What each decision is

Battalion Oil Corporation announced on September 8th, 2026 an equity investment in Collide Industrial Technologies and a Strategic Partner designation. Under an executed subscription agreement the producer will deploy the vendor's operations system across its upstream operations. The company says the deployment begins by unifying more than 100 terabytes of well files, land records, contracts and production history into one queryable model. The company says the work environment is expected to reach its production engineers at approximately day 90. The company names its Monument Draw cube development program in Ward County as the first fit. Every figure and every result in the announcement is the company's own and none of it has been through a regulator. The release names no client and no measured figure behind its claim of proven results.

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The Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs posted notice that it would meet at 9:00 AM on Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 in hearing room E1.012. Senator Charles Perry chairs it. The notice sets one interim charge and says the committee will hear invited and public testimony on it. The charge is to examine current water consumption rates for high consumption cooling technologies including data centers. It directs the committee to make recommendations improving transparency for local water providers. It also tells the committee to weigh industrial growth against water affordability for households and for agricultural producers. The notice limits public testimony to two minutes and routes written testimony to the committee clerk. A notice sets a hearing rather than reporting one. It says nothing about what the committee heard or what it will recommend.

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Galaxy Digital published an account on September 8th, 2026 of the conditional Batch Zero classifications ERCOT gave five of its Texas data center projects. Three of the five sit at the Helios campus in Dickens County, in the panhandle region of West Texas. Two projects already approved at that campus before the batch were classified as Batch Zero Base Load. Three more, Caspian, Selene and a further Helios load request, were classified as Batch Zero Studied Load. The account states that the company submitted Caspian as Base Load and that it was conditionally classified as Studied Load instead. It states what separates the two classes. A base load project is modeled in the study and is not subject to further capacity allocation. A studied load project is subject to capacity allocation as part of the study. The grid operator's own notice of the classifications named no load and gave no total. This account is where the public first learned what a classification did to a named project. The company's own risk section states that a classification may be modified, withdrawn or not confirmed, and that a project may be removed from Batch Zero.

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The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston contracted in December 2024 for a platform giving it a secure way to work with generative artificial intelligence models. The agenda book for the August 12th and 13th, 2026 meeting of the University of Texas System Board of Regents carries the third amendment. It is item 65 on the consent agenda. It states the first agreement was set at $825,000 and did not require Board approval. A first amendment raised the value to $4,250,000 and still sat inside the same delegated authority. The third amendment adds $5,600,000 and brings the total to $9,850,000. It extends the platform to all seven University of Texas System health related institutions and is funded under an initiative appropriated by the 89th Texas Legislature. The agenda book also states the agreement was competitively procured. No minutes for the meeting are published, so what the Board did with the item is not yet on the public record.

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The Texas Education Agency scores the constructed responses on English language STAAR tests with an automated scoring engine first. At least 25 percent of those answers then go to people. Where a person scores an answer, that score is the one that counts. A March 2024 agency presentation puts the engine's score as the score of record on about 75 percent of responses. Constructed responses on Spanish language tests are scored by people alone. The agency began the hybrid model in December 2023, and its presentation says full human scoring would have cost $15 million to $20 million more per year. On September 4th, 2026 the agency said about 27,200 students received additional credit after content experts rescored short typed answers. It said none of the regraded responses had been graded by the engine. A district can ask for a constructed response to be rescored by a person for a fee, and the fee is waived if the score changes.

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The Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin polled 1200 registered Texas voters from August 5th to 13th, 2026. It reported that 57 percent oppose the construction of a data center in their community. Only 30 percent expressed support. The project calls the result statistically indistinguishable from its June reading. Republicans split closely in August at 45 percent supporting against 43 percent opposing. Democrats and independents stayed decisively opposed.

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A feasibility trial registered on the federal clinical trials registry is recruiting pregnant patients at three Texas academic campuses. The lead sponsor is a professor of women's health at the University of Texas at Austin. Participants place a smartphone microphone on the abdominal wall and the recorded audio is assessed by a machine rather than by the patient's own sense of movement. The registered design is a prospective observational feasibility study of 60 patients drawn from both low risk and high risk pregnancies. What it measures is whether the application is usable rather than whether it prevents any loss. The registration reports an earlier pilot of 205 patients in which the machine assessment outperformed maternal perception against simultaneous ultrasound. The record gives a study start of August 6th, 2026 and was last updated on September 14th, 2026.

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Amarillo City Council voted five to nothing on first reading to authorize a water supply agreement with Fermi America, then took the required second reading later that month. Under the terms the city posted itself, Fermi may buy up to 2.5 million gallons of water per day at a rate twice the standard cost. Fermi pays for the wells, piping and other public improvements. The campus is not in the city. It sits next to Pantex about 35 miles north of the Amarillo city limits in Carson County. The city says it has adequate water resources for that volume without affecting the community's water supply or triggering changes to its drought contingency plans. This is a municipally owned utility selling water outside its own limits, which puts the decision in a council chamber rather than at a state agency. The Panhandle grid around it is the Southwest Power Pool rather than ERCOT.

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Amazon and Wiwynn announced an expansion of Wiwynn's manufacturing operations in Socorro, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer's first plant in the United States. Wiwynn builds and integrates the server systems and racks that go into Amazon's data centers. Wiwynn's chief executive puts the investment at over 1.6 billion dollars and Amazon's vice president of Annapurna Labs states the number of advanced manufacturing roles it supports. Socorro is in El Paso County, which is the one corner of Texas that is not on the ERCOT grid.

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Amazon announced a new manufacturing facility in Austin that will produce the robotics systems used in its fulfillment operations. The Office of the Governor announced the same siting and put it at 300 to 500 new jobs in manufacturing and engineering. Austin Mayor Kirk Watson is quoted in Amazon's own release saying the company asked for no economic incentives and no public money. That sets this apart from most large technology sitings the record carries.

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The authors include radiologists at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. They built a machine learning survival model from MRI radiomic features and tested it on a separate patient group without refitting it. Its discrimination score was lower on the group it was tested on than on the group it was built on. The paper reports overlapping confidence intervals for the two and no test that the difference is real. The authors conclude that the approach showed limited standalone discrimination and support cautious use of it as an exploratory imaging biomarker. The paper is a research result rather than a deployment, and neither institution has published a statement that the model is used in patient care.

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Angelina County Commissioners Court voted unanimously on July 14th, 2026 to adopt Resolution 010-26. It asks the Texas Legislature to grant counties specific powers over large scale industrial development that local government currently can't reach. The requests include buffer and setback rules, noise and heat attenuation standards, light pollution limits, water impact statements and public hearings. County Judge Keith Wright framed the problem plainly. Without an abatement the county has no control over a data center at all. He also said the ask was kept narrow on purpose because a broad one would fail. The resolution carries no force by itself and lands with a Legislature that is not in regular session.

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Archer County Commissioners Court voted unanimously on June 22nd, 2026 against a tax abatement for a data center proposed by Dynamo Ventures LLC. More than 30 residents packed the courthouse to oppose the incentive. County officials said the abatement was the leverage the county had for negotiating infrastructure improvements, local hiring and other commitments, so denying it gave that leverage away. County Judge Randy Jackson said he wants to see what restrictions the Legislature imposes before he would consider any reduction in local tax revenue. The denial does not stop the project from moving forward.

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The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved the system resiliency plan of Southwestern Public Service Company, which serves the Panhandle as Xcel Energy, in Docket 57463. The order lists the metrics the utility must carry into its annual reports. One of them is the number of artificial intelligence camera fire detections. The utility filed its first annual report in Project 57941 on May 1st, 2026. Against that metric it reports 33 cameras installed and projects 34 for 2026, and it gives no count of detections. The same report counts 24 wildfire ignitions associated with its overhead power lines and puts the 2026 capital cost of the AI camera project 64.04 percent above the plan's estimate.

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Austin City Council approved Ordinance No. 20260423-029 on April 23rd, 2026. It adds a new Chapter 2-19 to Title 2 of the city code, covering how any city department adopts, acquires, deploys, uses and reviews surveillance technology. The ordinance followed Resolution No. 20260205-061 of February 5th, 2026, which directed the City Manager to return to Council with a rule on the city's own use of that technology. The council file records no fiscal impact. Reporting has described the ordinance as banning facial recognition and restricting AI and machine learning tools. That language has not been confirmed against the ordinance text.

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A resolution on the Austin City Council's August 27th, 2026 agenda directs staff to begin amendments to City Code Title 25, the Land Development Code. The amendments would establish land uses, site development regulations and development processes for data center use in certain zoning districts. It also directs work on business regulations and permit requirements for data center operations. The item carries file number 26-2329 and no fiscal impact. The city's own legislative record still shows the item as agenda ready with no vote recorded against it, so nothing here says the council has acted.

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Item 61 on the Austin City Council's regular meeting agenda for August 27th, 2026 asks the council to approve a resolution. It would initiate amendments to Title 25 of the City Code, the Land Development Code. The amendments would establish land uses and site development regulations and development processes for data center use in certain zoning districts. The same item covers business regulations and permit requirements for data center operations. The posted item carries no megawatt or square footage threshold and the agenda records the item as having no fiscal impact.

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Austin City Council adopted Resolution No. 20260812-017 on August 12th, 2026. It directs the City Manager to write a Parks Security Implementation Plan. It also directs the manager to acquire and deploy security equipment for city parks and recreation lands. The resolution lists the kinds of equipment contemplated. Security cameras are on that list. So are non-recording drones as first responders. So are lighting and access control and signage and radio. The resolution then forbids the City Manager from considering any camera or drone system that depends on artificial intelligence to conduct surveillance or analysis. Anything acquired has to comply with the surveillance technology ordinance the council adopted in April. Parks with a history of violent crime are prioritized for the first deployment. The City Manager owes a progress update to the Council Climate, Water, Environment, and Parks Committee no later than December 9th, 2026. The resolution sets the date by which the update is owed and does not set a date for a meeting. The April ordinance the resolution points at is City Code Chapter 2-19. It already lists artificial intelligence or machine learning tools among what is not permitted. The exception is whatever the city's own policy allows.

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The Blanco-Pedernales Groundwater Conservation District board met on April 16th, 2026 and signed Resolution No. 20260416-1 requesting legislative clarification on the regulation of data centers. The district publishes the signed resolution alongside the meeting minutes and its other board orders from that date. A groundwater conservation district is the body that issues an operating permit when a large user drills its own well. The district is asking for statutory footing before that question reaches it. The same meeting produced a board order granting a commercial permit to another applicant, which shows the routine permitting work the district does month to month.

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On June 9th, 2026 Brazoria County Commissioners Court adopted a measure on data center development. Its own agenda system records it as a resolution about data centers and related facilities in Texas. The item was introduced on May 29th, 2026, reached the court and was approved. Reporting on the resolution says the court supports responsible economic development, including appropriately designed and sited data centers. It also says no future data center should proceed without an independent impact assessment. A county resolution is not an ordinance and Texas counties have no zoning power outside city limits, so this sets a stated position rather than a rule. It came from the same court that had already refused the reinvestment zone behind the Old Ocean Datacenter and Bulldog Power abatement applications.

