Gina Hinojosa, elected this week as Texas’s next governor, said the state will introduce laws to shield residents from the effects of data centers.
“We will have laws to protect Texans, and we need to stop what we are doing with data centers until we have those protections,” Governor-elect Hinojosa, a Democrat, told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview on Thursday.
Hinojosa defeated the Republican incumbent Greg Abbott in Tuesday’s election.
One of Hinojosa’s campaign promises was a moratorium on new data center projects.
On Thursday, she said new data centers should proceed only if communities have a “seat at the table” in how they are run.
Hinojosa Offers Communities ‘Leverage’
“Those communities have to be able to walk away from the table to leverage what they need for their communities,” Hinojosa said.
With reliable energy supplies, low taxes, and cheap land—compared to competitors like California and Virginia—Texas has become a leader in the data center industry.But Hinojosa could change all that.
Elon Musk, whose companies SpaceX and Tesla are headquartered in Texas, supported Abbott in the election, and the billionaire said on Wednesday he spent $158 million alone on Ken Paxton, the Texas Republican candidate who lost a Senate race to Democrat James Talarico.
The Nasdaq plunged on Thursday after the midterm election results, with AI-linked stocks largely driving the sell-off.
In Thursday’s interview, Tapper asked Hinojosa about the stock market’s reaction.
“Your victory is one that we’re told AI investors are worried about given your promises of a temporary data center moratorium,” Tapper said, and asked how she would balance the economic consequences with voters’ apparent opposition to data centers.
“We have always been a pro-business state in Texas, but what changes now with me as governor is it has to be a partnership that benefits Texans,” Hinojosa said.
“Data centers have moved into mostly rural communities, and there are no rules and laws to protect Texans.
“We can have a strong economy, strong industry, and protections for the people of Texas. Those things are not mutually exclusive, and I’ll make sure as governor I lead to ensure that that happens.”
Trump Administration Backing Data Centers
The Trump administration has strongly backed data center expansion as a national priority, but new data centers, needed to fuel AI growth, have become politically controversial in some areas because of the electricity and water they consume.
In February, during his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump said his administration had secured agreements with tech companies to pay a greater share of the costs that electric utilities—and their residential customers—incur when data centers and other high-tech “large load” users boost demand and strain supply.
Last month, Trump suggested that companies building data centers in the United States should offer local communities a dividend to make them more popular.
“If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend,’” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Oct. 21.
In September, Abbott ordered the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to halt every permit sought by data centers, and ordered an audit of all existing projects by the state’s water and electricity monitoring bodies.
Evidence shows the Chinese regime is using data centers to sow division.
OpenAI, in a report published in June, has also accused CCP influence operators of jumping on the data center bandwagon.
Musk said in March he planned to start a microchip plant in Austin, Texas.
Last month, Texas Monthly also reported that the state’s parks and wildlife commission was considering selling Boca Chica State Park to SpaceX.
Hinojosa said during a news conference on Thursday that she had spoken to the executive director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission “to request that no action be taken” on Boca Chica State Park during the transition period.
Hinojosa is set to be sworn in as governor on Jan. 19, 2027.
The Epoch Times reached out to SpaceX for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
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