Texas Just Froze All New Data Center Permits
Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait
Texas' grid operator ERCOT saw its large-load queue explode from 63 GW to 474 GW in 18 months, with data centers making up about 90%. After ordering them to pay for their own upgrades, Governor Abbott halted all new permits. The piece explains why interconnection is so hard: speculative projects, community pushback, and a grid built for reliability above all. It also explores behind-the-meter workarounds and why the grid still wins.
The grid is built for the hot summer days and frigid winters when failure can mean life or death. That duty is what makes sizing the grid so hard; you build for a few peak hours but pay for it all year.
- Rapzid
474 GW!!! Good God that's at LEAST the 5x our peak winter demand for the entire state.
And they want to mostly power it with on site GAS?!
What is even happening.
- state_less
I don't think the model of highly concentrated data centers makes a lot of sense. From a security standpoint, you can target them easily. It's better for everyone (except perhaps a handful of elite power-mongers) if the hardware is distributed among the populace. I've pushed for something like this before, where each home has a 128GB+ powerful computing rig they can use to run LLMs, generate images and whathaveyou.
I get why the people in power want it, you can concentrate dependence on your asset, do surveillance and industrial espionage. But it's so obviously better to have the power distributed out among the people that it's a no brainer for the average joe/jane.
No doubt, there is still a need for large datacenters to generate models, but we should be looking to a more sustainable/distributed approach when it comes to inference, or running the models. That way people can keep their data, not have their ideas ripped off, not be subject to the whims of whatever policy some technocrat dreams up and not be shit out of luck if someone strikes us-east1 or some such place.
- seereadhack
FYI the Texas grid produces the most power of any state, twice as much in fact as either California or Florida.
- sashank_1509
I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but to me this technological revolution more than any other in history feels like Silicon Valley and its VC class going to war with rest of human society.
> AI is needed to reindustrialize America.
It seems like they have no idea or are willfully deceiving why Americans want to reindustrialize USA. It’s not because they feel bad that things aren’t made in USA anymore, it’s because they want those manufacturing jobs back. If you replace humans with robots, it’s almost like a monkey paw’s fulfillment of a wish. They want to build 2 Trillion of data centers to get rid of your white collar jobs and your blue collar job, and you’ll be happy for it cause GDP go up. SMH
- newsy888
This entire essay is so obviously Claude