Texas Turns on the AI Boom It Built

Today on Concrete Compute: the governor who stood next to Google nine months ago to tout a forty-billion-dollar investment across three new Texas data center campuses just said data center developers dug their own grave. What actually changed between then and now? Before that, in the headlines: PJM says it has cleared its interconnection backlog and accepted seven hundred fifteen new power projects, representing more than two hundred gigawatts, into its first reformed study cycle. But clearing a queue and building a power plant are two very different things, and I'll show you why that matters for your bill. Plus, Rick Perry says the backlash is mostly misinformation, one striking Lake Mariner water-use claim did not survive independent verification, and AMD has seven planning takeaways for data centers in 2027. Welcome back to Concrete Compute, your daily brief on the AI infrastructure buildout. It's Monday, August 24, 2026. Let's get into it.

Some of these power projects have been sitting in PJM's interconnection queue waiting for word since twenty-eighteen — eight years — and now the grid operator says it has cleared that backlog while qualifying seven hundred fifteen new generation projects for study in the first cycle of its reformed process. Add up the nameplate capacity on all of them and you get more than two hundred gigawatts, across a grid that serves sixty-seven million people in thirteen states and the District of Columbia. But — and PJM says this about its own numbers — a project on a study list isn't a project on the grid. Separately, PJM's May fact sheet says roughly fifty-three gigawatts of projects across its interconnection pipeline have signed agreements to connect, and many of those are still getting stuck behind permitting, siting, and supply-chain delays that have nothing to do with PJM's paperwork. Historically, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab reports that about forty-one percent of the capacity covered by interconnection agreements signed from 2000 through 2022 had been withdrawn by the end of 2025. So why should you care if you've never seen a substation in your life? Because slow interconnection can delay new supply in a region already facing rising capacity costs, and every AI data center in PJM territory is competing within that constrained system too. Clearing the administrative backlog matters. Turning signed interconnection agreements into operating projects could add supply, but those projects still face permitting, siting, financing, equipment, and developer decisions beyond PJM's study process.

Now, sticking with the backlash storyline — former Texas governor and energy secretary Rick Perry went on Fox's One Nation this weekend and pushed back hard, saying opposition to AI data centers is fueled by widespread misinformation rather than legitimate grievances. Worth flagging up front: Perry co-founded Fermi America, a nuclear-and-data-center startup that hit a valuation of more than nineteen billion dollars on its first day of trading back in October twenty twenty-five — though by now, August twenty twenty-six, its market cap has fallen to roughly four-point-four to four-point-six billion dollars, down more than sixty percent from that first-day peak. Either way, he's not exactly a neutral observer here — he's got real money riding on how this argument plays out. The polling doesn't tell us whether that opposition is misinformed, but it does show how broad it is. Gallup's March survey found seventy-one percent of Americans opposed an AI data center in their own area, including sixty-three percent of Republicans. That's a national supermajority and a clear majority inside Perry's own party. Perry didn't offer specific examples of the misinformation he was referring to in the segment, and we haven't independently confirmed further detail here — it's a short cable hit, not an investigation. But it tells you the industry's messaging fight is now running on two fronts at once: state capitols and cable news.

Now here's a claim that lands right on top of the fight Abbott just reopened — water use, one of the flashpoints fueling opposition nationwide. An X post from @SmallCapSnipa, relaying a conversation with TeraWulf CEO Paul Prager, claims strikingly low water-use figures for the roughly five-hundred-megawatt Lake Mariner campus. We couldn't independently verify those figures, so I'm not going to repeat them as fact. TeraWulf officials have described initial closed-loop fills in the hundreds of thousands of gallons at a different project, but that does not establish Lake Mariner's consumption. Closed-loop cooling is designed to recirculate water; the mechanism alone does not prove a site's initial fill or ongoing top-off. That's exactly the kind of technical detail that gets flattened in a political fight. If the industry wants this claim to carry weight, it needs site-specific documentation from an accountable third party, not an X user relaying a CEO conversation.

Now, a lighter one to close the headlines. AMD's official account posted seven takeaways from its Advancing AI 2026 event, laying out planning guidance for what it calls the agentic AI era in 2027 — things like CPU-to-GPU ratios, rack-scale system design, software, cost, governance, and what it terms physical AI. The framing is worth catching: AMD wants hyperscalers and neoclouds planning next year's buildouts to start with the workload, not the spec sheet. That's a pointed attempt to move the conversation away from isolated component comparisons and toward planning the system as a whole. This is AMD's own forward-looking roadmap content, not a signed deal or a shipment number, so file it as a signal of where the vendor conversation is heading rather than news you can bank on. But if you're trying to read where next year's rack designs go, it's worth actually reading, not just skimming the headline.

