Governors who fast-tracked AI data centers are now suspending their own incentives

The 2027 capacity model usually has one row that reads like a purchase order: sign the lease, take the megawatts, rack in the third quarter. Every move in Fast Company's tally does the same thing to that row, which is to relocate the vote that decides it. In Pennsylvania the vote now sits with the locality, because a state permit follows local approval rather than substituting for it ^[6]. In Texas it sits with the agencies running Greg Abbott's audits, and the Texas Tribune reports that failing one costs grid access ^[11][12]. In New York it sits with a threshold of 50 megawatts, for a year ^[19]. Arizona's is the only one of the four that changes the price rather than the calendar, with the exemption suspended and its cost to the state put at roughly $38m a year ^[16][17].

The Texas number is worth working through. ERCOT's interconnection queue is tracking more than 1,800 projects, 90% of them data centers, which puts about 1,620 data center projects in the line that audit requests must now join ^[13][20]. A queue that long can damage a schedule without denying anyone; adding a step is enough.

Announced investment is the figure quoted most often, and it says the least about what actually gets built. Josh Shapiro backed a $90bn package in his first term and a $20bn Amazon Web Services build in Luzerne and Bucks counties last summer ^[3][4]. Abbott backed $40bn from Google across three campuses last November ^[10]. Neither figure was ever energized megawatts, and both signatures are now on the documents narrowing the path. Shapiro's order bans nondisclosure agreements and fast-track permits and asks developers to show how they will pay the full cost of their power ^[7]. Abbott, who told ABC News that the companies "dug their own grave," moved after in-state backlash and is up for reelection this fall ^[9][14].

The sorting rule follows from that. For each site in the 2027 plan, the question is which body can say no and when it next meets, and what hearing no in September rather than March would do to the in-service date. Those gates then split along two axes. Axis one: whether the gate is economic, like an exemption or a full-cost-of-power showing, or procedural, like a permit, an interconnect, or a county vote. Axis two: whether the person holding it faces voters before the site is meant to be live. Economic gates can be repriced into the pro forma and usually are. Procedural gates held by someone on a ballot are options, and an option should not sit in a capacity plan as though it were capacity. Katie Hobbs is on the ballot in November ^[18]. Shapiro has so far declined the moratorium that his Republican opponent, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, has endorsed ^[8].