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Texas data-center power & the ERCOT queue

No market shows the AI power crunch like Texas — where the interconnection queue is the real bottleneck, not the silicon.

A Gridlas analysis · ERCOT / LBNL / EIA data via Latitude Media & Utility Dive · current as of late 2025

63 → ~226 GW
large-load queue, end-2024 → Nov 2025
~77%
of the queue is data centers
1.8%
of queued capacity actually operational

ERCOT's large-load interconnection queue went from 63 GW at the end of 2024 to roughly 226 GW by November 2025 — about a 4× jump in a single year. Around 77% of that is data centers aiming to connect by 2030. Dallas–Fort Worth alone has crossed a gigawatt of operating supply.

Map of Texas data-center clusters and power plants over the ERCOT grid
Texas data-center clusters and generation over the ERCOT grid. Source: public EIA / ERCOT (late 2025); clusters approximate.

But a queue is a wish list, not a build plan. Of that 226 GW, only about 1.8% is actually operational and drawing power — and more than half of the requested capacity hasn't submitted enough information to even begin study. ERCOT added roughly 23 GW of new generation in 2024–25, but the requests are arriving far faster than steel goes in the ground.

Queued versus operational capacity in ERCOT
Queued ≠ built: how little of the ERCOT large-load queue is operational. Source: ERCOT / Latitude Media (Nov 2025).
Compute scales in months. Power scales in years. Texas is where that mismatch is most visible.

Why it matters

ERCOT's deregulated, fast-connect reputation is exactly why hyperscalers flooded in — and exactly why the queue is now the gating factor. For anyone siting capacity in Texas, the question has shifted from "can I get land and power?" to "where in the queue am I, and will the wires arrive before my GPUs do?"

Go deeper. The Gridlas report includes the full Texas deep-dive, high-res ERCOT queue maps, and the underlying dataset (CSV/GeoJSON) — built from public ERCOT, LBNL & EIA data.

Get the report →
Sources: ERCOT interconnection & load reports (via Latitude Media / Utility Dive); LBNL "Queued Up" 2025; U.S. EIA (public domain). Figures current as of late 2025. See the full methodology & sources.
Gridlas · independent & unaffiliated · built from public data. · Read the full analysis →