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Brazoria County Commissioners Court opened and closed a public hearing on the creation of Brazoria County Reinvestment Zone No. 26-01 on March 10th, 2026. The court then refused to create the zone. Commissioner David R. Linder moved to deny the order and Commissioner Stacy L. Adams seconded. The county's own minute note records that the motion to deny passed 5 to 0. Later items on the same agenda were four tax abatement applications, two from Bulldog Power and two from Old Ocean Datacenter. Each of those items carries the same note in the record. No action was taken because the reinvestment zone item had failed. Killing the zone killed the abatements without a separate vote on any one of them.

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Brazos County posted a Tax Code Section 312.207 notice that its Commissioners Court would consider assigning the tax abatement agreement for the RELLIS Campus data and research center. The agreement was originally approved on April 29th, 2025 with RELLIS Campus Data and Research Center, LLC. The pending assignee named in the notice is ThisWay, Global, Inc. The county's own notice puts the estimated cost of improvements and tangible personal property at a minimum of approximately 700 million dollars. The land sits in a reinvestment zone on the RELLIS campus. That campus belongs to The Texas A and M University System, so the abatement agreement is what decides whether the county collects anything from the build.

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At its September 1st, 2026 meeting the Brownsville City Commission considered starting the process for a temporary moratorium. It would cover data centers alongside private gaming clubs, automotive quick lube facilities, event centers and self storage. City staff told the commission that Brownsville's Unified Development Code contains no regulations addressing data centers. The stated purpose is to give the city time to study electricity and energy use, water consumption, noise, land use compatibility, infrastructure and economic and fiscal impacts. The proposal also reactivates the city's Environmental and Conservation Task Force to study data center development and recommend to the commission. The city's own account says an initial moratorium could run up to 90 days and could be extended for another 90 days after further proceedings.

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Carson County Commissioners Court approved a tax abatement agreement with Fermi America for the Project Matador HyperGrid campus in the Texas Panhandle. The agreement is two sided and pays the county on both ends of the same facility. Fermi pays 3 dollars per square foot of data center improvements and from 2,500 to 2,750 dollars per megawatt of generating capacity. County Judge Dan Looten said the agreement covers 15 phases and could extend up to 25 years. Each completed phase enters its own 10 year abatement. Yearly training with local EMS and first responders is written into the deal. This corner of the Panhandle sits in the Southwest Power Pool rather than ERCOT, so the ERCOT interconnection and reliability rules a Texas reader would assume do not govern here.

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JAMA Network Open published a quality improvement study on September 3rd, 2026. It compared discharge dates from a commercial AI tool built into Houston Methodist Hospital's electronic health record against dates estimated by the hospital's own case managers. The study covered inpatient encounters discharged between August 1st, 2023 and February 28th, 2024. At admission the two were close. Nearer to discharge, which is when the answer is used to plan a bed, the case managers were substantially more accurate. It reports estimation accuracy rather than any effect on a patient, and says so.

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The City of Taylor published a public notice for its City Council. The council would consider an Amended and Restated Tax Abatement Agreement with Compal Technology, Inc. and PDC TP 01 LOT A LLC. The notice set that consideration for the regularly scheduled meeting on August 13th, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. The property sits in Reinvestment Zone No. 11, which the city calls the Taylor Port Zone. The notice describes the improvements as the renovation of the Taylor Port Building. It covers the design and manufacture of electronics and related items at an estimated cost of approximately $ 200 Million. Compal already holds a separate Chapter 312 abatement from Williamson County for a server service center in Georgetown. The same contract manufacturer is now the subject of incentive agreements at two levels of Central Texas government. The August 13th vote has not been confirmed against a published minute.

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The College Station City Council voted 4 to 2 on September 24th, 2026 to approve two agreements with Flock Group. One covers automatic license plate readers on state highway roads and the other covers cameras on other roads. Council members Mark Smith and Bob Yancy voted against. The cameras photograph the rear of passing vehicles day and night and sort each one by make, model and color. The city says no search can be run without reasonable suspicion. It says its police department decides which agencies can search the network and keeps every search indefinitely. An automated audit tool that went live in April is the city's named check on misuse. The city reports lower property crime since the cameras went up and says the drop correlates with them. It does not claim they caused it.

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The Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act is the state's school district property tax incentive program. The Comptroller publishes the current executed agreements. Every project type on that list is manufacturing, power generation or extraction. No agreement on the published list is a data center.

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Conroe City Council voted late on August 13th, 2026 on whether to place a binding proposition about the city's Flock Safety license plate reader cameras before voters in November. Reporting says the motion did not get the three yes votes it needed. Council Member David Hairel and Council Member Shana Arthur were the only members who supported it. The city faced an August 17th deadline to place items on the November ballot, so the question will not reach Conroe voters this fall. The same council had already voted unanimously on July 23rd, 2026 to table two Flock related proposals indefinitely, a step that did not terminate or change the city's Flock agreement. The neighboring city of League City took the opposite path two days earlier and ordered the election.

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The Corpus Christi City Council passed a motion on July 21st, 2026 as agenda item 18, moved by Council Member Gilbert Hernandez and seconded by Council Member Carolyn Vaughn. The motion tells staff to initiate a Unified Development Code amendment defining data centers as a distinct principal land use. Staff are also to amend the zoning and permitted use tables to prohibit them in all districts. It also directs an extraterritorial jurisdiction and infrastructure protection policy. Under it a data center would fully fund its own infrastructure, provide verified water and wastewater planning and address electric and backup power impacts. It would need separate City Council approval before receiving city utility service or economic development incentives. A third part directs the statutory notice, hearing and findings work needed before the council could consider a temporary development moratorium. Nothing is prohibited yet because the motion only starts that process. The same meeting carried a staff briefing on data centers that included an overview of Governor Abbott's recent guidelines.

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The Department of Information Resources is required to establish a program letting eligible public entities contract with registered vendors to test AI systems before deployment. That testing is expressly without full compliance with otherwise applicable regulations. Vendors apply, and participants file quarterly reports. The department must report to the Legislature by November 30th of each even numbered year. That makes November 30th, 2026 the first reporting date.

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The Dallas City Council Public Safety Committee has put an update on the Dallas Police Department's Flock automated license plate reader program on its September 8th, 2026 agenda. The item was introduced August 13th, 2026 and is a briefing rather than an action item. The chief of police is listed as a presenter alongside a major and a sergeant from operational technology. A briefing is where a council committee is told what a system is doing. It is the point at which a resident can hear the department describe the program in a public room.

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The City of Dallas put AI enabled cameras on its sanitation brush trucks to photograph parcels from the public right of way and flag code violations. A December 9th, 2025 briefing to the council's Finance Committee set out the terms and drew a line under what the system would not be. It named automated ticketing and public safety surveillance among the three things it is not, and it stated that a human stands in the loop for all actions. The cameras went fully operational over the summer of 2026. A memo the city manager sent the council on September 8th, 2026 is reported to say that 57 citations have been issued at 34 properties. The same memo is reported to say that 39 of those citations went to three southern Dallas council districts. It is also reported to say the cameras scanned 10,000 properties and produced 3,700 violations that drew notices. The city's position is that the letters it sends are courtesy notices rather than warnings. The letter itself is reported to carry the words violations identified and to ask the owner to correct them to avoid further enforcement action. The assistant director of Code Compliance was asked about the difference and said you could call that a warning. The city manager briefs a council committee on the program on October 19th.

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An agenda item asked the Denton City Council to approve a resolution on a moratorium. It covers the acceptance and processing and approval of applications for data center development inside the city limits. The same item asked the council to approve a schedule for the notice and public hearings the moratorium would require. The city's legislative record shows no final action and the meeting minutes for August 18th, 2026 are not finalized. Denton runs its own municipal electric utility, so a moratorium here is a city deciding whether to keep taking applications for loads it would have to serve itself.

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ERCOT issued a market notice on September 9th, 2026. It states that the grid operator has begun sending Batch Zero Verification Requests for Information. They go to a majority of the large load entities whose loads were conditionally included in Batch Zero. The notice states that completing the verification is a condition of staying in Batch Zero. Batch Zero is the group of large loads whose place in the interconnection study was frozen pending the audit the Governor directed in August.

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The Electric Reliability Council of Texas put a list of emerging Large Load risks in front of its own Board of Directors at the September 14th and 15th, 2026 meeting. The presentation names three risks and a mitigation for each, and the three sit at three different stages. Ride through requirements are already in force. The model quality rule cleared the board on September 15th and now waits on the Public Utility Commission of Texas. The third rule has not been written yet. The grid operator states that Large Loads tied to data center AI training processes can swing their power draw fast enough to perturb synchronous generator shafts. It says that swing can cause equipment fatigue or damage. Its draft rule would hold a Large Load's power variation to 10 MW per 5 seconds. The same page states that the dynamic models the grid operator uses to study these loads have proven inaccurate, and that Texas A&M University is building better ones. The presentation itself was for information only and the board was asked to take no action on it.

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The El Paso City Council approved and adopted a letter to Governor Greg Abbott seeking clarification on his directives on data center development throughout Texas. The council took the item at its regular meeting on August 18th, 2026 as agenda item 34, and the motion carried. The item had been introduced on August 11th, 2026 by a member of the City Council. The question underneath it is jurisdictional, because El Paso is served by El Paso Electric in the Western Interconnection and statewide directives written around ERCOT do not automatically reach it.

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The El Paso City Council voted on July 20th, 2026 to adopt a Data Center Policy Framework. The resolution came through a City Council Work Session and passed on a motion by Representative Boyar Trejo. The framework routes future hyperscale data center applications through a Special Permit with public notice, City Plan Commission review and a public hearing. It sets standards on water use, energy demand, noise and lighting. It also eliminates local economic incentives for future hyperscale projects. Implementation has to return to council as ordinance amendments, so the framework by itself changes no rule until those pass. El Paso sits in the Western Interconnection served by El Paso Electric and is not on ERCOT.

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On June 23rd, 2026 the El Paso City Council directed the City Manager to amend the city's 90th Session State Legislative Agenda. The amendment adds advocacy for policy protecting residential ratepayers from the utility costs of data centers. The item cites Governor Greg Abbott's June 10th, 2026 letter to Public Utility Commission of Texas Chairman Thomas Gleeson and ERCOT chief executive Pablo Vegas. It also directs the City Manager and City Attorney to determine whether the electric grid El Paso residents use is incorporated under that directive. The motion was made by Representative Fierro, seconded by Representative Chavez, and it carried. El Paso Electric operates in the Western Interconnection, so ratepayer protections built for ERCOT do not reach El Paso customers by default.

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The El Paso City Council took up two items filed by members of the council at its September 15th, 2026 meeting. The council's own record marks each one approved as revised. The amendments were made from the floor and their text is not published. The minutes are marked final and are not posted yet. What the revisions changed is not on a record a reader can reach today. As filed, the first item directed the City Manager to remove every Flock Safety fixed automated license plate reader camera from city property and right of way within 60 days. The hardware went with it, whoever owned the equipment. As filed, the second barred the City Manager from entering, renewing or extending any contract for fixed networked plate reader cameras or similar technology without a further council vote. It gave the City Attorney 30 days to draft a resolution carrying that out. Whether those terms survived the amendments is unconfirmed. El Paso sits outside the ERCOT region.

