Gina Hinojosa win puts 27% of planned data center gigawatts at risk

The Texas governor's race had been circled by Wall Street as the event most likely to jolt the AI trade, and the result delivered. With Gina Hinojosa, a supporter of an immediate data center moratorium, defeating Gov. Greg Abbott, investors now face the prospect that the state carrying the largest share of planned U.S. data center capacity will slow or block new projects. Wells Fargo's estimate that 27% of planned gigawatts sits in Texas explains why the reaction was sharpest in companies tied to that buildout — CoreWeave and Iren each fell 4% — while SpaceX, based in the state and building multiple gigawatts of data center capacity there, dropped 4% and Tesla 5%.

The broader market context matters here. The Nasdaq-100 had already fallen into correction territory at the end of October as concerns mounted that data center spending by big hyperscalers and private AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic was slowing. The Texas outcome adds to that pressure rather than creating it from scratch. Notably, the tech giants that are not primarily data center builders — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — mostly rose, suggesting investors distinguished between infrastructure exposure and platform businesses.

The political backdrop is that data centers shifted from a popular economic development tool in 2024 and 2025 to something of a pariah by the time midterm campaigns gathered steam, according to Optimal Advisory's Washington policy team. That framing suggests the Texas vote may not be an isolated event but a signal to local and state officials elsewhere that blocking or delaying data centers carries political upside — a possibility that could weigh on AI infrastructure planning beyond the Lone Star State.