Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT), the state utility regulator, and grid operator ERCOT to stop approving new data center connections as of August 3. The freeze affects an interconnection queue (requests to connect projects to the power grid) containing more than 1,800 projects seeking a combined 474 GW, while Texas’s all-time peak demand reached 91,089 MW on July 22. About 90% of the requests come from data centers. ERCOT also suspended its Batch Zero interconnection study, which was due to notify developers by August 7, pending a comprehensive audit of the queue. BloombergNEF estimates the order puts about 49.8 GW of projects at risk of delay, representing roughly 20% of the U.S. data center pipeline, with potential revenue losses of $8 billion to $15 billion by early 2027 depending on the share tied to AI workloads. The halt also covers new crypto mining facilities and other large-load connection requests, not only AI data centers.