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The El Paso City Council passed two items on September 15th, 2026, and its own meeting record marks each one approved as revised. The text of the revisions is not on that record. As filed, the first directed the city manager to remove within 60 days all Flock Safety fixed automated license plate reader cameras and related hardware. That reached city property, city right of way and anything otherwise within the city's control, whoever owns the hardware. As filed, the second barred the city manager from entering, executing, renewing or extending any such contract unless the council directs otherwise. It reached Flock Safety and any other provider of fixed networked plate readers. It gave the city attorney 30 days to return a resolution. Whether those terms survived the revisions is unconfirmed. Both items were sponsored by members of the council rather than brought by staff.

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The Energy Department's Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation named four mining proving ground projects on September 9th, 2026. One goes to Southern Methodist University, whose project location the announcement gives as Navasota, Texas. The department describes it as the world's first synthetic pit of its kind. It sits inside an existing instrumented drilling and sensing facility. Mining tools, workflows and automation systems can be tested repeatably in the field rather than only in a laboratory. The announcement states no dollar figure for the Texas project and never uses the words artificial intelligence, so what is funded here is automation testing rather than a model.

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Rice University published on September 1st, 2026 that the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy awarded a three year grant to a coalition led by the University of Houston. The other partners are Rice and Colorado State University and Carrier Global and Newfound Materials. Rice brings artificial intelligence and atomistic modeling and high throughput computing to the work. Its part is choosing which magnetic materials get made and tested. The stated goal is to find entirely new materials while balancing supply constraint concerns.

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The Federal Aviation Administration has published a draft environmental assessment of Zipline International's request to begin commercial drone package delivery in Amarillo, Austin, El Paso, Houston and San Antonio. Approving the change to the company's air carrier operating approvals is the federal action under review. The draft assesses up to 220 chargers, 4,400 pickup dropboxes and 220,000 deliveries a day across the five areas, flown around the clock at about 330 feet above the ground. Routes are generated by software. At each stop a pod lowers on a line and evaluates the drop spot automatically. When the pod can't identify the target and judge the spot itself, an image is sent to an operator. The draft finds no significant noise impact. Comments are open until October 11th, 2026.

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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed a wholesale revision of its reactor licensing, safety oversight and siting rules. The revision is being carried out under an executive order directing reform of the agency. Comments close August 31st, 2026. Siting rules bear directly on the new nuclear generation being proposed to serve large electrical loads in Texas.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics proposed adding questions about artificial intelligence to the American Time Use Survey and took public comment on it under the Paperwork Reduction Act. That window closed September 8th, 2026, and no decision on whether the questions go into the survey has been published. The survey is a main federal instrument for measuring how people actually spend working time, so what it asks about AI shapes what is later knowable.

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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission published a request for comment on August 21st, 2026 asking what a designated contract market should weigh before listing derivatives with compute as the underlier. The document ties the supply side of a compute price to the cost of deploying and operating data centers, and to the cost of chips and energy. Comments are open until October 20th, 2026. The notice names no state.

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The Department of Energy published a request for information on September 9th, 2026. It implements an August 26th executive order on securing the United States bulk power system. The notice asks about covered equipment and transactions and about foreign produced bulk power system electric equipment. It also asks about remote access practices and federal procurement. The notice names advanced manufacturing and data centers and artificial intelligence and defense production as what increased the nation's dependence on reliable electricity. Written responses are accepted through October 9th, 2026 and a public webinar is set for September 16th.

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The Office of Defects Investigation at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a preliminary evaluation into the Avride automated driving system. The resume gives the date it was opened as the sixth of May, 2026. It was prompted by crash reports filed under the agency's standing general order. The resume says the crashes happened in Dallas and in Austin. The failure report summary gives a crash total and a single alleged minor injury. Investigators reviewed video of every crash. The video shows vehicles changing lanes into other vehicles and failing to slow for what was ahead of them. A person sat in the driver's seat during every one of those crashes while the system drove. The office also records its understanding that the same vehicles carry paying passengers on a ride-hailing platform in Dallas. The document makes no finding of defect. Its strongest statement is that the system's performance may indicate inappropriate assertiveness and insufficient competence. The agency's own investigation status pages would not answer a request this run, so the record can't say what state the evaluation is in today. What it can say is that it was opened and that the document reaches no conclusion.

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened Audit Query AQ26002 on September 3rd, 2026, the same day Tesla began commercial deployment of the Cybercab in Austin. The agency records that the vehicles lack permanently attached, conventional manual controls, naming a brake pedal, a gas pedal, a steering wheel and mirrors. Tesla certified the vehicle itself as meeting every applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard and told the agency it had done so. The audit does not ask how the vehicle drives. It examines the process and the technical data behind that certification. The agency says it will consider how far that certification rested on Tesla deciding that certain standards do not apply. The vehicle was built without the controls those standards were written for. The estimated population is a thousand vehicles and Tesla has told the agency it plans to add more vehicles and more locations.

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The National Telecommunications and Information Administration submitted its Internet Use Survey to the Office of Management and Budget for renewal on September 9th, 2026. It asked the public directly whether more data is needed on artificial intelligence. The notice names AI use at work or home and attitudes toward AI as areas it is asking about. Comments must be received on or before November 9th, 2026.

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The Fort Worth City Council took three data center votes on August 11th, 2026. Members unanimously approved the first steps toward a 90 day moratorium on accepting, processing and approving new data center applications inside the city. Two further items passed over a single dissent. One creates a Data Center and Infrastructure Commission. The other amends the city code so applicants must document their filings for connection to the Texas grid. The pause is not in force yet. Under the city timeline it takes effect on February 16th after public hearings and further votes, and zoning applications filed before then stay outside it.

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The Department of Energy announced the recipients of its Genesis Mission in Washington on July 22nd, 2026. UT Austin leads two projects and partners on three more. UT Arlington leads a project on keeping AI driven experiment workflows trustworthy at large scientific facilities. Texas A&M announced its own participation five days later. The program routes federal science money through an explicitly AI first frame, so Texas campuses are competing inside that frame rather than around it. The size of the round is the universities' own restatement of the announcement rather than a figure the department published where it could be read.

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The Texas Advanced Computing Center's Frontera user guide carries a warning. The queues close permanently on October 1st, 2026 after seven years of running. Users will still reach Frontera's file systems to transfer data off. Frontera is funded by the National Science Foundation through award 1818253 and the guide calls it the largest cluster dedicated to open science in the United States. The successor is Horizon. It is funded through the Leadership Class Computing Facility award. Horizon's own guide carries a notice dated in July saying it is still limited only to internal users. That guide also says it is in progress. Horizon lists three ways in. They are the facility's own allocations and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot and the state's allocation system.

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Governor Greg Abbott issued a directive on August 3rd, 2026. It tells the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to run a verification and audit of every data center moving through the interconnection process. The audit must finish before any data center project moves forward. The directive names five things the agencies must obtain from each project. They are public financial assistance received or expected. They are whether the project brings its own power and whether it brings and reuses its own water. They are what it does to reduce effects on neighbors and who owns and controls it. The letter states the queue at approximately 474 gigawatts and puts the data center share of new power requests at approximately 90 percent. It gives a reason. Some data centers did not answer the commission's own survey of water and power use.

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On September 21st, 2026 the Governor directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to suspend action on all permits sought by data center projects. In the Governor's own words the agency will issue no permits sought by data center projects until they complete the grid and water board audits. The letter goes wider than one agency. It states that no other state agency is to move forward with regulatory approvals related to data centers until that information is acquired. The agency must report to the Office of the Governor on its compliance by October 19th, 2026.

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The Office of the Governor issued a directive to the Texas Water Development Board on September 14th, 2026. It tells the board to enforce the water use survey requirement against major water users, naming data centers. The directive covers failures already made as well as future ones. The reason the directive gives for needing the numbers is the state water plan. The board writes it and can't do that while it is denied detail on what is consumed now and what will be. That sentence is the Governor's office describing the board's position rather than the board speaking. The Texas Water Code requires a complete and accurate water use survey. A recipient who does not complete and return it commits an offense punishable as a crime. One who returns it late becomes ineligible for TCEQ permits, amendments or renewals under Chapter 11 of that code. The board is told to refer noncompliance to the County or District Attorney and to notify TCEQ for possible permit disqualification. It is also told to partner with the grid operator on the data center audit the Governor ordered on August 3rd, 2026. It must report back on its enforcement by October 14th, 2026.

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The Governor's office ordered every Texas state agency to pause funding for Flock automated license plate reader cameras, and confirmed the order on August 28th, 2026. The money behind the state's share of that network is a one dollar auto insurance fee the Legislature passed unanimously in 2023 against catalytic converter theft. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority turned part of that fee into cameras reaching from El Paso to the Louisiana border. The order reached the public as a spokesperson's statement to a newsroom, and the Governor's own news index carries no release on it. The authority that wrote the grants listed a board meeting for October 13th, 2026 and has since taken it off its page, which now shows no future meeting at all.

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ERCOT issued Market Notice M-B091426-01 on September 14th, 2026, opening a Request for Information on the state and community impacts of data centers. Its stated audience is developers of data centers of 25 MW and larger. The body narrows the actual recipients to two defined groups rather than every developer of that size. It is issued jointly with the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Water Development Board. Section C carries the water questions. The water board's Executive Administrator authorized the grid operator to ask them on the board's behalf, and the grid operator forwards the answers back. A developer does not file its own response. Its transmission or distribution provider files it, with a notarized attestation, through the operator's own web platform. Responses are due at 5 p.m. Central Prevailing Time on October 12th, 2026. Not responding is reported to the commission and to the Office of the Governor, and under Texas Water Code 16.012 an incomplete answer to Section C carries criminal exposure. The notice states in its own words that this is a separate request from the Batch Zero eligibility one issued on September 9th, 2026. A report on what the answers show is expected by December 10th, 2026.

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A revision request pending at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas concerns the grid's ride-through requirements. It would give a large computational load up to 365 days after its in-service date to comply. It applies where the cooling load can't meet the standard on the day it starts. The posting names the reason as design and manufacturing limits, including vendors still adapting chiller and variable frequency drive equipment to the applicable standards. Ride-through is the requirement that keeps a large load on the system through a voltage dip rather than dropping off all at once. The request was posted on July 21st, 2026 and is still pending, with the reliability and operations subcommittee named as its next group.

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Guadalupe County Sheriff Joshua Ray asked the Commissioners Court for permission to terminate the county's contract with Flock Safety, and the court approved unanimously. Flock cameras read license plates automatically and alert deputies to vehicles of interest. Ray told the court his view of the technology has not changed and that the reason is cost. The county pays to replace cameras that keep getting vandalized while continuing to pay the monthly bill. Guadalupe County sits in the San Antonio metro area between Seguin and New Braunfels.

