The opening statement
A daughter comes home from boarding school, Sunday gets sentimental, and Texas reappears along the highway with billboards, server farms and grid anxiety.
Boarding school Sunday drive Political theater Data centers Still Texas
For one weekend, Texas got quiet in the best possible way.
My daughter came home from boarding school, and the house felt like itself again: laundry, laughter, snack requests, half-finished stories and the ordinary miracle of seeing her face across the room.
Then came the Sunday return drive. I dropped her back off, did the dad thing where you act normal until you are safely out of sight, and headed home.
That is when Texas reintroduced itself.
One tender weekend, one highway billboard and one concrete preview of the artificial-intelligence economy.
Political theater / Highway edition
First, a billboard informed me that Democrats now support communism. Then, a few miles later, the landscape opened up into the new Texas skyline: data centers, concrete, power infrastructure and the gray architecture of artificial intelligence rising out of the prairie.
Which raises the obvious question: if Democrats are communists, what exactly are Republicans now?
Data Center Czars?
Texas is currently trying to absorb a data-center boom so large that ERCOT has reportedly seen more than 470 gigawatts of proposed data center projects seeking grid connection, several times larger than the state's peak electricity demand.
The controversy is not abstract either. State officials have paused new state-issued data-center permits while Texas audits the industry's effects on the grid, water use, tax incentives and infrastructure costs. Communities are also raising concerns about who pays for new transmission, how much water gets consumed and whether backup gas plants and fast-tracked permits are turning rural Texas into an industrial support system for AI.
Source: Reuters reporting on the Texas data-center permit pause.
One more thing before Monday
Parenthood, propaganda, artificial intelligence, electric-grid anxiety and highway dust.
