What do you do when your business interests want one thing and your voters want the opposite? What do you think?
As the massive, digital information-processing facilities proliferate, Republicans are caught between a zealous president and governor bent on Texas becoming the next global data center hub, and outraged constituents, like Schroeder, in red and rural districts where a majority of them are being proposed.
According to a Texas Tribune analysis, at least 82 data centers, or nearly 60% of those that are either planned or under construction, are in state House districts that voted for President Donald Trump and elected a Republican state representative in 2024. Meanwhile, a March Quinnipiac poll found that 65% of Americans oppose the building of an AI data center in their community.
Republican state lawmakers — caught in the middle — have offered mixed opinions about data center development amid calls from city and county leaders to give them more freedom to regulate the facilities.
Altogether, the thorny politics could hurt Republicans ahead of this year’s midterm elections — especially in a cycle when they hold the White House, a dynamic that typically favors the opposing party.
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The data center industry has recently mobilized, unveiling a campaign to promote the benefits of the facilities, and ramping up its political donations during Texas’ GOP primaries. It’s also expanding its lobbying shops to win over Republicans priding themselves on being anti-regulation and pro-business as they pitch billions in investment and thousands of jobs.
AI-aligned super PACs spent about $4.2 million in Texas this primary cycle, with all but $150,000 going to Republicans, according to the Tech Oversight Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that supports regulations on data centers.
Companies that own, operate or rent from data centers collectively added at least 15 more lobbyists between the 2023 and 2025 sessions, according to a Tribune analysis, and have already started gearing back up for next year’s session.
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About 50 miles southwest of Galveston in coastal Brazoria County, which features a mix of rural and urban areas, the Republican county executive Matt Sebesta was blunt with his constituents at a commissioners court meeting on March 10. The court was about to vote down a tax abatement for a proposed, 620-megawatt data center and accompanying natural gas plant, but he wanted a roomful of angry residents to know that beyond that, counties have virtually no tools to stop the development.
“When folks look at me and say, ‘We don’t want this,’ I point them to our state reps and say, ‘Go talk to your state rep. Go talk to your senator,’ because they don’t trust us to make those decisions,” Sebesta said in an interview, underscoring his desire for the Legislature to give counties that authority.
He added: “County government is an extension of state government, but we’re the redheaded stepchild. We’re the ones that deliver the services, but they treat county government like shit.”
State Rep. Cody Vasut, R-Angleton, who showed up to the Brazoria County meeting, said he filed legislation last session to give counties regulation authority over large developments like data centers that have the potential to impact health, safety or noise levels, though it did not make it to the House floor. He committed to bringing similar legislation in 2027.
“When you develop in the county, it’s been viewed kind of as the Wild West, but I think as time has gone on, more and more projects are being developed near residences in the county, and that’s something we need to look at changing,” Vasut said at the meeting.
Not all Republicans are on board with the idea of empowering local governments with more oversight.
“These should be statewide, top-down guidelines,” state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said in an interview. “You can’t have 254 different counties and 1,000 cities all coming up with different answers. Stuff would never get built.”
Why would you want your local leaders to have input in these decisions when you can have Paul Bettencourt tell you what to do? I’ve talked about data centers and the problems they’re causing, which are disproportionately happening in red rural counties. I see this as a Democratic opportunity to find common ground with voters who have not supported us at all in recent years, though there was no discussion of that angle in this story. Meanwhile, Greg Abbott’s strategy is to tell the data center interests that they need to do a better job selling themselves to the public, and so a new big-money PR campaign is gearing up. The embedded image is from the local version of that campaign – it’s connected to a national group called the Data Center Coalition – and I feel confident you’ll be seeing ads for them on the TV during college football season. You’ll note who they’re spending their political and lobbying money on, so it really is a simple binary choice right now. It’s up to who we elect.