AUSTIN, Texas — Governor Greg Abbott called Tuesday for blocking new data center construction in rural Texas neighborhoods, marking a sharp turn from his earlier embrace of the artificial intelligence industry and aligning himself with a growing grassroots backlash against the sprawling facilities.
Little Elm, home to roughly 55,000 people in Denton County, occupies the south shore of Lewisville Lake approximately 35 miles north of Dallas and features 23 miles of shoreline.
Abbott’s push for a prohibition in rural neighborhoods goes further than a sweeping regulatory framework he unveiled earlier in June, which called for data centers to add new power generation to the grid, pay for their own infrastructure costs, reuse their own water, and implement measures such as setbacks from residential communities.
“We must prohibit them from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” Abbott said at a campaign stop in Bullard, adding that the issue “dovetails right into fighting for East Texas values.”
The third-term Republican governor had previously been enthusiastic about the influx of companies seeking to build the facilities, calling Texas “the epicenter of AI development” when he announced in November that Google had made a 40-billion-dollar investment in cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure in the state. Abbott has received over 2 million dollars from people and companies linked to the tech and AI industries since last year, according to reporting by E&E News.
