Immediately following the election, stocks linked to data center development in Texas swooned — Elon Musk’s SpaceX is down 12.5% since Tuesday, data center developer CoreWeave is down almost 19%, Oracle is down 9%, Texas-based independent power producer Vistra is down 19%. Sterling Infrastructure, a civil construction company headquartered outside Houston, has seen its shares fall 32%.
On the campaign trail, Hinojosa called for a moratorium on data centers until the legislature could pass legislation putting guardrails around development, including protecting residential ratepayers from electricity price hikes and giving local communities more leeway to restrict and condition development. Two weeks before election day, she released a video criticizing Governor Greg Abbott’s “Batch Zero” review process — which had been broadly characterized as a “pause” when it was announced over the summer — for allowing new permits, and she said that she would issue a “ban” on all data center approvals until new laws could be passed.
When Abbott introduced his pause over the summer, Texas’s electricity market ERCOT had 474 gigawatts of data center interconnection requests in its queue (almost all from data centers), a figure he said was around five times the electricity market’s peak demand. That review is due to end next month, shortly before Hinojosa is due to take office, leaving little time for new projects to get approved before the moratorium goes into effect.
Some observers and investors took a sanguine view of Hinojosa’s data center policies. Gavin Baker, a longtime investor in SpaceX, said on X that Hinojosa’s policies “sound reasonable” and pointed to an interview she gave saying that the moratorium would be on new permits and would not affect the pipeline of permitted projects.
The data center and energy industry, however, is in wait-and-see mode when it comes to the severity of the moratorium.
“If she was thinking of trying to go after projects that had begun the construction process,” Brandt Vermillion, U.S. research lead at Modo Energy, said, “I think it would change the overall outlook a ton.”
According to Modo Energy analysis, there are some 25 gigawatts worth of projects under construction in Texas, another 4.6 gigawatts permitted, and another 90 gigawatts that are either just announced or have only submitted grid studies. If Hinojosa “is only going after non-permitted projects,” Vermillion added, then anyone thinking about the future path of data center development in Texas should be more concerned about supply chain constraints like obtaining enough chips to power the data centers.
That being said, the Texas legislature’s session doesn’t end until May 2027, meaning that Hinojosa’s pause could last several months before lawmakers put guardrails into law.
“I don’t think we’re going to not build another data center in the state,” Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “But I think that they’re going to be under quite a bit more scrutiny.”
That being said, analysts are now much more uncertain about the future path of electricity demand in the state. “Texas demand is difficult to project after Gina Hinojosa’s surprise win,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Thursday.
That means more trouble for developers in Texas, especially for storage projects, which had already been seeing extremely volatile monthly revenue.
“Batteries and energy storage have been counting on demand to go up because they’re having a rough time out there right now in terms of revenues,” Rhodes said. “Demand will have a pretty big impact on supply.”
One thing the battery storage industry, as well as solar and wind developers, can cheer is that Democratic control of the governorship and the state House means that the threat of anti-renewables bills has fallen to essentially zero.
The renewables industry is hoping that data center development does continue in Texas, but that it looks more orderly and grid-connected.
Going forward, Vermillion expects that data center developers will have a harder time getting tax abatements, which means that a “well-capitalized hyperscaler” could potentially still pursue projects.
“Project A that was going to go about development in a certain way of seeking tax abatements and buying a bunch of reciprocating engines and trying to run themselves off grid” is much less likely to be able to go forward in Hinojosa’s Texas, Vermillion told me, especially as she is able to appoint new commissioners to the Texas Public Utility Commission or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Tim Woodruff, the data center lead at Modo, told me similarly. “In the near term, if you're one of the neo clouds, maybe now you start pushing a little harder on your projects that you have in MISO or in CAISO,” he said.
Chart courtesy of the Business Council on Sustainable Energy