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The City of Harlingen Waterworks System board of directors approved a water supply agreement with RGV Property LLC for a supply of effluent water. The water is intended to serve a proposed data center on land outside the Harlingen city limits in Cameron County. The board's own minutes carry the vote, 6 yeas and 0 nays. The trustees took it after consulting their attorney in executive session on what the agenda calls the RGVPG Data Center reclaimed water agreement. Roy Rodriguez, the interim general manager at that meeting, is recorded as the officer who recommended approval. The minutes call it a supply of effluent water.

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Harris County Commissioners Court approved a renewal option with Flock Group, Inc. for a license plate reader and sound detection system on May 28th, 2026 as agenda item 86. The renewal covers a period running from June 6th, 2026 to June 5th, 2027 at a cost of $868,975. Commissioner Ellis moved approval and Commissioner Garcia seconded. On July 9th, 2026 the court approved a follow up amendment that supplements certain terms and clarifies that the agreement is available for use County-wide at no additional cost. Local reporting on the May vote says the item passed with four votes and that County Judge Lina Hidalgo abstained after residents spoke against it.

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The Hays County Commissioners Court approved a resolution on June 23rd, 2026 establishing a 180-day emergency water protection review period for high water use development applications, including data centers. The same resolution creates a review board that evaluates those proposals and advises the court. Commissioners voted unanimously. The county has been operating under drought conditions and water use restrictions tied to declining aquifer levels, which is the stated reason for the measure. This is the counter-image to the incentive votes elsewhere in Central Texas, since a county here chose to slow its own review rather than speed it up.

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The Hays County Commissioners Court agenda for September 1st, 2026 carried an item acknowledging that the Hays County Sheriff's Office had committed not to activate or implement Axon Draft One. The agenda describes that product as a report writing feature inside a vendor platform. The commitment reaches any new AI based feature the same platform may later offer under the related contract. What makes the item unusual is the condition rather than the refusal. Operational use requires returning to this court for approval, so the decision stays with the elected body rather than with the office holding the contract. The vendor's own product page describes the feature as drafting a report narrative from body worn camera audio. That page says an officer has to review and approve one before it can be submitted. Local reporting says the court voted three to two on September 15th to move the money it had set aside for a possible Axon contract. The money went to two more corrections officer positions. The county's own minutes of that vote are not yet published.

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The Hays County Commissioners Court agenda for September 8th, 2026 carried an item on how the county governs its own use of artificial intelligence in surveillance. The item names equipment and software alongside the collection and analysis of data. It contemplated adopting a policy statement that would set guidelines and limits on the AI enabled surveillance technologies the county uses. The reach is general rather than product specific. That makes it the standing rule beside the narrower promise the same court posted a week earlier. The item immediately after it on the same agenda concerns two contract amendments with a different vendor. One of those is for report writing services. Nothing on either page connects the two. The county's own Court Minutes archive for 2026 carries nothing later than July 28th. The disposition is not on the public record today.

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The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate brought industry partners to the Progreso International Bridge in Hidalgo County to demonstrate facial biometric image capture for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Customs and Border Protection asked for the work in October 2025. Six companies were invited to the Maryland Test Facility in early 2026 for basic capability demonstrations. Three solutions were selected for further data collection. Two came from NEC National Security Systems and one was a joint solution from Paravision and AiFi. A replica of the pedestrian exit environment was built at the Maryland Test Facility first. The partners then arrived at Progreso in May. Cameras were mounted on poles at different heights. Testing ran after dark as well as in daylight with external lighting configurations. The partners used artificial intelligence to construct a three dimensional digital environment of the image capture zone. They also used it to observe pedestrian movement and to analyze whether facial images were suitable for matching in the Traveler Verification Service. Signs in English and Spanish told pedestrians that United States citizens could opt out. An opt-out lane was provided. The biometric entry and exit mandate applies to travelers who are not United States citizens. The account published on September 1st, 2026 records what the agencies and the vendors said about the result. It publishes no accuracy figure and no count of images captured. It publishes no retention period and no deployment decision.

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The Texas House Committee on Public Health met on August 20th, 2026 on a charge about clinical artificial intelligence. It directs the committee to study the use of artificial intelligence in the health care system to improve access and quality and efficiency of care. The same charge tells the committee to evaluate potential risks to patient safety and privacy and access to care for Texans. A second charge on the same agenda covers what social media platforms and artificial intelligence technologies do to the mental health and the cognitive development of minors. This is the committee that would write any statute governing clinical AI in the next session. Clinical AI is already running in Texas hospitals.

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The Texas House Committee on State Affairs met on August 19th, 2026 on two interim charges. The first directs it to study the development of data centers in Texas and to review the regulatory framework governing that development. It also directs it to study the implementation of SB 6 and the Large Load Batch Study Process proposed by ERCOT as it relates to data centers. The second directs it to review the regulatory and planning processes regarding the proposed 765 kV transmission lines. Those are the same lines the commission has two Oncor applications for. The committee's product is a report to the next Legislature rather than an order, so nothing binds until the session convenes in January 2027.

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Houston Independent School District has a proposed local board policy numbered CQD(LOCAL) covering technology resources and artificial intelligence. The item was introduced on March 20th, 2026. Its first reading sat on the June 11th, 2026 board agenda as item 42. Its second reading sat on the August 13th, 2026 agenda as item 24, in the consent section. The district's agenda system records no action, mover or vote for either reading. The August 13th minutes are still marked draft, so the record does not yet show whether the board adopted it. This is a state-appointed Board of Managers rather than an elected board, and the policy would apply to the largest school district in Texas.

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Houston Methodist rolled out a suite of AI imaging tools across the system, starting with a small group of users before widening it. The tool flags a suspected finding on a scan and draws a heat map to direct the radiologist's attention. The stated aims are faster emergency response and cleaner patient follow up. The hospital's own account says the system is not perfect and quotes a radiologist making the same point. That is a more careful public position than a deployment of this kind usually carries.

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UT Physicians is the clinical practice of McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. Its chief medical information officer told a school wide meeting on September 9th, 2026 that the practice is working toward adopting one ambient listening platform as a unified system. Pilots ran on two competing products first. The stated purpose is to cut the administrative load of clinical documentation and return attention to the patient. The same meeting reported that McGovern is taking part in a University of Texas System project examining already completed student simulations to see whether AI can write the feedback. Real time feedback is named as the longer term goal. No completion date is given for either.

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HGACBuy is the cooperative purchasing program run by the Houston-Galveston Area Council. It publishes an active contract numbered AI05-26 titled AI Consulting Services. The term runs from May 1st, 2026 through April 30th, 2030. The catalog describes the work as comprehensive guidance through the array of possible solutions where artificial intelligence can be integrated. Five vendors are listed as awarded on the contract page. This is the procurement plumbing behind a lot of Texas government AI work. A contract vehicle is how a small city or district buys a service without running its own solicitation.

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El Paso Electric asked the Public Utility Commission of Texas to amend its certificate so it can build and own the McCloud facility. It is a 366 MW natural gas plant in northeast El Paso County made of 813 modular gas generators. It would primarily serve a data center being developed by Wurldwide LLC, which the case record says is owned by Meta Platforms. Meta calls the El Paso site an AI data center that can scale to one gigawatt. On September 23rd, 2026 two administrative law judges issued their proposal for decision. They found a need for capacity to serve the data center. They also found the utility did not show the plant is a cost-effective and reliable resource, and did not show it adequately considered alternatives. They recommend approval only if the utility's other retail customers are held harmless from the plant's capital and operating costs, and denial without that condition. The commission decides at an open meeting. El Paso City Council has since authorized a counteroffer seeking a full hold harmless for ratepayers. The utility serves outside the ERCOT region, so no ERCOT large load rule decides who pays here.

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The Justice Department filed a proposed final judgment on September 4th, 2026 against Pinnacle Property Management Services, an apartment manager headquartered in Frisco. Pinnacle licensed AI Revenue Management and YieldStar from RealPage, which is headquartered in Richardson. The judgment would bar Pinnacle from any outside revenue management product that uses other landlords' nonpublic data to recommend or set prices. It would also bar Pinnacle from sharing competitively sensitive information with competitors. The government may inspect Pinnacle's own pricing product down to its code and pseudocode. A monitor can be appointed if Pinnacle uses outside pricing software without a qualifying certification. The notice was published on September 18th, 2026 and invites public comment for 60 days. The judgment would expire five years after the court enters it. The case against RealPage and the other landlords goes on, and Pinnacle must cooperate in it.

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The Killeen Planning and Zoning Commission voted against a conditional use permit for a $30 million data center proposed by the company ONMINE. It voted at its regular meeting on April 27th, 2026. City staff had recommended approval. The commission's own agenda files the request as Case Z26-07. It is a conditional use permit to allow a data center on about two and a half acres at 6509 South Fort Hood Street. The land is zoned University District. The applicant of record is Belton Engineering, Inc. on behalf of 4 Lazy J Properties, LLC. The commission's vote is a recommendation, and the final decision on the zoning rests with the Killeen City Council. Two outlets report the tally differently, one as 4 to 1 to deny and one as 4 to 0 against with a single abstention.

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Laredo City Council declined to impose a temporary moratorium on data center permits at its meeting on July 27th, 2026. The council item asks staff to evaluate the impacts of high intensity data processing facilities on municipal infrastructure, water resources, electrical demand and land use compatibility. It also asks staff to recommend regulatory standards. The city's own record carries that item on the June 15th and July 27th agendas and records no action taken at either meeting. It returned to the August 3rd, 2026 agenda and the city records no action there either. The city attorney told the council that Laredo's existing Land Development Code already prohibits uses that are not specifically permitted. Planning staff reported that neither the city nor Webb County had received an application for a data center.

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On August 11th, 2026 the League City City Council approved Ordinance No. 2026-27 on first and final reading. The ordinance orders a special election on November 3rd, 2026. It asks voters about the police department's continued use of automated license plate reader cameras at fixed locations on public roadways. The wording the city published opens by telling voters the result is a nonbinding statement of preference, so the council keeps the decision either way. Mayor Long sponsored the item and asked for approval on first and final reading. Council member Chadwell moved it, seconded by Council member Cones. Reporting in the Houston region identifies the cameras as Flock cameras.

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The Leander City Council directed the city to discontinue funding its contract with the automated license plate recognition vendor Flock at its September 3rd, 2026 meeting. The city posted a notice saying that as of September 4th, 2026 the police department is no longer using Flock cameras or Flock data. The city's own account gives the reason as community concerns and says the system had been started to enhance public safety. What the notice does not say is what happens to the images already collected or whether the hardware comes down.

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Lubbock County Commissioners Court passed a non binding resolution on August 10th, 2026. It asks large scale industrial developers to disclose expected water use, electricity use and infrastructure impacts before building in the unincorporated county. The discussion centered on data centers, though the wording reaches any major business. County Judge Curtis Parrish cast the lone vote against it. He said the resolution should be tailored to data centers if data centers are the concern. The resolution states on its face that it creates no county authority. Commissioner Jason Corley said flatly during the meeting that resolutions are not binding.

