago that voters in his Hill Country district were turning on GOP leadership.
“I think Abbott, once he saw the polling roughly five to six months after I told him he’s losing support in Hill Country over this stuff, he changed his tune,” Virdell said. “It’s very frustrating to give common sense to the folks in leadership, and for it to be completely ignored until polling shows I was correct.”
Virdell also said that when he told Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that data centers were going up next to homes, Lutnick replied, “Oh yeah, I heard that,” and moved on.
Meanwhile, the money has kept coming. A Texas Tribune analysis found that Abbott took in about $2.8 million from data center-linked donors after he announced the pause, his biggest monthly haul from the industry this election cycle.
Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa called the pause a farce. The audit behind it is expected to wrap up Dec. 10, about a month after the election.
“Data center approvals will be back up and running in December,” Hinojosa said, “because Abbott is bought and paid for by global data center corporations.”
