Overview
- State and utility actions have materially slowed the buildout, with Texas directing ERCOT and the PUCT to audit interconnection requests and stalling roughly 1,800 proposed projects.
- Governors from both parties have moved from courting projects to imposing pauses, local-approval rules or binding guardrails in places including Texas, New York and Pennsylvania.
- The Australian federal government plans national 'causer pays' energy and water rules and has signaled it will legislate to override objecting states such as Queensland.
- President Donald Trump publicly defended data centers as job- and revenue-generating and said communities that reject them are “making a mistake,” highlighting a split between federal encouragement and state-level curbs.
- Opposition is driven by concrete resource and transparency concerns — data centers used about 176 TWh of U.S. power in 2023 and developers have flooded interconnection queues — and the dispute is reshaping incentives, project economics and electoral politics in competitive districts.