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The Lubbock City Council held a public hearing on September 8th, 2026 on a citizen petition brought under the city charter. The petition asked for an 18 month moratorium on high water use and high energy use data centers inside the city. The same agenda carried a separate resolution stating the council's desire that large scale data centers not be developed inside the municipal limits. On September 22nd, 2026 the council began the procedure to adopt a 90 day moratorium. It would cover rezoning, building permit and annexation requests tied to large scale data centers. The petition's 18 month version failed without a second. The moratorium is not in force yet. It needs two public hearings before it can be declared.

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Memorial Hermann Health System says its clinicians are using an artificial intelligence assistant built into Epic to draft the note a patient receives with a lab or imaging result. The draft is written in plain language rather than clinical terms and the clinician can review, edit and personalize it before sharing it with the patient. The health system reports that patients sent 32% fewer follow up messages about test results when the clinician started from the draft. It reports the tool has helped care teams write over 55,000 messages and that clinicians starting from a draft saved an average of nine seconds per result comment. The feature was piloted in December of 2025 in the system's innovation clinic and use has since expanded across the system. A health system trade publication that read the same announcement noted every one of those figures comes from the software vendor and its customer. No baseline, control arm or denominator is published beside them, and the share describes only the clinicians who chose to work from a draft. The system's chief medical information officer says the technology is designed to support rather than replace the clinician's judgment.

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The National Science Foundation made an award to Prairie View A and M University on August 11th, 2026 under its HBCU Excellence in Research program. The project builds a framework that uses graph based artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning to decide how to break up electric grid optimization problems. It then assigns the pieces to processor cores as the work runs. The award record states the obligation as FY 2026 = $699,999.00 and runs the project from October 1st, 2026 through September 30th, 2029. The math it targets is the math that decides which generators run in a grid the size of the one carrying the state's new load.

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The National Science Foundation made an award to the University of Texas at Austin on August 13th, 2026 under its Foundational Research in Robotics program. The project trains a model on expert demonstrations and uses it as a filter that pulls a robot's action back toward behavior that was demonstrated as safe. The award record states the obligation as FY 2026 = $360,000.00 and runs the project from October 1st, 2026 through September 30th, 2029. Its own abstract is the argument for it, because it says engineers today must define every dangerous situation by hand.

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The National Science Foundation award to William Marsh Rice University funds READINESS, a cloud accessible robotic laboratory for synthesizing electronic and quantum materials. AI plans the experiments and the equipment executes them. The award record calls the result a self-driving laboratory and says it is meant to run with minimal human intervention. SUNY Poly and the University of Texas at Austin are named alongside Rice. What the award promises is access rather than speed alone, putting capability that existed in a handful of laboratories behind tools a researcher elsewhere can reach.

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The National Science Foundation obligated a cooperative agreement to William Marsh Rice University for a test bed called READINESS. The award runs from August 1st, 2026 to July 31st, 2030 and its estimated total is carried in the award record quoted below. The agency's own abstract describes the platform as a self driving laboratory that designs, tests and improves material synthesis processes with minimal human intervention. The performance site is Houston and the principal investigator of record is Jun Lou.

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The National Science Foundation obligated a cooperative agreement to the Texas A and M Engineering Experiment Station for the Autonomous Robotic Metallurgist Materials Innovation Platform. The university calls it a six year, 24.9 million dollar grant. It runs from September 1st, 2026 to August 31st, 2032. The agency describes it as an open access national user facility that designs and makes and tests new alloys and learns from them. It does that by integrating robotics and artificial intelligence and physics based simulation and automated experimentation. The performance site of record is College Station and the principal investigator of record is Raymundo Arroyave.

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Texas A&M's College of Engineering published on September 4th, 2026 that the National Science Foundation is funding PhaseForge. The software comes from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and applies machine learning to the CALPHAD phase diagram method. The university states the tool is free and openly available. It states that making the tool free and openly available will help accelerate materials discovery across academia, national laboratories and industry. The announcement names no award number and no dollar figure.

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The National Science Foundation made a standard grant to William Marsh Rice University in Houston on August 17th, 2026. The award record describes reinforcement learning and large language models proposing randomized numerical linear algebra algorithms. The Lean proof assistant is required to certify correctness and cost before a candidate counts. The record states that the machine methods can explore designs efficiently but may produce opaque or inconsistent results without dependable guarantees. It also describes separating real algorithmic improvement from variation caused by the model itself. The award runs from September 15th, 2026 to August 31st, 2029.

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The National Science Foundation made two matched standard grants on August 14th, 2026. They fund a subspace optimization framework for resource efficient and private fine tuning of large language models. One went to the University of Texas at San Antonio and one to Texas A&M University, each obligating the same amount. The award record states the problem as reaching the performance of full parameter fine tuning where computing resources are limited and training data are sensitive or off limits to share. It names small organizations, universities and healthcare institutions among those the current requirements shut out. Both awards run from January 1st, 2027 to December 31st, 2029.

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The National Science Foundation made award 2535195 to the University of Texas at Austin on August 25th, 2026. It funds a Science and Technology Center on human and robot co adaptation. The award record carries an estimated total for the full five years in the agency's own award service. It records the fiscal year 2026 obligation as $5,999,999.00. The project runs from September 1st, 2026 to August 31st, 2031. Joydeep Biswas is the principal investigator. The stated problem is that robots leaving the laboratory for homes and hospitals and workplaces have to understand and adapt to people over time. The university names the places the work runs in. They are houses and dorms and cafes and a public museum and a rehabilitation hospital and elder care and assisted living residences. It also states that an internal ethics board will oversee the research and develop the consent and opt out procedures. The rooms are named and the rules for the people in them are not written yet.

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The National Science Foundation made a cooperative agreement to the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station in College Station. It funds the Autonomous Robotic Metallurgist Materials Innovation Platform. The award record describes a national user facility that designs and makes and tests new alloys in one autonomous laboratory. It joins robotics and artificial intelligence with simulation and automated experimentation. The record states that scientists and engineers from universities and national laboratories and industry come to it as hands on users and run their own campaigns. Remote access modes are named as a way to reach researchers at institutions outside the top research tier. The agreement runs from September 1st, 2026 to August 31st, 2032.

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The National Science Foundation announced the first awards under its CyberAICorps Scholarship for Service program on July 28th, 2026. The University of Texas at El Paso is on the list. UTEP's award is for a project on building an AI-integrated cybersecurity workforce. The scholarships cover tuition and pay an academic year stipend. Recipients owe one year of government service for each year of funding. Texas A&M University and The University of Texas at Dallas also received inaugural awards, which puts three of the first round institutions in Texas.

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The National Science Foundation announced on September 1st, 2026 that it is establishing an operations center for the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource. The center is led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. The Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin is named as the collaborating institution. The pilot the operations center takes over has supported over 800 research projects. That names a Texas public institution on the center that operates the national resource rather than only on a machine behind it.

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Oncor Electric Delivery has applied to amend its certificate of convenience and necessity to build the Longshore Switch to Drill Hole Switch transmission line. The application covers ten named counties in west Texas. The commission has it set for discussion and possible action at the open meeting on August 21st, 2026. That agenda carries this application and the Dinosaur Switch to Longshore Switch application and nothing else. The two lines meet at Longshore Switch. The commission issued its order on August 28th, 2026, amending the certificate to include the line and approving route 476. The two applications had been consolidated on the question of need and were severed again so each could take its own final order.

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Oncor Electric Delivery has applied to amend its certificate of convenience and necessity to build the Dinosaur Switch to Longshore Switch transmission line. The application covers a corridor crossing 22 named counties in central and west Texas. The docket has drawn one of the largest volumes of landowner filings in recent PUCT practice. Those filings include intervention requests, protests and a county resolution. The commission has the docket set for discussion and possible action at its open meeting on August 21st, 2026. That meeting is in a hotel ballroom in Austin rather than in the hearing room. That meeting takes up two Oncor 765 kV applications and nothing else before it closes. The commission issued its order on August 28th, 2026, amending the certificate to include the line and approving route 559. The administrative law judges had found the utility did not fully comply with the public meeting rule for links added after that meeting. The commission read the rule to require only one meeting before the application was filed. The order records the transmission providers projecting an exponential increase in non oil and gas load in the Permian Basin region, named as cryptocurrency mining, data centers and hydrogen electrolysis.

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The Public Utility Commission of Texas is amending its wholesale and investor owned utility retail transmission cost recovery rules for the ERCOT region. The commission published a proposal for publication amending Section 25.192 and Section 25.193 and adding a new Section 25.252, and set a comment deadline of August 11th, 2026. Utilities and data center developers filed comments on the deadline date. So did consumer advocates and ERCOT itself. The project index now stands at 67 filings. The commission next considers the proposal at an open meeting before adopting a final rule.

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The Public Utility Commission of Texas has proposed a new rule governing demand management service for large electric loads. The proposal for publication creates a new Section 25.521. The comment window shut on September 4th, 2026 and the filing index now stands at 64 filings. Most of what the commission received arrived on the deadline itself. It came from the transmission utilities, from the grid operator, from generators, from an environmental group, from a data center trade association and from Google. The rule as published in the Texas Register does not contain the words data center. It draws its line at a total non-coincident peak demand at a single site of 75 megawatts or more.

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The Public Utility Commission of Texas adopted new 16 TAC §25.194, the large load interconnection standards Senate Bill 6 required. Before a large load can be included in an ERCOT interconnection study, the customer must sign an intermediate agreement, make certain disclosures and post financial security of $50,000 per megawatt. The rule reaches new interconnections of 75 megawatts or more. The commission removed the interconnection fee its proposal carried, and says the financial security that remains protects against stranded infrastructure costs rather than being a fee. The order was filed on September 18th, 2026 and the Texas Register receipt gives an effective date of October 8th, 2026.

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The Public Utility Commission publishes its open meetings and public comment deadlines as a machine readable feed. Every entry is marked open to the public and names the room. The schedule runs into 2027, so a reader can see in advance when the commission will take up large load and transmission cases. The listings move as the calendar firms up, and an entry comes off the feed once its date has passed. The September 11th, 2026 open meeting has gone that way since the record last read the feed. The next open meeting the public may attend is Friday, September 18th, 2026 in the commissioners hearing room. Project 59550 stands on the feed with a comment deadline of September 17th, 2026 and Project 59086 with one of October 15th, 2026. It also carries a workshop on September 22nd, 2026, and it carries the grid operator's own board meetings at a separate address. No feed entry names a docket number, so the agenda published for each meeting is where a reader finds out what will be taken up.

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The Public Utility Commission of Texas has opened Project 59550, the quinquennial review of the system-wide offer cap programs under 16 TAC Section 25.509(d). Commission staff filed a memorandum on August 20th, 2026 asking interested parties to answer questions about whether the caps and the emergency pricing program should change. The memorandum states that calendar year 2026 marks the first review period for these programs. It also states that ERCOT has never activated the emergency pricing program since it was adopted. Comments are due by September 17th, 2026 and anyone may file one through the commission's Interchange.

