Texas has stopped connecting new data centers to its grid. The order came from Governor Greg Abbott in late August, and ERCOT acted within hours, suspending the study process that developers had been waiting on. The Public Utility Commission now has to audit what is sitting in the queue before anything else moves. What’s in the queue is the story. Requests from data centers and other large loads have gone from roughly 48 gigawatts in 2023 to more than 474 gigawatts.

Every announcement of a new AI campus leads with megawatts. Power is the number that gets negotiated in public, fought over at the utility commission, and quoted in the analyst note. It’s also the constraint that money can eventually solve, because you can build generation, sign a nuclear offtake, or put turbines on the site. Water is harder, and it decides more siting arguments than the public record suggests. A large data center running evaporative cooling can consume millions of litres a day at full load.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering another broad round of semiconductor tariffs, potentially extending beyond chips themselves to laptops, gaming consoles and, most importantly, servers used in AI data centers. The proposal could also tie tariff exemptions to companies’ commitments to invest in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. Importantly, this is still a proposal rather than a finalized policy, but the direction is clear. The problem is that tariffs cannot manufacture chips. They can only make imported chips and the products built around them more expensive.

Roughly 180 items crossed the wire in the last twenty-four hours. Strip out the translated duplicates, the earnings-date notifications, the investor-conference attendance notices, and the vendor testimonial campaigns, and perhaps a dozen carry actual information. Those dozen cluster around three themes: the memory cycle acquiring a short side, the physical limits of data center expansion, and the widening distance between how capable AI systems have become and how safe their output is.