Source: The Verge
Texas faces a paradox: its deregulated energy market attracted massive AI infrastructure investment, but the resulting surge in natural gas-fired power plants threatens to undo Clean Air Act gains from the past 20 years. The state's ability to absorb this pollution load is constrained by geography—existing nonattainment areas—and policy: no mechanism coordinates data center siting with emissions limits. Infrastructure agglomeration has become a direct environmental tradeoff that policymakers have not priced into their growth calculations.