The Texas governor's office published the directive on 3 August at 18:12 UTC. It orders the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to audit every data centre seeking a grid connection, and states that "the PUCT and ERCOT must complete this audit before any data center project moves forward." ERCOT has suspended processing of its batch zero queue.
What has to be disclosed
Applicants must hand over the public subsidies they have taken — tax abatements, grants, write-offs — their on-site generation against expected grid draw, water consumption and cooling design, community impact mitigation, and the identity of their controlling owners. Failure to comply means denial of connection.
The number that is doing the work
474 GW is the volume of interconnection applications, not contracted load and certainly not energised capacity. Texas's record peak demand is roughly a fifth of it. Speculative and duplicate filings are normal in every queue in the country, and the Texas Tribune notes there is no state or federal database tracking how much of it is actually under contract — which is close to the point of ordering an audit.
A letter is not a moratorium
Coverage framing this as Texas halting data centres overstates the instrument twice over. Nothing bars anyone from building; what is paused is approval of grid connections, and it is paused until the audit finishes rather than indefinitely. It is also a gubernatorial directive rather than a signed law — state agriculture commissioner Sid Miller called it "all hat and no cattle." The PUCT declined to say how far the audit reaches.
What the release does not say
The governor's statement never uses the words "artificial intelligence." The connection runs through the composition of the queue: the large-load applications piling up in ERCOT are overwhelmingly AI compute.