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The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved a net metering arrangement in Docket 59220 on July 24th, 2026. It lets a second AI data center complex share the point of interconnection and the settlement meter of GOODNIT1, a stand-alone wind resource in Armstrong County. The commission attached conditions. The second load has to curtail fully when ERCOT instructs, and it may not be offered into any demand response program the order names. Neither complex is running yet and the commission found ownership of the second load has not transferred to the company expected to operate it. Ensign Infrastructure asked the commission to remove the conditions on rehearing. The commission voted not to put that motion on any open meeting agenda, leaving the order in place.

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The wildfire mitigation plan rule, 16 TAC §25.60, reaches every electric utility, municipally owned utility and electric cooperative that owns transmission or distribution lines in Texas. In Project 59053 commission staff filed a pro forma plan and guidelines that a utility may use and is not required to use. Its situational awareness section names cameras or other monitoring technology among the tools a plan describes. That section is marked suggested rather than required. Pano AI sells AI smoke detection cameras and names Xcel Energy, CenterPoint Energy, American Electric Power and Austin Energy as its Texas customers. It had asked staff to make a description of situational awareness tools a minimum requirement. A House State Affairs hearing reported on September 21st, 2026 heard that only eight of 160 utilities in fire-prone areas had complied with the plan law. The same hearing heard that Southwestern Public Service, which operates as Xcel Energy in the Panhandle, has deployed AI smoke detection cameras across its service territory.

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The Texas Comptroller now lists application J0022 among current agreements under the Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act. It pairs Energy Forge One LLC with Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD in Reeves County. The executed agreement was posted on July 24th, 2026. The recommendation packet had gone up on February 11th, 2026. JETI excludes data centers from eligibility. This project entered the program as fossil fuel electric power generation, which is why it also carries no minimum job requirement. The Comptroller's table records a proposed investment of $6.5 billion. Reporting by Grist says the school board approved the application at a February meeting and puts the value of the break at more than $227 million over ten years.

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The Pflugerville City Council approved on second reading on August 11th, 2026 an ordinance ordering a special election on November 3rd, 2026 on amendments to the city's home rule charter. The 2026 Charter Review Commission put 21 amendments forward for the city's voters. One of them adds a new Section 2.03 titled Artificial Intelligence Protections. It would require the council to adopt protections covering data, facial recognition and surveillance technology. It would also require transparent approval processes for those technologies and a responsible artificial intelligence framework. A charter section outlives the council that writes it, which an ordinary policy does not.

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A small emergency services district in Pecos noticed a public hearing to accept a tax abatement application from Energy Forge One LLC under Chapter 312 of the Texas Tax Code. The application concerns a new gas turbine power generation facility inside the Energy Forge One Reinvestment Zone. That zone was established on November 24th, 2025. The notice describes the plant as producing dedicated power for prospective data center end users. It puts the estimated project cost at $6 billion. The hearing was set for 5.30 in the afternoon on March 25th, 2026 at the district's administrative office in Pecos. All interested persons were free to appear and present testimony. The outcome of that hearing has not been confirmed from district minutes.

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The Richardson Independent School District board reviewed a draft of the district's 2027 legislative priorities at its September 18th, 2026 meeting. The draft is built on three areas and the first of them is the responsible use of technology and artificial intelligence. That priority asks the Legislature for resources and guidance for the thoughtful use of artificial intelligence in education, alongside age appropriate approaches to screen time. The district says it gathered the input behind the draft through community roundtables with parent teacher associations, local chambers of commerce, higher education partners and other community organizations. The board is expected to vote on the final priorities on October 15th. The draft asks for resources and guidance and does not say what the state already provides, so nothing here establishes whether any exists. That is what makes this a record of where classroom AI rules are actually being written.

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San Angelo passed Ordinance 2026-078, which adds Section 11.02.043 to the city water service rules. It puts hard numbers on how much city water a data center may take for cooling. Initial cooling system fill can't exceed 8.0 gallons per square foot of gross building area for each building. Routine makeup water can't exceed six percent of the installed cooling loop volume per building per calendar year, and cooling water has to be metered separately from other use. Any exceedance needs City Manager approval and has to be reported in writing to the City Council within five business days. The ordinance was introduced with a public hearing on May 19th, 2026 and passed on June 16th, 2026, taking effect the same day.

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San Angelo adopted Ordinance 2026-076, which adds a data center subsection to the city's prohibited discharges rule. Any intentional release of treated cooling fluid into the sanitary sewer is defined as a discharge event, and sampling with laboratory verification has to be completed before each one. Records of volumes, results and dates must be kept for at least three years and handed to the Director of Water Utilities on request. Planned discharges need 72 hours written notice. Emergency discharges have to be reported within 4 hours with a written incident report inside 7 days. The council introduced the ordinance on May 19th, 2026 and adopted it on June 2nd, 2026.

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San Angelo created Section 430 of its zoning ordinance, the first full land use rulebook for data centers in West Texas. New data centers are allowed as a principal use only by Conditional Use, and only in Light Manufacturing and Heavy Manufacturing districts. Each one comes back to a public hearing. The code caps buildings at 75 feet. It bars ground mounted equipment near residentially zoned property and limits noise to 55 dBa at the property line day and night. It also requires a sound modeling study before final site plan approval and a post development sound study after occupancy. The definition it adopted excludes cryptocurrency mining. The ordinance was introduced on May 5th, 2026 and passed on May 19th, 2026.

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The San Marcos City Council voted on June 16th, 2026 to define data centers in the city's zoning rules and make them ineligible for development anywhere inside the city. Council members cited concern that the facilities would draw water and energy away from the local community. The vote came after a long fight over a proposed campus and is the first ban of its kind by a Texas city. The city adopted an amended Land Development Code on the same date under ORD-2026-08, effective that day.

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The National Science Foundation obligated an award to the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station on September 9th, 2026. It sits in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation. The work is to build AI-enabled digital twins that predict and manage cascading failures in freshwater infrastructure. The award record carries Artificial Intelligence among its programs. The performing site is College Station and the grant runs to August 31st, 2029. The abstract names no Texas utility. Which water system's data this reaches is not stated.

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The Senate Committee on Economic Development carries an interim charge on preparing the Texas workforce for artificial intelligence. The charge directs the committee to study what AI does to the Texas workforce and what that means for the state's economic competitiveness. It also directs the committee to look at workforce resiliency. Educational pathways set against evolving employer needs and opportunities for upskilling are named in the same charge. The hearing the committee had set for Thursday, September 3rd, 2026 is canceled. The committee reset it for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026 in hearing room E1.016 at the Capitol as a public hearing. A witness has published testimony saying it was presented to the committee that day. The committee has published no report or recommendation from it. Angela Paxton chairs the committee and Kevin Sparks is vice chair.

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The Senate Committee on Transportation posted notice of a public hearing for August 25th, 2026 in the Capitol. One of three interim charges covers the deployment of autonomous vehicle technology authorized by SB 2807 of the 89th Session. It reaches the rules adopted by the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Licensing and Regulation. The charge directs the committee to quantify the impact on traffic related collisions. The committee will hear invited and public testimony.

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The Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs carries an interim charge directing it to examine how much water high consumption cooling technologies use. The charge names data centers. The committee sat on Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 and again on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026 in hearing room E1.012 at the Capitol. The Legislature's upcoming meetings listing no longer carries either sitting, which is what a held hearing looks like on that page. No recommendation from the committee has been published, so what it will ask the Legislature to do about cooling water is not yet on the record.

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Governor Greg Abbott announced on August 6th, 2026 that SpaceX will construct a vertically integrated semiconductor fabrication plant in Grimes County. A Texas Enterprise Fund grant of $30 million has been extended to the company. The project is also qualified under the state's Jobs Energy Technology and Innovation program. The release states a first phase of more than $16.8 billion in capital investment and 3,000 new jobs. The company's own statement in the release says the plant will produce AI chips at scale. Two school districts have agreements of their own. The Iola board voted to enter one and the Anderson-Shiro superintendent describes another.

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The Texas Department of Information Resources published an account on August 14th, 2026 of how it is implementing the artificial intelligence laws passed by the 89th Legislature. Senate Bill 1964, House Bill 3512 and House Bill 149 are named in it. One of them puts an annual artificial intelligence awareness training obligation on certain state and local government employees and officials, and the agency offers a free training video. Another established the state's AI governance framework and directed the agency to develop a public sector sandbox. A third requires governmental entities to disclose their use of AI and creates the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council.

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Every state agency and local government that deploys a public facing AI system must post a standardized notice on the related applications, websites and public computer systems. The same duty covers any system that is a controlling factor in a consequential decision. The Department of Information Resources is required to develop the notice form. That form must describe the system, its data sources and its privacy and ethics safeguards.

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The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had scheduled a public meeting for August 24th, 2026 at the Panhandle High School Auditorium. It concerns proposed new air quality permits for Fermi Equipment Holdco, LLC. The agency posted a cancelation and stated the meeting will be rescheduled for a later date. The application covers a state new source review permit plus prevention of significant deterioration and greenhouse gas PSD permits. That is the permit family a large behind the meter generating plant needs. The site is in Carson County in the Texas Panhandle, which sits outside ERCOT.

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The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had set a notice and comment hearing for August 17th, 2026 in San Antonio. It concerns air permit O4791 held by Vantage Data Centers TX11, LLC. The agency posted a cancelation and said the hearing will be rescheduled for a later date. The facility is in Bexar County. Written comments still go to the Office of the Chief Clerk.

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TCEQ's pending new source review page lists air permit applications whose notices are open to the public. Four of them are data centers. Aligned Data Centers REIT LLC is listed at ADC Plano and Amazon.com Services LLC at TXZ5. Crusoe Energy Systems LLC appears twice, at the Longhorn Data Center and at the Goodnight Data Center. Each row carries a plain language summary in English and Spanish and a notice of receipt of application. Several also carry a notice of application and preliminary decision, which is the document that opens the formal comment window. Crusoe's Longhorn permits include prevention of significant deterioration and greenhouse gas PSD authorizations. That is the permit family covering on site power generation rather than a few backup engines.

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The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's executive director finished technical review and drafted a permit for an electric power generation facility at 615 Farm-to-Market Road 2404 outside Abilene. That is the address of the Stargate campus in Taylor County. The notice covers three permits at once. They are state air quality permit 182126, PSD permit PSDTX1688 and greenhouse gas PSD permit GHGPSDTX263, all sought by Crusoe Technologies LLC. TCEQ processed the application in an expedited manner under its own rules. Written comments are due within 30 days of the newspaper publication of the notice. A person who may be affected by the emissions can request a contested case hearing on the state and PSD permits, though not on the greenhouse gas permit.

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The Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act took effect on January 1st, 2026 as Chapter 552 of the Business and Commerce Code. It bans developing or deploying an AI system with intent to unlawfully discriminate, to manipulate behavior, for social scoring or to produce certain illegal content. It also requires government agencies to tell people when they are interacting with an AI system. The Attorney General has exclusive enforcement authority and the statute creates no private right of action.

