qinbafrank|Nov 04, 2026 07:38
The impact of newly elected Texas Governor Gina Hinojosa on Texas data centers may not be as bad as it seems. Her plan requires: no subsidies, unionized labor, no confidentiality agreements, and evidence that household electricity and water bills will not increase. These are measures that various cloud companies are already implementing in their data center construction.
As mentioned in the tweet on the 2nd, the partisan differences on AI infrastructure are not as significant as many people think, and the Democratic Party's rise to power is not a step backward. This can be seen from the three electricity bills proposed by Democratic lawmakers in 2026 regarding electricity pricing and regulation: the Ratepayer Protection Act has gone the furthest, passing the House of Representatives, while the other two are still in the committee stage.
The Ratepayer Protection Act "gives states a direction, allowing them to decide for themselves"; the GRID Savings Act "directly stipulates who pays and how to guarantee"; and the Power for the People Act "government regulates queues and some costs, while using priority and rate design to guide data centers to bring their own clean resources and assume more obligations."
These three bills essentially outline the main direction of future US regulation of electricity costs for AI infrastructure. None of them advocate for a halt to data center construction. Even with Democrats controlling both houses, the mainstream approach remains "buildable, but must pay and assume more obligations," rather than directly limiting scale. Extreme suspension or quota schemes are not currently included in these mainstream legislative texts.
Therefore, the most likely scenario is: based on the consensus of the Ratepayer Protection Act, the "must consider" requirement will be upgraded to more mandatory cost allocation and financial guarantees (absorbing the GRID Savings Act), while potentially adding requirements for specific data center rate categories and establishing certain queues or research rules at the federal level. Clean energy priority and labor provisions may appear as bargaining chips, but will be more moderate than the original Power for the People Act. The final text will be stricter than the current House version, but will not completely copy any of the Democratic bills.
The common signal conveyed by these bills is quite clear: the electricity costs of AI data centers can no longer be easily socialized. Regardless of the power structure after the election, the direction of regulation will be towards "whoever uses electricity, whoever initiates the upgrade, and whoever bears the corresponding costs," with the main differences being the degree of enforcement and the number of additional conditions. Therefore, future AI infrastructure requirements will be higher, and costs will rise (but the increase in electricity costs will still be a small part compared to the overall cost of data center construction), but it is not a step backward.
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