Our main story today: the governor who invited the AI boom into Texas just told developers to look in the mirror. Nine months ago, Governor Greg Abbott stood alongside Google to announce a forty-billion-dollar Texas investment expected to bring three new data center campuses, calling Texas the epicenter of AI development in America. This past weekend, on ABC's This Week, the same governor said data center developers, quote, basically dug their own grave for the problem that's been caused for them, and that's why they got the backlash they deserve. That's not a state regulator or a local activist saying that. That's the governor who personally recruited this investment, on national television, rebuking developers in an industry he has championed. So what actually changed? Abbott's case is that developers who moved into communities without first winning local support brought this on themselves. In the interview, he framed three expectations going forward — don't draw power the grid needs for everyone else, lower costs for consumers instead of raising them, and don't disrupt the neighborhoods you're building next to. That last one is doing a lot of work in one sentence, and it's the same complaint driving pushback in state after state: noise, water use, and the sense that a project got approved before the town had a real say. Here's the wrinkle worth sitting with, though. This isn't a brand-new regulatory action landing today. In June, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to require data centers to fund the full cost of the electric infrastructure needed to serve them. On August third, he ordered an audit of every data center advancing through ERCOT's interconnection process before any project moves forward. Repealing the sales-tax exemption has not begun; that remains a legislative priority Abbott has pledged to pursue in the 2027 session. So the weekend rhetoric is catching up to actions he had already set in motion, not announcing a new rule by itself. Texas isn't alone, and that's what turns one governor's comment into a story about the whole buildout. In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro — who celebrated a twenty-billion-dollar Amazon investment last year — has now imposed new restrictions of his own. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul ordered a one-year moratorium on hyperscaler data centers about a month ago. Reporting this week from the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Hill documents this exact fight showing up in campaign ads across Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — all states with midterms on the ballot this fall. So this is bigger than Texas politics. It's the same tension playing out state by state: governors who courted hyperscaler investment are now recalculating whether that investment is a political asset or a liability heading into an election year. And that raises the question this show keeps circling back to — when the governor who invited you rebukes developers this hard, who actually decides where the buildout goes from here, and who's left holding the bill?

Now let's get into who's actually arguing about this, because it's not just Abbott against a faceless backlash. That's a Republican governor, in deep-red Texas, making a community-consent argument that sounds a lot like something you'd expect from local opponents, not the state's biggest booster. Not everyone in the president's orbit agrees. According to Forbes' coverage, allies of President Trump have pushed back, calling opposition to data centers a mistake and arguing the industry could end up bigger than oil. That's the other pole of this fight inside the same party — build-everything-everywhere versus require local buy-in — and Republican officials are landing on both sides of it depending on whether they're standing next to a groundbreaking or fielding calls about a constituent's power bill. The industry's own trade group is trying to thread that needle. Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition, in Politico's polling writeup, argued the industry needs, quote, continued efforts to better explain the role of the industry to the public. In the coalition's own telling, this is a messaging problem. Here's where I come down on that. Remember the Gallup polling I flagged earlier — a national supermajority, including a majority of Republicans, saying they don't want a data center in their own backyard. Numbers like that don't move because a company explains itself better; they move when the underlying deal changes. Right now, the interview still doesn't say what a host community is guaranteed to receive in concrete, measurable terms. This is my standing view, and I'll say it plainly: any industry spending this much on infrastructure can afford a better answer for the communities hosting it than we'll explain ourselves better. The question I keep asking on this show is what the host community actually gets — permanent jobs that outlast the construction crews, tax base that sticks around, protection on residential rates, capped water use. Abbott's three interview expectations touch some of that, but the interview attaches no quantified thresholds: no dollar target for residential savings, no site-level water limit, and no formula for community benefits. His separate August audit has a defined scope: it applies to pending data-center interconnection requests in ERCOT's process. Until Texas defines measurable community-benefit and ratepayer outcomes behind those expectations, the interview remains a rhetorical escalation layered on top of the June cost directive and August audit. The bigger dynamic here is that the politics aren't splitting cleanly along party lines. A Republican governor in Texas and a Democratic governor in New York have both moved toward more scrutiny, more conditions, and more skepticism of unchecked hyperscaler expansion, for very different-sounding reasons. That convergence is the real story. It's incumbents in both parties recalculating the politics of this buildout ahead of a midterm where it has become a genuine campaign issue. Time for the Hype Check. I'd put this one at a four out of ten on substance versus noise. Abbott's quote is real, and it's a genuine shift in tone from a governor who staked his brand on this buildout. But the interview itself adds no new enforceable rule. Its consequence will depend on what Texas regulators and lawmakers put behind those three expectations.

So here's the open question I'm sitting with after today's story: when governors from both parties converge on tighter data-center scrutiny for different reasons, whose playbook does the rest of the country end up following? If you want this fight tracked state by state as it plays out toward November, subscribe wherever you're listening so today's episode isn't the last one you catch. This has been Concrete Compute, an AI-voiced podcast, created and built by a real human using today's cutting-edge technology. Nothing you heard on this show is financial advice. I'm Brian Lampert, and I'll catch you all tomorrow — take care!