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Chapter 552 of the Business and Commerce Code supersedes and preempts any local ordinance, resolution, rule or regulation about the use of AI systems. Texas cities and counties that might otherwise write their own AI rules are displaced by the state statute. The preemption is written broadly and without a carve out on its face.

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The Tarrant Regional Water District publishes a standing page on data center raw water requests after developers approached it about supply from the Cedar Creek system. The district states that the developer and West Cedar Creek Municipal Utility District formally withdrew their requests and the project is no longer proceeding. The district also states that it has entered into no new water supply contracts specifically to serve data centers. It has not raised contract volumes for existing customers on that basis either. The TRWD Board of Directors is the body that decides raw water supply contracts, and it does so at monthly open meetings that are broadcast. The page was last updated on July 27th, 2026.

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The Temple Planning and Zoning Commission has three data center items on its August 17th, 2026 agenda. The central one is a set of proposed Unified Development Code amendments. They would require a Conditional Use Permit for any future data center, even in districts where data centers are already allowed. The city says the change would add a public review step and let Temple attach project specific conditions, technical studies and supporting documentation before a project moves forward. A second item is zoning for a subsequent building in Rowan Digital Infrastructure's first phase at Synergy Industrial Park, which the developer calls Lasso. Temple's own data center hub states that domestic water use for Project Temple is contractually capped at 4,000 gallons per day. It also states that projects under this framework would have to use closed-loop cooling.

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Texas A&M University Technology Services published guidance on August 31st, 2026 naming TAMU AI Chat as the university approved way for faculty, staff and students to use commercial AI models. The single platform carries models from several vendors behind a university login. The university states the service supports information classified up to and including University-Confidential, which is what decides whether a researcher may put non-public university data into a model at all. It also states that conversations in the tool are not used to train external models. The same channel that protects the data is a channel the university controls, and the guidance does not say what the university does with the conversations itself.

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An expert panel review in the American Journal of Roentgenology states that pediatric medical imaging remains substantially underrepresented across artificial intelligence in radiology. The panel means the development of models and their validation and their regulation and their use in the clinic. Two of its authors are Texas radiologists. One works in the radiology department shared by Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. The other is at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The panel gives its reason plainly. Children go through continuous physiologic and anatomic changes that adults do not, so a model trained on adults is not the model a child needs. It names what holds pediatric work back. Public datasets are scarce and institutional data is fragmented and external validation is insufficient. It also names off-label use of adult-trained AI models among the ethical and regulatory concerns in children. The review is a recommendation document rather than a hospital policy. No Texas institution has published a purchasing change that follows from it.

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Three separate acts of the 89th Legislature each added a Subchapter S to Government Code Chapter 2054, and two of them number their sections identically. Section 2054.702 exists twice with entirely different commands, as do Sections 2054.701 and 2054.703 through 2054.705. The codifier has flagged the conflict in the published code rather than resolved it. Which text governs a state agency's AI duties is unsettled on the face of the statute.

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Texas State University published on August 24th, 2026 that its project on artificial intelligence for pavement condition assessment has entered a second phase. The method reads two dimensional surface images paired with three dimensional depth data and finds cracking and other damage at pixel level rather than relying on a human rater's judgment. The university describes the second phase as closer to statewide deployment. Pavement condition ratings are what decide which roads get repair money, so moving that judgment from a rater to a model changes how the money is aimed.

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The Texas Water Development Board took up a petition for rulemaking on July 23rd, 2026. It asked the agency to project water demand for data centers and crypto mining as a standalone industrial category. The petition was filed by Margaret Hill and co petitioners, and the board denied it. At the same meeting the board considered adoption of the 2027 State Water Plan (Phase I), which contains no separate demand line for high density computing load. Board members noted that regional water plans feed the state plan and can be amended as better data arrives. The decision means the state's central water planning document carries data center demand folded inside broader categories rather than on its own.

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House Bill 3512 of the 89th Regular Session created artificial intelligence training programs for certain employees and officials of state agencies and local governments. Its author was Giovanni Capriglione and its sponsor was Cesar Blanco. It took effect on September 1st, 2025. The Legislature indexes it under artificial intelligence and under the Department of Information Resources, which is the agency that certifies which programs satisfy it. Which programs carry that certification is unconfirmed. So is the date by which an entity files its compliance certification.

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The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles now requires any company running automated vehicles commercially on Texas roads to hold an authorization, under Senate Bill 2807. The requirement became enforceable on May 28th, 2026, after the department's rules took effect on February 27th, 2026. An applicant acknowledges a written statement about the vehicle and certifies that it gave the Department of Public Safety a plan for how first responders should deal with the vehicle. There is no fee, and an authorization does not expire until the department revokes it. The department treats an operation as endangering the public when it has resulted, or is likely to result, in serious bodily injury. Below that standard it says administrative enforcement action is unlikely. The City of Dallas asked the department to require crash history and to make approved operators public. The department answered that the statute does not allow it to require crash history.

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The United States Army Research Office established a five year research center at Rice University for secure sensing, imaging and communications. Edward Knightly of the electrical and computer engineering department leads it. The center studies extremely large antenna arrays. It lists artificial intelligence alongside wireless networking, antennas, radar, circuits and physics. The release describes no specific AI method. What the models will actually do inside the work is not yet on the public record.

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The Hays County Commissioners Court agenda for September 15th, 2026 carried an item to authorize the County Clerk's Office to obtain AI Minutes through a vendor. The first year's amount is stated on the agenda. The same item asks the court to waive the county purchasing policy that requires three quotes, so the request is to buy this product without comparing it against others. The vendor's own site describes the product as using AI to write official meeting minutes from a recording, a live session or a pasted transcript. What the agenda does not say is whether a person reviews or certifies the machine's draft before it becomes the county's official record. That is the question the item leaves open. The county's own Court Minutes archive for 2026 carries nothing later than July 28th, so the disposition is not on the public record today.

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The Speaker's interim charges give a charge to the House Committee on Delivery of Government Efficiency. It is to study how the state can use technology to detect fraud and waste and abuse of taxpayer resources. The charge names artificial intelligence among that technology. A second charge asks whether the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act gives Texas residents and businesses adequate protection. The same document puts the Department of Information Resources and the Sunset Advisory Commission and the Texas Space Commission under the committee's oversight. A charge is an instruction to look at something and report, and it is the stage before a bill exists.

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The National Science Foundation made a standard grant to the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station in College Station. The work is AI enabled digital twins of freshwater infrastructure under cascading hazards. The award record carries an award date of September 9th, 2026 and a start date of September 15th, 2026. It expires on August 31st, 2029. Sudipta Chowdhury is the principal investigator. The abstract describes water infrastructure that is getting harder to run. It names aging assets and deferred maintenance. It names climate driven hazards and power outages and water quality variability. A disruption that starts in one component can propagate through the connected networks. The abstract says current utility practice leans on monitoring systems and historical records and reactive emergency protocols. Those give limited ability to anticipate how a local anomaly escalates. The award sits in the foundation's Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation.

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The National Science Foundation has made a Science and Technology Center award to the University of Texas at Austin for the Center for Human and Robot Co-Adaptation. Joydeep Biswas is the principal investigator. The award record runs from September 1st, 2026 to August 31st, 2031. The center's stated purpose is to work out how robots and the people around them adapt to each other over long periods. The aim is that assistive and service robots stay safe and aligned with what people actually want. The award abstract commits the work to a network of always on living laboratories in residential, commercial and healthcare buildings rather than to laboratory testing alone. The abstract says those deployments will grow more complex over the life of the center. The abstract describes the facility network as a thing to be built and the award clock started this month.

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The National Science Foundation made a cooperative agreement to Texas Southern University in Houston for the HBCU AI and Quantum Innovation Network. The award record carries an award date of September 17th, 2026 and a start date of October 1st, 2026. Clark Atlanta University leads the network. The work runs through five regional nodes and Texas Southern leads one of them. Daniel Vrinceanu is the principal investigator. The stated work is identifying institutional strengths and needs. It also covers regional meetings and workshops. It covers shared training resources and pathways for students and faculty into these fields. The award sits in the foundation's Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships.

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The National Science Foundation established the NSF National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Operations Center on September 1st, 2026. That moved the resource out of a pilot begun in 2024 and into standing operations. The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego leads it, in collaboration with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The center coordinates the resource providers and integrates computing and data and models and tools. It operates the national portal and provides support and training to users. The foundation says the pilot has supported over 800 research projects and thousands of innovators and students nationwide.

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In re Patrick Hughey is a mandamus proceeding filed May 29th, 2025. The court's own case record sets oral argument for 9:00 a.m. on October 6th, 2026. The docket shows briefs on the merits from the relator and from Reddico Construction. It also shows amicus filings from the Texas Court Reporters Association and the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and a group of Texas court reporting firms and certified shorthand reporters. The last docket entry is the court reporters association's amicus brief of June 4th, 2026. What the court decides reaches every county court in the state.

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VISION is the Texas A&M University System's shared AI computing platform. The June 2026 TOP500 list credits it to the System rather than to one campus and records a measured Linpack result of 34.82 petaflops against a theoretical peak of 51.16. The System says the machine entered the list at number 66 in the world. It is 95 nodes carrying 760 graphics processors over 110,960 cores, housed at the West Campus Data Center at Texas A&M University. The System attributes 45 million dollars for advanced computing infrastructure to its Board of Regents and names no meeting date for that approval. The chancellor says the machine gives the System's 12 universities and eight state agencies computing power most institutions could never build alone. The machine's own documentation says something narrower. It gives the current status as a controlled beta and says access is invitation-only and approved through System governance. General availability onboarding is expected to begin in the coming weeks and starts with institutions that have finished technical integration.

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The University of North Texas announced a gift from Anuradha and Vikas Sinha and will name the Anuradha and Vikas Sinha College of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics. The university describes the college as an academic hub focused on the development, application and responsible use of artificial intelligence, intelligent systems and data analytics. The gift creates six permanent endowments covering college leadership, student scholarships and other purposes the announcement lists. One of the donors holds a doctorate from the university. Nothing in the announcement names a faculty appointment made, a student enrolled in the named college or a research result. What is decided here is the money and the name rather than a program already running.

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The Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost requires a Course Artificial Intelligence Policy in every syllabus every semester. The policy has to name one of three designations. AI is permitted or prohibited or partially permitted. An instructor who allows it has to write down what is permissible and how a student must disclose use. The university names the requirement one of two new syllabus statements for Fall 2026. That term's classes began August 24th, 2026. The rule on generative AI is therefore set course by course rather than university wide. A student can hold two syllabi with two different answers in the same week.

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The State Board of Education took the new Applied Personal Financial Literacy standards to second reading and final adoption. Its item for that is dated September 4th, 2026, and it publishes one attachment. That text tells a student to research career pathways using artificial intelligence tools. It tells the same student to explain how algorithm driven recommendations influence spending. It then asks that student to appraise automated investment platforms by analyzing their algorithmic limitations. Districts implement the course beginning with the school year that opens in 2027. The board found that the rule takes effect 20 days after filing with the Texas Register.

