Texas suspends 17 data center permits after auto-approvals

Texas' environmental regulator has suspended at least 17 permits for data center construction and shut down the online portal that approved them. The permits were issued after Governor Greg Abbott ordered a statewide pause on data center approvals on September 21, 2026. The automated system kept approving them anyway, until two watchdog groups noticed, The Texas Tribune and other outlets report.

The agency is the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ. Its portal is called STEERS.

How a paused permit kept getting approved

Abbott told the TCEQ to stop issuing "all permits related to data center projects," the Tribune reports. The pause is meant to last while the state checks how much power and water data centers use. ERCOT, the state's grid operator, is gathering that information with other agencies. GovTech Insider reports that ERCOT's findings go to state utility regulators on December 10.

STEERS is the TCEQ's electronic filing system. It handles many permit types, including air and water pollution permits. Some can be approved automatically when they are filed, according to the Tribune. One of those is the construction stormwater permit, which covers rain runoff from a building site. 404 Media calls it a key, and sometimes final, approval step.

The pause did not reach the software. "STEERS is a portal that TCEQ uses to rubber stamp construction approvals," Sam Law of the FracTracker Alliance told 404 Media. "The irony is not lost on me."

What the watchdogs found

FracTracker and Public Citizen published their findings on October 19. They counted 35 permitting actions on data center projects after Abbott's order, GovTech reports. An update on October 21 added nine more. The actions included:

Type of action	Count
Construction stormwater approvals	11
Applications involving gas plants and generators	14
Air emission-limit certifications	7

404 Media reports that approvals went to projects tied to OpenAI and Amazon. Public Citizen says the TCEQ's own database labeled the permits "approved" and "active," with start dates after the pause.

TCEQ and Abbott's office first said no data center permits had been issued after the order, GovTech reports. On October 20, the agency suspended the permits and closed STEERS, according to Public Citizen. Watchdogs then found another approval as late as October 21.

What the agency says now

The TCEQ says it suspended the permits the watchdogs identified, the Tribune reports. It has not confirmed the count of 17 itself, GovTech notes. Applications must now be delivered on paper, so staff can check whether each one involves a data center.

"To ensure all applications are thoroughly reviewed by agency staff," TCEQ spokesman Ryan Vise told the Tribune of the change. The shutdown also hits applicants with no link to data centers. No return date for STEERS has been announced.

Public Citizen's Kathryn Guerra, a former TCEQ staffer, was blunt. "In this case, the agency's rubber stamp worked so well, even the agency had difficulty stopping it," she said in a statement quoted by the Tribune. Public Citizen says only new state laws, not the governor's directives, can fix the problem. It adds that Abbott has resisted calls for statewide rules.

What this means for developers

For teams that buy data center capacity, Texas just became less predictable. For engineers who build approval systems, this is a case study in what happens when policy changes and code does not.

• Add Texas permit risk to capacity plans. Projects that relied on fast automatic approvals now face staff review and a paper process. Expect delays to new sites in the state until the ERCOT review ends.
• Ask providers where their new capacity stands. If a planned site needed stormwater or air permits after September 21, its timeline may have moved.
• Build a kill switch into auto-approval rules. STEERS kept approving because nothing in the software knew about the pause. Any system that approves requests on its own needs a fast, central way to stop a category.
• Tag requests by type at intake. The TCEQ now has to check every application by hand because the portal could not tell which ones were data centers. A required field would have made the pause enforceable.
• Watch December 10. ERCOT's findings reach regulators then, and they will shape when the pause lifts.