Meta is building a $14 billion data center campus in El Paso, and the project has become a full-blown flashpoint in the Texas governor's race, with residents in the border city voicing concerns about water use, electricity demand, noise, and effects on nearby neighborhoods. Governor Greg Abbott and Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa are now clashing directly over how the state should handle the rapid buildout of data centers like Meta's, and El Paso sits at the center of that fight.
According to KFOX, Hinojosa made a campaign stop in El Paso where she said Texas has no rules governing the impacts of data centers and that residents there have real concerns about water, electricity, and community impacts. She said she would call state lawmakers into a special session if elected and would review existing agreements tied to projects that could affect local resources, including contracts she says jeopardize the water El Paso residents need. Meta first announced the El Paso project in October 2025 as a $1.5 billion investment before dramatically expanding it in July, when it partnered with BlackRock to develop a 1-gigawatt artificial intelligence campus that will mark the company's 25th data center in the United States, according to Meta.
An Amanecer People's Project representative said, per KFOX's reporting, that Texans do not want data centers, echoing a sentiment one El Paso resident put bluntly: water is a finite resource. Another local resident identified water conservation as a key issue tied to the project. Those concerns are not abstract — municipal and utility filings reviewed by El Paso Matters indicate Meta's agreement permits the campus to draw up to 2.5 million gallons of potable water per day at full build-out, though that water provision is governed under a separate contract with El Paso Water rather than the city's tax incentive deal.
A Gas Plant Built Just for Meta
To power the AI facility, El Paso Electric has proposed building the $473 million, 366-megawatt McCloud natural gas plant, which would be dedicated exclusively to Meta for its first five years of operation, as reported by the Texas Tribune. That plan surprised some observers who initially expected the site to lean on renewable solar power, and environmental advocates worry the gas plant could affect local air quality and eventual utility rates.
The El Paso City Council took up the broader incentive question directly on June 9, voting 5-3 against initiating a process to cancel its Chapter 380 tax incentive agreement with Meta, following a seven-hour meeting that drew more than 160 public comments. City legal staff had warned that breaching the contract could lead to costly litigation. The fallout continued into the following months: local residents launched a recall petition drive targeting District 4 Representative Cynthia Boyar Trejo over her vote to preserve the incentives, an effort that KVIA reports faces legal challenges but reflects lingering neighborhood dissatisfaction.
Abbott's Statewide Pause and El Paso's Regulatory Gap
Abbott has said the power grid must remain safe, secure, reliable, and not overburdened by data centers, and he ordered a state review of their effects on the power grid and other resources. Per KFOX, he directed reviews of whether data centers provide their own power and reuse water, and of plans to limit noise, traffic, and other impacts on nearby communities. Abbott said there is now a halt to any further approval of new data centers in Texas pending audits to be conducted by both ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission, with the pause set to end on November 4, though the halt will remain in place pending reviews from state agencies until then.
That order, issued August 3, halted ERCOT's Batch Zero transmission study and mandated audits for roughly 300 pending large-load energy projects, most of them data centers, as detailed by the Houston Chronicle. But the order's reach has a notable gap in El Paso: El Paso Electric operates independently outside ERCOT, within the Western Interconnection, meaning Abbott's ERCOT-focused audit does not automatically apply to the utility that actually powers Meta's campus. That distinction prompted the City of El Paso to formally ask the Public Utility Commission of Texas in July to extend statewide ratepayer protections to non-ERCOT utilities like El Paso Electric, which serves nearly 700,000 customers outside ERCOT's direct operational control.
Hinojosa's Platform and a Statewide Backlash
Hinojosa's platform goes beyond the special-session request. As reported by FOX 7 Austin, she would seek broader protections related to data center development, including banning non-disclosure agreements for developers, prohibiting local tax subsidies, requiring union labor, and making water contracts void if local public water supplies face shortages. She has said Texas needs stronger rules for data center projects already underway, framing the issue as one where existing law has failed to keep pace with the industry's growth.
The pushback is not confined to El Paso or to Democrats. The Associated Press has reported that rapid data center expansion has fueled broader political pushback across rural Texas, where Democratic state candidates and conservative rural residents have aligned against heavy local water and power consumption, with Democratic nominees for lieutenant governor, comptroller, and agriculture commissioner also urging construction halts. The scale driving that anxiety is significant: ERCOT's April preliminary load forecast found that non-cryptocurrency data center requests could add 228,420 megawatts of demand by 2032, potentially pushing total peak grid load to 367,790 megawatts — more than four times ERCOT's current all-time peak demand record of 85,508 megawatts, set in August 2023.
Data centers now must be audited by the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT before receiving state approval, and Meta's El Paso campus has undeniably brought investment to the region even as it tests the limits of local water and power systems. Whether the Public Utility Commission will extend ERCOT-style ratepayer protections and audit requirements to non-ERCOT utilities like El Paso Electric before Meta's facility comes fully online remains an open question, one that will likely stay unresolved as the governor's race heads toward November.
