{"id":873921,"date":"2026-10-07T12:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T12:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/873921\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T12:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T12:32:09","slug":"puc-sues-paxtons-office-over-release-of-data-center-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/873921\/","title":{"rendered":"PUC sues Paxton\u2019s office over release of data center records"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy<\/a>, and give us feedback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Public Utility Commission of Texas is asking a Travis County judge to block the release of information showing where data centers and virtual currency mines operate, saying those details could aid terrorists.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit filed Monday pits the state agency responsible for regulating utilities against Attorney General Ken Paxton\u2019s<\/a> office over the scope of Texas\u2019 public-records law and the state\u2019s protections for critical infrastructure.<\/p>\n

At the center of the dispute are two seemingly basic geographic details: the county where a facility is located and the regional water planning area in which it sits.<\/p>\n

The PUC argues that those details are \u201cprivileged information\u201d and become sensitive when combined with other information collected through its survey of the industry, including electricity demand, actual electricity consumption, projected peak demand, water consumption, water sources, cooling technology and the utilities and infrastructure serving a facility.<\/p>\n

The commission is not asking the court to declare the entire survey confidential. Instead, it wants the court to rule that the two geographic fields are exempt from disclosure under the Texas Homeland Security Act, which is meant to \u201cprotect against homeland security threats and hazards . . . and prevent significant criminal and terrorist attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawsuit does not represent a final ruling on whether the information ultimately must be released. But it does come as Texas officials are seeking more information<\/a> about the state\u2019s data center industry.<\/p>\n

Gov. Greg Abbott<\/a> has ordered state agencies to conduct additional reviews of data centers seeking to connect to the state\u2019s electric grid, including reviews of electricity and water use, cooling systems and other information. He has also directed the Texas Water Development Board to take enforcement action against<\/a> data centers that fail to comply with required water use reporting.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in the PUC water and energy use survey?<\/p>\n

In 2025, Texas lawmakers directed the PUC to collect information about water and energy consumption at data centers and virtual-currency-mining facilities to better understand the growth of the industry. <\/p>\n

The effort reflects a growing concern among state officials and Texans about the resources required by large computing facilities.<\/p>\n

Data centers can consume enormous amounts of electricity because of the thousands of servers operating inside them. Depending on their cooling systems, they can also require substantial quantities of water to help keep their servers cool during operation.<\/p>\n

The PUC developed its survey in cooperation with the Texas Water Development Board, the state agency tasked with overseeing the state\u2019s water planning process. The information was intended to help state officials better understand the relationship between electricity demand and water consumption and to inform future planning. The Legislature also directed the PUC to share information with other state agencies and produce a report on its findings.<\/p>\n

The survey was sent to 377 facilities and sought information including a facility\u2019s location, county and regional water-planning area, electricity load and consumption, projected future peak demand, cooling technology, water consumption and sources and information about the facility\u2019s connection to the electric grid.<\/p>\n

The response was limited and called \u201cpathetic\u201d by one state representative during a June legislative hearing<\/a> where PUC officials said 28 companies representing 92 facilities had responded to the survey. Lawmakers questioned whether the resulting data would be sufficient to support long-term policy decisions.<\/p>\n

The PUC later reopened the voluntary survey for an additional 10 days in July. As of August, 13 virtual currency mining and 77 data center facilities had filled out the survey, according to an email from a PUC spokesperson. <\/p>\n

The PUC lawsuit <\/p>\n

The PUC dispute with the attorney general\u2019s office began after a resident from McLennan County and four journalists, including a reporter at The Texas Tribune, sought the survey responses through open records requests. <\/p>\n

The PUC denied those requests, saying that the information should be protected from disclosure in its entirety. Those requestors have an opportunity to participate in the open records dispute if they choose. <\/p>\n

Under Texas law, when a governmental agency believes requested records aren\u2019t open to the public, it can ask the Attorney General\u2019s Open Records Division for a ruling.<\/p>\n

That is what the PUC did.<\/p>\n

The commission argued that at least some of the survey information was protected under the Texas Homeland Security Act, which makes certain information concerning vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure confidential.<\/p>\n

But the PUC, the government entity seeking to withhold records, must establish that the statutory exception applies.<\/p>\n

That distinction is at the heart of the dispute.<\/p>\n

The Attorney General\u2019s office issued two rulings concluding that the PUC had not sufficiently established that the disputed information identified the kind of technical vulnerabilities covered by the Homeland Security Act.<\/p>\n

The PUC is now challenging those rulings by asking a court to reach a different conclusion. The agency argues that the individual pieces of information in the survey cannot be considered in isolation.<\/p>\n

A county name, for example, ordinarily would not reveal much about a facility\u2019s security. But the commission argues that the county and regional water planning area can be combined with information about a facility\u2019s electricity consumption, water use and the infrastructure that supplies those resources.<\/p>\n

In the PUC\u2019s view, identifying the facility allows otherwise general operational information to be connected to a particular physical site and potentially reveal vulnerabilities that could be exploited in a physical or cyberattack, which could then affect the reliability of the state\u2019s power grid and drinking water systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis combined disclosure would give a person intending an act of terrorism or a hostile act by a foreign adversary of the United States what the released fields alone do not,\u201d the lawsuit states.<\/p>\n

The geographic information also has an important role in Texas\u2019 water-planning system.<\/p>\n

Texas relies on regional water-planning groups to develop projections of future water demand and identify strategies for meeting those needs. The regional plans feed into the state\u2019s broader water planning process. State law requires regional planning to account for projected water use. <\/p>\n

That makes the location of major industrial water users relevant to planners so they can understand future demand and the infrastructure needed to serve it.<\/p>\n

The importance of that information has grown as Texas experiences rapid data center development. A separate, mandatory water-use survey conducted by the Water Board<\/a> has also produced relatively low response rates from data centers. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear whether other information like the facility name or water usage will be released \u2014 or if the PUC has given up that fight. A PUC spokesperson said in an email that the agency does not comment on pending legal matters. <\/p>\n

The PUC survey is different from that annual TWDB survey. The PUC\u2019s effort was voluntary and was designed specifically to gather information about the relationship between water use and electricity demand at large computing facilities.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time the PUC and the Attorney General\u2019s office have fought over the disclosure of information. The same thing happened with records regarding a power plant loan program and cryptocurrency mines registered in Texas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The agency spent more than $56,000 in taxpayer funds to hire outside lawyers to help them withhold information, according to invoices obtained by the Houston Chronicle through a public records request last year. The agency argued at the time that it was a common practice.<\/p>\n

Taylor Goldenstein contributed to this reporting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":873922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253,368025,46047,273341,203167,127235],"class_list":["post-873921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-mclennan-county","tag-texas-legislature","tag-texas-water-development-board","tag-travis-county","tag-well-a-homepage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=873921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/873922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}