Answers
Data centers have become one of the largest new buyers in Texas energy. As of August 2026, ERCOT was weighing about 474 gigawatts of requests to connect to the Texas grid, more than five times the state's record peak demand, and about 90 percent of those requests came from data centers. Much of that load is being powered with natural gas: Energy Transfer has signed about 900,000 Mcf/d of gas supply to Oracle data centers, and Chevron signed a 20-year agreement to power a Microsoft data center in West Texas from about 2.67 GW of gas-fired generation using Permian gas.
The hyperscaler is rarely your direct customer. Spend flows through a developer, a general contractor or EPC, a power developer and a midstream operator, and each owns different packages: gas supply and laterals, onsite generation and compression, medium-voltage electrical, water sourcing and treatment, land, and site prep. Map the package owner on each project, the same way you would map the operator, EPC and procurement team on an oil and gas project.
The buying process will feel familiar. As one episode of the podcast put it: "we're talking oil and gas, we're talking power customers typically, but now even heavy industry manufacturing data centers are in there. So a multi-year sales cycle is very obvious." Gated engineering phases, approved vendor lists and risk-averse buyers all carry over, so the winners get specified early instead of chasing the bid.
Location matters. West Texas and the Permian hold many of the gas-powered campuses, and as another episode put it: "they're building data centers left and right. So there's so much activity right there." Qualify hard, though. In August 2026 Texas ordered an audit of data centers in ERCOT's queue, and ERCOT paused energizing new data centers of 75 MW or more pending a report due December 10, 2026. The projects most likely to buy are the ones with onsite generation, a signed gas supply and a public incentive on file.
To see where Texas projects are, what they plan to spend and who is building them, use the ModalPoint Texas Data Center Map.
Drawn from the show archive by searching the transcripts, so each one genuinely covers the question rather than mentioning it in passing.
The next step
If the way energy buyers actually buy is costing you deals, talk it through with ModalPoint, the go-to-market firm Matthew Bertram runs. A 30-minute discovery call: no scope, no commitment, and a mutual NDA before anything substantive. You get a reply within one business day, and the first call is with someone who works in the sector.