The Grave They Dug Themselves

On watching an industry get exactly the welcome it earned

I spent a good portion of my working life reading rooms. Not literature, rooms. You learn to do it in the RAF Police whether you want to or not: walk into a briefing, a hangar, a married quarters estate at two in the morning, and within about four seconds you know whether the atmosphere is going to hold or whether it’s about to come apart. Nobody teaches you this explicitly. It just accumulates, the way most useful things do, quietly and without ceremony, until one day you realise you’ve been doing it for decades and can’t switch it off.

I mention this because I’ve spent the last few days reading about American data centres, and the room, as it were, has very much come apart.

Let me set the scene, because the timeline is the whole joke.

In November 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott stood next to Google and declared his state the “epicentre of AI development,” celebrating a $40 billion investment across three data centre campuses. It was the full production, the ribbon-cutting energy, the sense of a man who believed he’d landed the future and wanted everyone to watch him catch it.

Nine months later, the same governor went on ABC and told a different story entirely. Data centre companies, he said, had “basically dug their own grave” by moving into communities without bothering to win local support first. “They got the backlash they deserve,” he added, which is not a sentence you often hear a Republican governor use about an industry he was, quite recently, holding hands with in public.

That’s not evolution. That’s a man quietly backing out of a room he walked into with considerable confidence, hoping nobody notices the door.

The tell was in the paperwork, as it always is

Here’s the detail that I keep returning to, because it tells you more than any quote ever could. Abbott revealed that when the state asked data centre companies to hand over information about their current and projected power usage, information the grid genuinely needed to plan around, fewer than 10% of them responded.

Fewer than one in ten. Sit with that for a moment. These are companies that wanted access to Texas land, Texas water, and Texas power at industrial scale, and when asked the most basic administrative question- how much of our infrastructure are you actually going to use- nine out of ten of them simply didn’t bother to answer.

I spent years of my life in environments where you learned that the paperwork isn’t the boring bit; it’s the honest bit. People will smile at you in a meeting and then reveal exactly what they think of you by whether they file the form. This is the data centre industry’s form, and they didn’t file it. That’s not an oversight at that scale. That’s a posture. It says, quite plainly, we intend to take what we need, and we don’t especially feel we owe you an explanation for how much.

Abbott’s response, in the end, was to halt up to 1,800 data centre projects via directive, forcing an audit of energy and water usage before anything new gets to connect. Whatever you think of Abbott generally, and I have views, that’s not overreach. That’s a state government asking the most basic question a landlord asks a tenant, and getting stonewalled until it had no choice but to pull the lease.

This isn’t a Texas story, and pretending it is misses the point entirely

If this were just a Texan grievance, a one-state hiccup in an otherwise smooth national rollout, I wouldn’t be writing about it. What makes it worth your time is that it isn’t isolated at all, it’s a reflex, and it’s happening across the political spectrum simultaneously, which in this particular moment in American politics is almost eerie.

Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, spent last year celebrating a $20 billion Amazon data centre investment. This week he imposed new restrictions on the industry. New York’s Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, ordered a one-year moratorium on hyperscaler data centres a month before that, making New York the first state in the country to enact a statewide pause. By July, at least eight states, Delaware, Georgia, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia, had active or recent efforts underway to restrict, pause, or ban data centre development outright. Several more considered similar legislation, and it stalled, which tells you the appetite is wider even than the successful bills suggest.

Democrats and Republicans do not agree on very much in 2026. They appear to agree, independently and more or less simultaneously, that the AI infrastructure boom has been allowed to run roughshod over the people who live next to it.

That’s the story. Not “Texas gets cold feet.” A bipartisan, geographically scattered, entirely organic revolt against an industry that assumed community consent was a formality it could catch up on later, if at all.

The polling is the part that should actually worry the industry

Politicians pivoting is one thing; politicians are weathervanes by trade, I don’t hold it against them particularly. But a June 2026 Echelon Insights survey found that voters opposed a data centre being built in their own community by 62% to 27%, and here’s the detail that should genuinely unsettle anyone in that industry: that margin barely moved even after respondents were shown additional messaging about the economic and technological benefits.

They tried the pitch. The pitch didn’t work. This isn’t an information deficit that a better ad campaign fixes. People have already run the maths on rising utility bills, strained water supplies, and a facility the size of an airport landing in their sightline, and they’ve concluded the trade isn’t worth it, and no amount of “think of the jobs” messaging is moving that number.

I find that oddly reassuring, if I’m honest. We’re told constantly that public opinion is infinitely malleable, that the right framing can sell anyone anything. Here’s a live case where it plainly couldn’t. People looked at the actual physical footprint of this industry and said no, and kept saying no, even when handed the industry’s own best arguments.

Where the money finds you, wherever you’ve hidden

I live, as regular readers know, off-grid in a cave dwelling in rural Spain, deliberately about as far from the centre of any of this as a person can get without renouncing electricity altogether. And even from here, this fight follows me, because water scarcity and energy infrastructure are the two things I think about more than almost anything else these days, not as abstractions but as the literal daily arithmetic of how a small group of us keep the lights on and the taps running.

So when I read that a hyperscale data centre can use as much water in a day as a small town, and that the industry’s own trade body responded to all this by saying its members “strive to be responsible stewards” and want to be seen as “true partners” in the communities they operate in, I recognise the register instantly. It’s the sound of an institution that got caught, not one that got convicted, and there’s a difference. Nobody says “true partners” until the partnership’s already curdled.

Where the fault line actually runs, come November

The politics of this are about to get genuinely interesting, and not in the usual predictable-partisan way. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, running for Senate, has built a “Texas First Data Centre Plan” directly around Abbott’s tougher line, which puts him openly at odds with Trump, who continues to insist the industry is essential to American AI leadership and that Texas saying no to it is a mistake. Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has reportedly warned AI companies directly that voter anger over data centres is putting a critical Ohio Senate seat at risk.

Read that again. The Republican Party’s own campaign apparatus is telling the AI industry it’s actively costing them seats. Not Democrats saying it. Not activists saying it. The people whose entire job is keeping the GOP in power, saying it to the industry’s face.

That’s not a culture war front. That’s a landlord-tenant dispute that’s escalated into a national one, and it’s happening because an industry moved fast, assumed forgiveness would follow investment, and discovered rather late that neither major party is willing to eat the electoral cost of defending that assumption on its behalf.

What I actually think happens next

I don’t know, and I’d be lying to you if I pretended otherwise. That’s not a cop-out; it’s just where the evidence currently sits. The moratoriums might harden into permanent law, or they might soften the moment the AI investment money threatens to walk somewhere friendlier. The industry might actually learn the lesson written in giant letters across eight states’ worth of legislation, that showing up somewhere with a permit and a promise isn’t the same as showing up with consent. Or it might simply wait this cycle out, the way industries usually do, banking on the fact that public anger has a shelf life and quarterly earnings don’t.

What I can tell you is that Abbott’s line has stuck with me for a reason that has nothing to do with Texas politics specifically. “They dug their own grave.” It’s such an unusually blunt thing for a sitting governor to say about an industry he was cheerleading a year ago, and I think it’s blunt precisely because he knows he’s covering for his own earlier enthusiasm as much as he’s criticising theirs.

We’ve all done that. Praised something loudly, then watched it curdle, then had to find a way to talk about the curdling that doesn’t implicate our own part in the applause. Abbott’s just doing it with a $40 billion paper trail and a live microphone.

The rest of us just do it more quietly, in rooms nobody’s filming.

Until Next Time