Miner Weekly: AI Boom Floods Texas Grid with 164 GW of Power Requests
This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, BlocksBridge Consulting’s weekly newsletter curating the latest news in bitcoin mining and data analysis from TheEnergyMag. Subscribe to receive in your inbox once a week.
Texas is heating up again — not because of weather or bitcoin miners, but because AI developers are flooding the ERCOT grid with power requests at a pace the state has never seen before.
In its System Planning and Weatherization Update released this week, ERCOT revealed numbers that honestly look more like a land rush than a utility report: about 226 GW of new large-load interconnection requests are now in the pipeline. For perspective, that’s up from 63 GW at the end of last year, and roughly 73% of it comes from data center developers building out AI-scale campuses.
And these aren’t small projects. ERCOT highlighted a growing wave of 1-GW-class sites—single campuses equivalent to a large gas plant, but purely for compute.
A few data points worth sitting with:
- 225 large-load requests were filed through mid-November alone — already more than the total applications submitted during 2022–2024 combined.
- Total large-load demand seeking interconnection by 2030 has jumped 270% since January, rising by 142 GW in less than a year.
ERCOT is blunt that both transmission headroom and resource adequacy will dictate how quickly these facilities can actually energize.
This wave is overwhelmingly AI. Bitcoin miners used to be the face of “large flexible load” in Texas, but 2025 is a different story: the compute-cloud giants, hyperscalers, GPU colocators, and independent AI operators are the ones now stretching ERCOT’s planning bandwidth.
Meanwhile, on the supply side…
The generation queue is ballooning too — just not in the way that directly solves the AI load problem.
ERCOT is reviewing 1,999 active generation interconnection requests totaling 432 GW, and 77% of them are solar and battery storage. Gas has grown to 48 GW, but still represents a modest share relative to the tidal wave of intermittent resources entering the queue.
Translation: Load is growing fast, but firm generation is not keeping up at the same pace. Texas hasn’t hit the wall yet, but the shape of the queue points to future tension.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas is already working on new rules that would flag any customer asking for 75 MW or more as a special-handling case — a category that now captures much of the AI boom. ERCOT echoed that future load-forecasting rules will be essential to separate “credible loads” from speculative paper requests.
And ERCOT itself has been sprinting: it has reviewed more than double the number of transmission projects this year compared with 2024.
Regulation News
- Thailand Busts $8.6M Bitcoin Mining Operations Funding ‘Chinese Scam Networks’ – Decrypt
- Trump says he’ll sign executive order blocking state AI regulations, despite safety fears – CNN
- Canada Open for AI Data Centers After Carney’s Energy Shift, Power CEO Says – Bloomberg
Hardware and Infrastructure News
- Greenidge Sells South Carolina Land and Power Rights as Bitcoin Mining Footprint Shrinks – TheEnergyMag
- MicroBT Unveils M70 Series Featuring 12.5 J/TH Efficiency as Bitcoin Hashprice Hits Historic Lows – TheEnergyMag
- NextEra, Google Plan Multi-GW Data Center Buildout as Power Crunch Deepens in AI Era – TheEnergyMag
- Crusoe orders 1.21GW of natural gas turbines from prototype airliner co. Boom Supersonic – Data Center Dynamics
Corporate News
- Bitcoin Mining Stock Linked to Trump Family Tumbles – The Wall Street Journal
- CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) Maintains Bitcoin Production Amidst Market Volatility – Markets.com
- Citadel Entities Report 5.4% Stake in TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) After Bitcoin Miner’s AI, HPC Pivot – TheEnergyMag
- Luxor expands hardware business into GPUs to support Bitcoin miners diversifying into AI – The Block
- American Bitcoin (NASDAQ: ABTC) Increases Strategic Reserve to 4,783 Bitcoin – Link
- Citadel Discloses 5.5% Stake in Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), Adding to Recent Bitcoin Mining, AI Positions – TheEnergyMag
Financial News
- IREN Plans $2B Convertible Issuance, Adds Equity Sale as Bitcoin Miners Deleverage – TheEnergyMag
- Fluidstack Seeks $700M at $7B Valuation as AI Data Center Boom Accelerates – TheEnergyMag
Feature
- The Man Who Got Eric Trump Into American Bitcoin Before 70% Rout – Bloomberg
- The power crunch threatening America’s AI ambitions – Financial Times
- Big global investors see gold in AI but don’t buy the rush – Reuters
- Crypto Winter Squeezes Bitcoin Miners as AI Pivot Gains Urgency – Bloomberg
