Texas elects Gina Hinojosa, who called for a pause on new data centers until lawmakers act
Elon Musk gave her opponent $5.5 million, and hours after she won he posted that space was looking appealing for data centers.
Gina Hinojosa declared victory in the race for governor of Texas in remarks to supporters in Austin, which her campaign posted on November 4, 2026. She said Governor Greg Abbott had called to congratulate her. She takes the oath of office in January.
Data centers were one of her biggest issues. Since July she'd been calling for a moratorium on new ones until the Texas legislature meets and writes rules, and her campaign kept hammering Abbott over permits and donors right up to the last week.
- Who
- Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa
- Takes office
- January
- Her call
- a moratorium on data centers until the legislature meets
- Her rule on bills
- data center companies prove households won't pay more for electricity or water
- Musk to Abbott
- $5 million in under a month, $5.5 million in total, per her campaign
What she asked for
Her July release called on Abbott to sign an emergency executive order putting a moratorium on data centers until lawmakers could meet. She said data centers were guzzling water and electricity while the people around them had no say, and she listed what she calls her Texans First Data Center Priorities for the next legislative session.
Those priorities go well past a pause. Operators would have to hire licensed union labor. Companies couldn't use NDAs to keep deals quiet. Subsidies would stop, and any water contract with a data center would become unenforceable if it threatened a community's water supply.
Abbott had his own plan by August, and data center companies praised it. Hinojosa's answer was that guidelines from a governor aren't laws.
When the companies being regulated are cheering for the rules, you know the rules were written for them, not for Texans.
Musk, and the AI money in the race
Elon Musk was Abbott's largest donor this cycle, according to Hinojosa's October 27 statement on Abbott's last finance report. It lists $5 million from Musk in under a month. The same list has $500,000 from Anthropic, naming its co-founder Thomas Brown and its political action committee.
Early on November 4, at 1:12 am Eastern, Musk posted this.
Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now
A minute later he joked that his election-interfering space lasers hadn't worked this time. Neither post names Texas or Hinojosa, so linking them to her win is a reading, and it's mine. Her August statement had already described Musk as pushing to send data centers to space.
What it could mean for Texans' bills
The promise most Texans will feel is the one about money. One of her priorities is that data center companies prove households won't pay more for electricity or water, including hidden costs for grid upgrades, transmission and new capacity that get passed through to everyone else.
At her July event, a nurse practitioner who lives across from a data center in Granbury, Cheryl Shadden, said the site takes 2.5 million gallons of water a day off the Brazos River and Lake Granbury. That's the kind of complaint the water-contract rule is written for.
Her campaign also said in October that Public Citizen had found 35 permits issued to data centers in the weeks after what it called Abbott's so-called pause. Those permits are already granted. Whether a new governor can stop projects already approved isn't something any of her releases answer.
Her victory speech didn't mention data centers or AI at all. It was about schools, taxes and billionaires, and it ended with a promise that the transition begins tomorrow.