Drone Strikes, 130GW Queue, and Texas Writing Rules Before 2027

The week opened with a geopolitical shock that reframed everything that followed. Drone strikes on three AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain collapsed two of three availability zones in AWS's ME-CENTRAL-1 region, taking down Emirates NBD, Careem, and multiple fintech platforms simultaneously. Amazon's stock paradoxically rallied 3% as analysts priced in mandatory multi-region redundancy spending. The message to Texas developers was immediate: physical location isn't just a cost variable, it's a risk-pricing decision. By Friday, that same logic was playing out in committee rooms and groundbreaking ceremonies across the state, where developers who've solved both power and water constraints in the same project are pulling decisively ahead of those who haven't.

Texas Writes Its Own Rulebook, and the Clock Is Running

Nine months remain before the 2027 legislative session hardens into statute. House Speaker Dustin Burrows and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick have already launched interim charges covering water, energy, tax exemptions, and community impacts. The first House hearing on water use took place April 9. Then on April 10, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas told the House Committee on State Affairs that over 130,000 MW of new projects entered the interconnection queue in the last six weeks, with data centers driving roughly 87% of that growth. He's proposing batch processing over 4-to-5-year windows to replace the failing serial approach.

Senate Finance Chair Joan Huffman's legislation to repeal or reform Texas's data center tax exemption, now bleeding $1.3 billion annually against a 2027-28 projected cost exceeding $3 billion, lands in that same window. Developers who testify early, with auditable numbers, shape the outcome. Those who don't will inherit whatever legislators write without them.

Power and Water Aren't Separate Problems. Caprock Solved Both at Once.

That's the week's real synthesis. Aligned Data Centers broke ground on Project Caprock, a 540 MW, $5 billion campus near Abernathy in Hale County, deploying DeltaFlow liquid cooling with closed-loop air-cooled heat rejection that doesn't draw on the Ogallala Aquifer, while simultaneously funding its own dedicated electrical infrastructure through Xcel Energy. Same week, Lancium CEO Michael McNamara told legislators his Abilene campus consumed just 4% of its allocated water, framing water scarcity as "a shortage of engineering and money." Skybox claimed its average facility uses less than five households. PUC Chairman Thomas Gleeson immediately cautioned that self-reported data lacks rigor. That's the fight: developers are trying to set the measurement standard before regulators do.

Behind-the-meter gas is accelerating alongside this. Microsoft and Chevron are in exclusive talks on a $7 billion, 2,500 MW West Texas plant. Meta is funding 10 gas plants totaling 7.5 GW for a single Louisiana campus. Soluna closed a $53 million acquisition of the 150 MW Briscoe Wind Farm to own its electrons outright. Meanwhile, Medina County's water manager Scooter Mangold forced Microsoft to cut consumption 85% by demanding blueprints and proposing air-cooled designs. Community leverage is real, and it's being applied.

What to Watch

• •Williams Companies breaks ground April 14 on the first new New York pipeline in over a decade; watch whether that triggers accelerated permitting opposition that narrows Texas's gas infrastructure advantage.
• •PUC Chairman Gleeson's push for rigorous water measurement standards: whether Lancium and Skybox can produce auditable third-party data will determine if developer self-reporting survives the 2027 session or gets replaced by mandatory disclosure rules.
• •Huffman's tax exemption legislation takes shape; the delta between "repeal" and "reform" will define the economics of every active Texas project in the pipeline.
• •Pennsylvania's DEP interconnection RFI closes June 5; if PJM's Expedited Track delivers Generator Interconnection Agreements within 10 months, capital that's been defaulting to Texas faces a credible alternative.