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Weekly recap · Feb 23 – 28, 2026

Hyperscalers Build Their Own Grid as Texas Counties Watch Helpless

Texas's datacenter buildout isn't waiting for the grid, and this week made clear it isn't waiting for local governments either. With 6.5 GW under construction, 22 GW in the pipeline, and Fri, hyperscalers have decided the fastest path to power is building it themselves. The result: a parallel generation system rising outside ERCOT's line of sight, a water crisis hiding behind the megawatt obsession, and rural communities discovering they have almost no legal tools to respond.

The week in briefings

  1. Mon Feb 23Texas Adds 58 GW of Gas in One Year. The Grid May Be the Last to Know.
  2. Tue Feb 2435 GW Pre-Leased, 107-Week Lead Times, Zero Margin for Error
  3. Wed Feb 25Co-Located Power Is the New Default. Texas Counties Can't Stop It.
  4. Thu Feb 26Turbines Ease the Power Bottleneck. 91 Billion Gallons Say Water Is Next.
  5. Fri Feb 276.5 GW Under Construction, 30% Slippage: The Real Cost of Texas's Datacenter Sprint
  6. Sat Feb 28Self-Supplied Power Is Table Stakes. Six States Are Already Closing the Door.

Bring Your Own Grid

Self-supplied power crossed from strategy into orthodoxy this week. Google locked a Wed in Wilbarger County, putting generation assets on pre-interconnected land. Meta is deploying Mon behind the meter in El Paso at a $473 million capital cost. Boom Supersonic landed Crusoe Energy as its first customer for Thu, where Baudouin engine supply chains and Tue from Caterpillar, Cummins, and Rolls-Royce are the real schedule constraint. Joule Capital Partners is going fully off-grid with Sat. CyrusOne is siting a 144 MW Jack County campus adjacent to an existing gas plant, sidestepping interconnection entirely. The cumulative scale is staggering: Texas added nearly 58 GW of gas capacity to its pipeline in 2025 alone, with roughly 40 GW designated for datacenter supply.

Water Becomes the Binding Constraint

The megawatt arms race is obscuring the resource that could actually halt projects. Bluefield Research quantified the gap: Thu, not cooling towers, with indirect consumption projected to hit 91 billion gallons annually. San Marcos rejected Highlander SM One's $1.5 billion campus outright; Hays County tried a moratorium and got shut down by its own legal counsel. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called water concerns "fake," a claim that handed organizers a soundbite and didn't survive contact with the Houston Advanced Research Center's projection of 29 to 161 billion gallons of annual Texas datacenter water use by 2030. Air-cooled designs from Google in Wilbarger County and CyrusOne's closed-loop system in Jack County show engineering solutions exist. But they don't address the gas plants behind them.

Counties Boxed In, Communities Leveling Up

  • Hood County commissioners face a moratorium vote with their own attorney warning they lack authority; Sen. Paul Bettencourt asked AG Paxton to investigate
  • Texas statute bars counties from regulating zoning, and the next regular session isn't until January 2027
  • Over Tue were introduced across 50 states in 2025; the bipartisan GRID Act would require any facility above 20 MW to self-generate

What to Watch

  • March 4 datacenter power pledge: six companies are expected to sign formal commitments aligning with the White House's bring-your-own-power push
  • Hood County's Tuesday vote and any resulting AG opinion request, which could set statewide precedent on county moratorium authority
  • TCEQ permitting velocity: whether Fermi America's Amarillo approval and Pacifico Energy's GW Ranch permit trigger new contested case challenges
  • Operational data from air-cooled Texas facilities: the gap between engineering claims and West Texas summer performance will determine whether the industry's water answer actually works