Data center construction is unpopular among locals, and a majority of the facilities are being proposed in red, rural counties. That puts Texas Republicans in a tough spot, as the White House has encouraged states to let the centers flourish.
Taylor Goldenstein
Taylor Goldenstein is an enterprise and investigative reporter for The Texas Tribune. Taylor previously covered state politics for the Houston Chronicle and Hearst Newspapers from 2019 and 2026. She hails from the suburbs of Chicago but has been a Texan for nearly a decade, having first cut her teeth at the Austin American-Statesman in 2016 where she covered local politics. Taylor graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2014, she was selected to be a visiting fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Taylor's grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Latin America, providing a foundation in Spanish that she has strengthened through more than a decade of formal study and an undergraduate minor in the language. She is based in Austin.