Texas data centers bypass environmental regulations: "start small, then go big"
Data center developers in Texas have found a loophole in environmental legislation that allows them to avoid public hearings and speed up the construction of their own power plants. Instead of obtaining a single permit for a large facility, which requires mandatory environmental review and notification of residents, companies use a simplified procedure to approve individual turbines and generators. This scheme, originally intended for small and standard emission sources, is now actively used to expand facilities already under construction, making their shutdown practically impossible.
Manipulation of emission thresholds
Since 2024, at least 38 data centers have obtained permits for their own generation precisely through the simplified procedure. More than half of the projects reported nitrogen oxide emissions just below the threshold of 100 tons per year, beyond which public procedures begin. For example, the Vantage data center near San Antonio received a permit for 99.8 tons per year. Former employees of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) describe this strategy with the formula "start small, then go big": companies break a single project into many small applications and then combine the installations into an industrial-scale power plant. According to former EPA enforcement division head Bruce Buckheit, this practice may violate the requirement to consider interconnected parts of a project as a whole.
Stargate project: gas for AI giants
The central example of this scheme is the Stargate data center in Abilene, part of the infrastructure initiative by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle with announced investments of up to $500 billion. In 2024, developers obtained simplified permits for 10 gas turbines and 62 backup diesel generators, which, according to documents, can emit more than 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases and about 1,000 tons of other pollutants per year. A representative of developer Crusoe claims that the turbines will only be used for backup power, but the current permits allow their continuous operation. Within a year, an application was submitted for a main permit for 41 additional turbines and 18 generators. If implemented, the power plant's capacity would exceed that needed for 1 million homes, and annual pollution would be comparable to emissions from nearly 2 million cars.
Scale and risks for the energy system
Texas already has about 300 data centers in operation, with another 200 under development. According to Global Energy Monitor, 80.6 GW of new gas-fired power plants have been announced in the state, of which nearly half (about 40 GW) are intended for direct power supply to data centers. This places Texas second in the world in terms of gas capacity, behind only China. Analysts at Cleanview identified 59 data centers in the US with plans to build their own power plants with a total capacity of about 90 GW, but only about 2 GW have been brought into operation. An investigation of nine gas plants associated with data centers showed that their permitted emissions could exceed 130 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. The TCEQ regulator, despite more than 1,400 unresolved enforcement cases, claims it issues permits only when standards are met but did not provide specific responses to the investigation's findings.
Expert commentary: This situation is a vivid example of how the rapid growth of AI infrastructure is outpacing regulatory mechanisms. Fragmenting projects to bypass environmental controls is not just a technical loophole but a systemic problem that calls into question the sustainability of US energy policy. While profits from the AI boom outpace environmental risks, investors and regulators play cat and mouse, and real emissions grow exponentially.