President Donald Trump called Texas’ de facto data center moratorium “a mistake” in an interview released Friday, delivering a rare rebuke of a state he won three times.
The comment was published days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered the state’s power regulators to pause all new data center approvals until they audit projects looking to plug into the state’s grid.
In the recent interview with Punchbowl News, Trump said he “saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,” though he didn’t mention Abbott by name. There’s “a lot of money” at stake, the president said, because other communities will want to attract data centers instead.
“They are tremendously important for the economics,” Trump said. “For Texas to say no to data centers is a mistake in the sense that it could be bigger than oil.”
