Lamar County Data Center Queue Reaches 6.1 GW as Texas Pauses New Permits

As of September 25, 2026, Lamar County had 6.1 gigawatts of new power interconnection requests queued across 24 active data center projects in ERCOT's queue, with a median wait of 3.7 years, according to WattStreet's county-level data center power tracker. Two projects have already been energized and 12 have been withdrawn, a mix that shows both the scale of developer interest in the region and the reality of how selective these projects become as they mature.

One week earlier, on September 21, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop issuing permits sought by data centers until ERCOT completes its audit of the interconnection queue, which had grown to roughly 474 GW of requests statewide, about 90% of it from data centers. The order also pauses other state regulatory approvals tied to data center projects, creating near-term uncertainty for rural projects that still need ERCOT interconnection or TCEQ permits.

A national demand story landing on a rural county

The Texas Tribune reported on October 1, 2026 that data center developers have poured more than $340 million into rural Texas communities as they try to improve their reputations, funding items like a $3 million water tower in Turkey, museum upgrades in Stamford, and first-responder funding in Medina County. The same analysis found Texas will forgo at least $3 billion in sales-tax revenue over two years from the industry's tax exemption.

The Paris News covered Data Center World Power 2026 in mid-September, a conference built around the exact challenge this queue represents: the energy infrastructure needed to serve surging data center power demand. The through-line for Paris is that the region's flat land, available sites, and willing community have already put it on the map of power-hungry development, even if individual projects now face a state-level pause while the grid question gets worked out.

What the queue says for commercial property in Paris

For investors, the queue is a demand signal regardless of where any single project lands. Six gigawatts of interconnection requests do not get filed against a county without site selectors studying its land, labor, and grid. That attention raises the profile of the region for every other end use: industrial users, logistics, and the housing and services that follow them.

The pause is a timing question, not a cancellation. State policy makers are working through an audit that will eventually clarify which projects are real, which sites have the transmission capacity to matter, and what communities will host them. For a property like 1905 E Price St in a Texas Opportunity Zone, the value of the exercise is visibility: an 11,000+ SF flex asset with an estimated 10% cap rate sits in a market that is now part of the statewide data center conversation, with all the follow-on commercial demand that conversation implies.