Texas has suspended 17 data center construction permits and switched off the automated portal that issued them, a month after the governor asked the state to stop approving new ones.
Governor Greg Abbott called for the pause in September 2026 while the state audited about 1,800 data center projects. The concerns were power use and generation, water consumption, and effects on nearby communities. Watchdog groups FracTracker Alliance and Public Citizen then published reports detailing more than two dozen permits issued to Texas data center projects. FracTracker researcher Sam Law said the system kept approving projects, including ones for OpenAI and Amazon.
The tool is STEERS, an electronic filing system at the state environmental agency, TCEQ, that grants authorizations automatically. A notice on the site says it was shut down temporarily so agency staff can review every application and determine whether it relates to a data center. All 17 suspended permits cover stormwater construction, the paperwork for raising and leveling ground, which is a vital part of approving any construction project in Texas.
The lapse shows that a policy announcement and an enforcement mechanism are different things. A pause ordered from the governor's office means little if the software granting approvals has no human in the loop and no one tells it to stop. It is not clear why STEERS stayed on, so oversight may be a likelier explanation than defiance. The effect was the same either way: permits for the projects under review.
Texas is not alone in tightening up. New York's Governor Kathy Hochul signed a year-long ban in July on data center projects larger than 50 megawatts (a megawatt is a million watts). In Northern Virginia, Amazon backed away from plans for four new data centers after community backlash and offered the land for housing. At the federal level, the White House moved from an AI Action Plan in July 2025 to a mandate in October 2026 that AI data centers pay dividends to communities.
The politics are shifting faster than the plumbing. The harder question is how many of the 1,800 projects under audit already hold permits that no staff member ever reviewed.