Houston lawmaker may kill data center tax breaks due to $8B revenue loss
looking at the data
An influential Houston-area state senator is raising concerns about potentially billions of dollars in lost state revenue from tax breaks for Texas data centers—and is pondering legislation that would abolish the tax incentives.
Citing data from the state comptroller’s office, The Texas Tribune reports the state stands to lose nearly $8 billion in revenue from 2026 to 2030 due to sales tax and use tax exemptions for data centers. During the state’s 2025 fiscal year, which ended on Aug. 31, these tax exemptions caused Texas to lose a little over $1 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $130 million.
“These new numbers are extremely concerning, and I will say they’re unsustainable,” Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, chairwoman of the state Senate Finance Committee, tells The Texas Tribune. “I plan to look at filing legislation to either repeal the exemption or take a very close look at it and see.”
Texas on track to be No. 1 data center market in U.S.
Scrutiny of the tax breaks comes amid an explosion of data center development in Texas, where data provider Aterio identifies nearly 1,000 centers that are operating, under construction or planned.
A report issued in January by Bloom Energy says the state is poised to become the No. 1 U.S. market for data centers within three years. By 2028, according to the report, Texas is projected to exceed 40 gigawatts of data center capacity—representing nearly 30 percent of total U.S. demand.
Among companies benefiting from the data center boom are:
- Tech titans like Apple, Google, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, which are spending billions of dollars to build data centers in Texas.
- Spring-based ExxonMobil and Houston-based Chevron, two oil and energy giants that are developing natural gas plants to supply power for data centers.
- Houston-based energy technology company Baker Hughes, which is collaborating with Google Cloud to develop AI-enabled power optimization and sustainability software for data centers.
- DataBank, Data Foundry, Equinix, Digital Realty, Lumen Technologies, and IBM, all of which operate data centers in the Houston area.
The Texas Legislature will begin debating tax breaks for data centers in July, when Huffman’s Senate Finance Committee meets for an interim hearing before the 2027 legislative session, according to the Tribune.
Data center industry defends tax breaks
Leaders in the data center industry warn that watering down or halting the tax breaks could slow down or even end Texas’ ascent in the data center sector.
A 2025 report commissioned by the Data Center Coalition found that in 2024, data centers provided more than $1.6 billion in state tax revenue and almost $1.6 billion in local tax revenue in Texas. Over the next several years, according to the report, planned development of data centers in the Lone Star State could generate almost $3.8 billion in state tax revenue and more than $4.9 billion in local tax revenue.
In 2024, the Houston area had 8.1 million gross square feet of data centers, with the properties’ real estate investments sitting at $10 billion, according to the report. That year, data centers in the region produced a little over $700 million in state and local tax revenue. About 60 data centers operate in the Houston area.
Watchdog group warns of tax breaks’ danger to state budgets
On the other side of the debate over tax breaks for data centers, a report released last year by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks economic development incentives, decries the tax breaks as dangerous to state budgets.
“We know of no other form of state spending that is so out of control. Therefore, we recommend that states cancel their data center tax exemptions,” says Good Jobs research analyst Kasia Tarczynska, co-author of the report. “Shy of that, states should amend … legislation to cap how much any facility and company can avoid paying in taxes each year.”