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ERCOT published the user guide for the Verification RFI on September 11th, 2026, the questionnaire it issues as part of the Batch Zero eligibility verification. The guide states the questionnaire goes to every large load that was conditionally classified on the list distributed to transmission service providers on September 3rd. Each of the three parties on a project, the load entity, the distribution service provider and the transmission service provider, answers the sections assigned to its own role. Which sections a project sees depends on the conditional classification ERCOT gave it. Every participating party has to upload a notarized attestation before the response can be submitted. Responses are due within ten business days of issuance and a five day extension may be requested through the transmission service provider. A load entity that fails to supply what its provider needs may be taken off the Batch Zero process. Only the transmission service provider can submit the finished response, and once submitted it is locked.

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ERCOT issued a market notice on September 2nd, 2026 setting a workshop for October 6th. The workshop presents the deployment mechanics, the registration process and the draft revision requests for curtailing large loads under Senate Bill 6. The notice names the three provisions the bill put into the Public Utility Regulatory Act. One lets the commission require a large load co-located with an existing generation resource to reduce consumption during certain events. One lets the grid operator require a large load with backup generation serving at least half its load to curtail grid consumption to head off an emergency. One requires the commission to establish a large load demand management service. The workshop is the step where a legal authority becomes a registry and a piece of software.

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ERCOT issued a market notice telling each Interconnecting Distribution Service Provider and Transmission Service Provider how it had provisionally classified the large loads submitted for the Batch Zero interconnection process. The notice states that inclusion is conditional. The conditions it names include the interconnecting large load entity passing verification and curing deficiencies in dynamic model data. Another is the Public Utility Commission of Texas granting a good cause exception. It states that failure to satisfy an applicable condition may disqualify the load. It also names the route by which an entity that disagrees with a classification may dispute it. The notice names no individual load and gives no total, so the size of the provisional list is not public.

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The Tom Green County Commissioners Court voted not to pursue a temporary moratorium on large scale energy and data center development in Precinct 4. The court acted after hearing a presentation from Beacon Data Centers on its proposed Westline site at Dove Creek, west of San Angelo. Commissioner Shawn Nanny pointed to a $100 million lawsuit filed against Hill County after that county approved a similar one year pause. The result is that the unincorporated part of the county has no local pause. The city of San Angelo has three adopted data center ordinances, and they apply only inside its own limits. That split is the whole local story in Texas, where counties have no general zoning power and cities do.

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The House Committee on State Affairs met on August 19th, 2026 on a charge covering data center development in Texas. That charge names SB 6 and the large load batch study process the grid operator proposed. The same notice carries a second charge on the regulatory and planning processes for the proposed 765 kV transmission lines. The House Committee on Public Health meets the following day on a charge covering artificial intelligence in health care. That hearing takes invited testimony only, and the notice states online public comment is open on the artificial intelligence charge. Both sit in the interim, before the 90th Legislature convenes.

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The University of Texas at Arlington published an account on September 10th, 2026 of an AI conversational tutor built on a National Science Foundation grant. The tutor is designed not to supply an answer. It asks the student questions and offers hints so the student reaches the answer, in the way a teacher does at a desk. The same account says the researchers are helping to develop Fort Worth Police Department training using real life scenarios, with prompts based on the principles of de escalation. The university describes the system judging whether an officer is listening and whether the officer follows what the other person wants to talk about. No evaluation result is published for either use.

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The University of Texas at Arlington College of Business launched two artificial intelligence degrees on September 14th, 2026. They are a bachelor's program and a master's program in artificial intelligence. The new degrees take the place of the college's existing Business Analytics programs rather than sitting beside them. The college describes a redesigned curriculum aimed at using the technology for business strategy, productivity and decision making. New certificate offerings accompany the degrees. No start term and no first cohort size is stated in the announcement.

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The Institute for Fusion Studies, the Oden Institute and the Cockrell School jointly funded four fusion seed grants announced on August 31st, 2026. Each pairs a principal investigator in computation with a second in fusion studies and supports graduate students for two years. Three of the four build surrogate machine learning models, covering real time plasma shape control, liquid metal wall alloy screening and alpha particle leakage. The university's own release states the limits of the reinforcement learning approach rather than only its promise.

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The University of Texas at Austin published a new Core Curriculum on August 13th, 2026 that names Computer Science and AI among the foundational courses. The others alongside it are Great Questions of Human Life, Western Civilization and Great Ideas in Science. The university says the core will be introduced in phases starting with new courses in the autumn of 2027, so no student sits the requirement yet. A history major on that campus will take an AI course to graduate, which is a different kind of AI decision from buying a machine.

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The University of Texas at San Antonio published on September 8th, 2026 that it has a field ready prototype flood warning node. The node is for street level water and the team is led by Chen Pan. It harvests its own solar power and carries temperature, humidity, light and precipitation sensing plus four optical water level sensors at different heights. It runs a compressed machine learning model on the microcontroller itself rather than sending readings to a server. It reports over long range radio instead of a cell tower, so it keeps warning when the grid and the network are down, which is when the water rises. The work was funded in part by a Texas Coastal Management Program grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is a prototype and the announcement names no place that has installed one.

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The University of Texas at San Antonio published an account on September 8th, 2026 of a field ready prototype flood warning node. A team led by an assistant professor of electrical engineering combined four things. Solar energy harvesting, environmental sensing, long range radio and a machine learning model compressed to run on the microcontroller itself. The design point is that the node evaluates flood risk where it stands rather than sending readings to a server. It keeps working when power and network fail in a storm. The university reports a validation accuracy figure from assessment after training rather than a measurement against a real flood. Funding is named as a Texas Coastal Management Program grant awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The account names no installation site and no agency operating it, so what exists is a prototype.

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UT Southwestern Medical Center built a process that reads and grades the post encounter notes students write after their objective structured clinical examinations. The medical school says it has replaced more than 91 percent of human grading since the autumn of 2023 and returns results in days rather than weeks. The stated reason is that grading those notes by hand is slow and inconsistent. The page names no model and no vendor, and it carries no publication date, so how current the figure is can't be established from it.

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The University of Texas System Board of Regents approved the creation of a School of Computing at The University of Texas at Austin on February 19th, 2026. The school merges computer science, information, statistics and data sciences into a single unit inside the College of Natural Sciences. The university framed the decision as advancing its leadership in computing and artificial intelligence. UT Austin says the school is committed to recruiting and hiring 50 faculty positions. It is slated to open in Fall 2026, so the term now beginning is its first.

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The University of Texas System Board of Regents approved $25 million in Permanent University Fund support for San Pedro II. The money completes the build-out for UT San Antonio's College of AI, Cyber and Computing. The build-out adds approximately 47,748 square feet in the downtown San Antonio building. At the same meeting the board approved $14.3 million for enterprise technology infrastructure modernization at UT San Antonio. That is part of roughly $470 million in capital investments authorized for the university. The board met on May 20th and May 21st, 2026.

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The Board of Regents approved adding the first phase of the UT Dell Medical Center in Austin to the capital improvement program. It acted at its August 12th, 2026 meeting. The agenda book the board took up asks it to amend the program at a total project cost of one billion dollars for that phase. It also asks the board to appropriate that money from revenue financing system bond proceeds. The phase itself is early work and site preparation with a building cost of zero. The board item describes a 27 acre academic medical campus built around a digitally enabled infrastructure, with digital technology, robotics and automation folded into operations. It names MD Anderson as the partner for cancer care. The board's own document never uses the words artificial intelligence. That framing comes from the university's own April release, which describes a center where technology, data and AI are embedded to support clinicians. The debt is repaid from pledged revenues rather than from an appropriation, so the bet is on clinical income.

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The University of Texas Medical Branch migrated its electronic health record from servers it runs itself onto Microsoft's Azure platform, and announced the move on August 13th, 2026. The institution states the cutover took nineteen minutes and that the migration was first announced as part of a five year agreement with Microsoft in May 2025. Its own account names a stronger foundation for advanced technologies that support patient care, research, education and operations. Where a public hospital's patient records physically sit is the decision that has to be made before any clinical AI tool reaches a bedside.

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The University of North Texas is offering a Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence through its Department of Computer Science and Engineering, with the curriculum starting in 2026. The university describes it as a four year curriculum built around the applications of AI development rather than as a concentration inside a computer science degree. A named undergraduate credential in artificial intelligence changes what a hiring manager in the Dallas Fort Worth area is reading on a resume.

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Texas law restricts the channels through which the Public Utility Commission may order ERCOT to act. A verbal directive is prohibited outright. An official action may be directed only by contested case, by rulemaking or by a written order or memorandum adopted on a majority vote. The ERCOT board selection committee picks ERCOT's directors and designates its chair. The governor does not.

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The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved an amendment to Oncor's certificate of convenience and necessity for a new 765 kilovolt transmission line. The company's own project page records the decision as approved on August 28th, 2026. The line runs from a proposed switch about 3 miles north of Glen Rose in Somervell County to an existing switch about 4.5 miles west of Forsan in Howard County. Oncor filed the application on February 19th, 2026 under Docket No. 59315. It states the route will run approximately 235 to 270 miles depending on the route chosen, and is planned for completion in 2029. It is a voltage class new to the Texas grid.

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The City of Wichita Falls Planning and Zoning Commission approved a conditional use request from DataNovaX. It lets the company put a data center inside an existing building at 2236 Airport Drive on the north side of the city. The building is a former grocery store and call center of about 37,000 square feet. City staff attached conditions rather than approving the use outright, and the largest was a ban on evaporative cooling, which forces an air cooled design and holds water use down. Development Services director Fabian Medellin said the applicant agreed to the limits, which also cover light pollution and electricity use. City officials put the load at 12 megawatts and the investment at an estimated 100 million dollars. The Airport Drive building is a first piece of a larger Pioneer Park project with a much bigger second phase planned.

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The Williamson County Commissioners Court approved a Chapter 312 tax abatement incentive agreement for Compal USA Technology Inc. on April 15th, 2026. The county described the project as a server service center on approximately 33 acres at 1800 Aviation Drive in Georgetown. It is to support enterprise and cloud infrastructure needs, general warehousing and other work in the electronics, technology and medical device industries. Chapter 312 agreements are performance based, so the county does not grant the abatement until the company meets the required measures. The agreement sets a minimum capital investment of $35 million and requires no fewer than 100 full-time employees within three years. If the terms are met the county abates 30% of assessed value for 10 consecutive years, an estimated $526,010 over that period. The City of Georgetown approved its own incentives for Compal on December 9th, 2025.

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Young County Commissioners Court formally received a tax abatement application from Headwaters Site Development for the Project Saltworks data center campus at the courthouse in Graham on August 10th, 2026. That agenda item required no vote, and County Judge Win Graham said he would hand the application to the county clerk so it becomes a public document. Commissioners did vote to ratify a separate escrow agreement under which the developer puts up 250,000 dollars to pay for the county's outside consultants while it evaluates the project. Residents used public comment to ask the court to slow down and wait for the Legislature before granting any incentive. Commissioner Alan Craig said the application contained no specifics and that the court would know more when it convenes again on August 17th.

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