Monday, June 15, 2026

Texas's June 23 Hearing Opens the Water Rulebook Before It Hardens

The June 23 hearing in Austin will set the language for water, power, and incentive rules that 248 planned Texas campuses will live under, while 75 builds worth $130 billion have already been blocked nationally this year. Developers showing up with site-specific water mechanics, locked generation, and county-level relationships will write the rules; the rest will inherit them.

Today's Lead

Community opposition has crystallized into a hard permitting constraint. Data Center Watch counts 75 projects worth $130 billion blocked or delayed in Q1 2026 alone, matching all of 2025, while at least 69 jurisdictions have moratoria on the books and public opposition to new builds climbed from 50% to 70% between late 2025 and spring 2026.

Texas has dodged the worst of it, but the Texas House Natural Resources Committee meets June 23 on data center water use, and ERCOT just logged 519 large-load interconnection requests in two years versus 24 the year prior. The window to shape rules before they harden is now.

[1]·[2]·[3]

Politics

Local control vacuum meets a legislative calendar

Waco's "Data Center Impacts" event drew 180 residents and 50 question cards around a structural problem: Texas counties can't zone, but nearly half of the state's 248 planned data centers sit in unincorporated land. Hood County has eight proposals in that gap. Governor Abbott has recommended measures on water, electrical demand, and tax incentives, and the House Natural Resources Committee convenes June 23 at the Capitol with public testimony open.

Elsewhere the picture is harder. Seattle paused five projects. New York passed a one-year freeze. Maine nearly enacted a statewide ban through October 2027. Federal cover is thinning too: OMB Memorandum M-25-03 sunsets September 30, 2026, and over 300 state-level data center bills have landed across 30 states in the first six weeks of 2026. Risk: developers who skip the June 23 hearing and the incentive-conditioning conversation with county commissioners will inherit whatever language the room writes without them.

[3]·[4]·[5]

Power

Capital concentrates around whoever owns the electrons

KKR's new Helix Digital Infrastructure launched with $10 billion-plus in commitments, Adam Selipsky leading, Nvidia as founding chip partner, and Texas-based Vistra as preferred power provider. That last piece is the tell. NTT is raising at least $1 billion through Citigroup for U.S. expansion. Duke Energy booked $1.58 billion in Q1 profit with 7.6 GW of data center load in its pipeline and 5 GW already under construction.

Meanwhile Joule Capital Partners is bypassing the queue entirely, deploying 636 Caterpillar natural gas engines toward 1.5 GW of captive generation on a 4,000-acre Utah campus, with hosting starting this year. ERCOT's queue holds 438,595 MW of applications, roughly a third of all U.S. generation, with 90% tied to data centers. Risk: site-first developers without signed power or captive generation are now bidding against one-stop platforms that institutional capital prefers. Land and zoning lose to a locked PPA every time.

[6]·[7]·[8]·[2]

Water

Closed-loop and rights transfers become the permit-unlock

The Guardian's analysis of 809 planned U.S. facilities found 517 in drought-affected zones, and U.S. data center water demand could hit 73 billion gallons by 2028 versus 17 billion in 2023. Project Jupiter, the 1,400-acre STACK and Oracle build six miles from the Texas border in Doña Ana County, shows the unlock mechanics: Oracle pivoted from gas turbines to fuel cells, committed to 11 million gallons/day of non-potable recycled water in closed loops, and STACK bought existing rights from a sod farm rather than seeking new allocations.

Amazon disclosed 2.5 billion gallons consumed in 2025, down 2% year-over-year, with claimed fleet efficiency of 0.12 L/kWh against an industry average of 0.84. The disclosure excluded leased-site water, indirect power-plant water, and reclaimed-water percentages. Risk: Texas permitting authorities will read those gaps the same way New Mexico's State Engineer read Jupiter's, and developers offering aggregate fleet averages instead of site-specific water plans and verified offsets will lose acreage to those who came in with mechanics ready.

[9]

Sources we cited

9 articles across 9 publishers · 107 reviewed today

[1]Tom's Hardware
More than 75 data center build-outs worth $130 billion have been successfully blocked in the first three months of 2026 — bipartisan opposition mounts nationwide over fears of soaring power and water costs
Jun 13, 2026·This could put a dent towards the availability of compute in the future. Data center projects are being delayed nationwide as many oppositi…
[2]Texas Energy and Power Newsletter
New Rules for Data Centers | Reading and Podcast Picks - June 14, 2026
Jun 14, 2026·The Texas Tribune maps data center buildout; Google's bet on the grid; Details on the Governor's letter to PUC and ERCOT; Record demand pred…
[3]The Waco Bridge
You asked us questions about data centers. We answered them.
Jun 15, 2026·Our “Data Center Impacts” event last month brought an expert panel to McLennan Community College’s Cameron Hall to bring clarity to debates …
[4]Crypto Briefing
US government allows key data center regulation to expire in September
Jun 15, 2026·The federal rule governing data center efficiency standards will sunset with no replacement, creating a regulatory vacuum that touches every…
[5]Datacenter Knowledge
Data Centers’ Next Hurdle: Public Trust
Jun 15, 2026·The industry faces a "public legitimacy problem" where securing social license and trust has become as essential to project approval as secu…
[6]The Real Deal
Billions Flow Across Data Center Deals Despite Headwinds
Jun 12, 2026·For all of the controversy dogging data centers these days — prompting municipalities to impose moratoriums on their development — there sur…
[7]BloombergNEF
US Data Center Builder Goes Off-Grid to Speed Deployments
Feb 27, 2026·By Vandana Gombar, Senior Editor, BloombergNEF How quickly can you get me power? That’s the key question Conor Andrus keeps hearing as his …
[8]WFAE
Duke Energy announces nearly $1.6 billion in profit, courts new data center development in the Carolinas
May 5, 2026·Duke earned $1.58 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2026, up $180 million from this time last year. Duke Energy released its first…
[9]NPR
Worries over water as a giant data center moves into the New Mexico desert
Jun 14, 2026·The building site for the Project Jupiter data center in Doña Ana County, New Mexico …

Search across 25,000+ tracked articles → coming with paid