A ProPublica investigation, co-published with El Paso Matters and The Texas Tribune and dated October 14, 2026, reports that three hyperscale data centers sited within roughly 30 miles of the Texas–New Mexico border could together release greenhouse gases at a scale that exceeds the combined 2019 emissions of El Paso and Hudspeth counties — yet none of those emissions were folded into the climate plans both jurisdictions adopted within the past year. For the two projects with publicly reported figures, ProPublica cites Project Jupiter’s application seeking authorization for fuel cells to release up to 8.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, and El Paso Matters estimates the Meta natural-gas power plant at up to 1.3 million tons per year, with the third, larger Fort Bliss project still in “exclusive negotiations” with the Carlyle Group and its emissions undisclosed. “This does add to our greenhouse gas emissions in a massive way,” Gunnar Schade, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told the news organizations. “This is a huge source.”

The first-order cause documented in the reporting lies in regulatory architecture, not individual conduct. “We’ve never had a national climate law passed by Congress,” Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, told the news organizations. “And so what we’ve had in this country are primarily state and local efforts.” New Mexico has codified greenhouse gas reduction targets into state law and requires facilities seeking air permits to disclose estimated emissions; Texas has not codified equivalent targets and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality does not require greenhouse gas disclosure in air permits. As a result, when El Paso Electric sought an air permit last fall for the Meta data center’s natural-gas power plant, the utility did not have to share estimated greenhouse gas emissions, and the Texas commission approved the permit 20 days after the filing under an expedited review.

The sub-cause depth runs in two directions. First, the geographic scope of impact exceeds the geographic scope of regulatory authority. State Rep. Sarah Silva, a New Mexico Democrat who represents Chaparral — directly across the state line from Meta’s data center site — framed the regulatory gap in direct terms. Her state can regulate air quality in New Mexico but not at the Texas construction site a few hundred yards away. “This is why we need federal regulation,” Silva said. “How do we knit something together that makes sense for our region when actually this is the job of the federal government?” Likewise, residents living in west El Paso across the state line from Project Jupiter have no say in that project despite sharing an aquifer that crosses the state boundary. “Emissions do not remain within the state where they originate,” Silva said.

Second, the regulatory pace has lagged the construction pace. The reporting documents scale: Texas alone has 596 data centers that are either in operation or planned across the state as of early September, according to research by The Texas Tribune, and the three border projects sit within that national wave of AI-driven construction. Project Jupiter would draw electricity from a 2.45-gigawatt on-site facility built by Bloom Energy — enough to power around 1.5 million homes, the report said, and more than El Paso Electric has ever supplied to its 465,000 residential and commercial customers at one time — while the Fort Bliss data center is expected to use 3 gigawatts, likely from natural gas turbines, according to Department of Defense officials who briefed reporters in April. Peskoe characterized AI hyperscale data center campuses such as Oracle’s and Meta’s as “cities in terms of their electricity consumption” and stated that the facilities are being built so rapidly that the pace has “no real parallel, at least for 50, 60, 70 years, but probably ever” for the U.S. power industry. New Mexico celebrated publication of its climate plan last December; El Paso adopted its plan a few months later. According to New Mexico state climatologist Dave DuBois, the data centers are “going to undo a lot of the very expensive and very meaningful work a lot of people are doing.” Fernando Berjano, El Paso’s climate coordinator, said the kinds of power plants tied to these projects “produce greenhouse gases that will make it harder for the city to meet its climate goals, as well as produce air pollutants.” If emissions increase in the El Paso area, “that has an impact on air quality, that has an impact on pollution,” Berjano said, “which is something that we all know is not good.”

Local and state officials responded to these projects with an incentive structure that, on the timeline reported, predated the climate-impact disclosure. Local governments in El Paso and Doña Ana counties approved tax incentives in exchange for corporate investment, job creation, and the prospect of attracting more technology companies. Texas legislators approved a sales tax break on data center equipment more than a decade ago, a decision The Texas Tribune estimated could cost the state $3.2 billion in revenue over the next two years. In 2025, New Mexico lawmakers approved a separate law allowing facilities such as Project Jupiter to generate their own electricity using natural gas; the law exempts those private power systems, known as microgrids, from renewable-energy requirements, even as New Mexico requires electric utilities to source 50% of the power they sell from clean energy by 2030. The reporting shows that some state lawmakers voted for the bill without realizing its broader implications for a data center project in southern New Mexico. Silva, who initially backed Project Jupiter in part as an opportunity for long-term jobs, said she and other state lawmakers “were so caught off guard at the speed at which these hyperscale data centers showed up in all of our communities almost simultaneously” and that she “would support a moratorium.”

The reporting distinguishes root conditions from contributing factors. The root condition is the federalism-based regulatory architecture in which cross-state emissions are assessed jurisdiction by jurisdiction rather than regionally, paired with disclosure asymmetry that allows one state to permit a major emissions source without quantifying it. The contributing factors — multi-million-dollar local tax incentives, microgrid carve-outs from renewable requirements, and air-permit review timelines measured in weeks — do not by themselves create the misalignment, but accelerate its onset. Removing the root condition would require either federal climate legislation of the type Peskoe described as absent, or an interstate compact that New Mexico and Texas have not moved to negotiate.

Whether the dynamic changes depends on a small set of critical uncertainties, each with leading indicators an observer can monitor. First, the New Mexico Supreme Court delayed a public hearing on Project Jupiter’s air permit originally scheduled to begin Sept. 14 when opponents challenged the state’s approval process and the facility’s use of groundwater; the court lifted the stay last month and the state has appointed an examiner to preside over the hearing. The outcome of that hearing will set precedent for whether the current state-by-state permitting process can absorb a facility of this scale. Second, in Texas, El Paso Electric is still waiting for the Public Utility Commission to approve the Meta power plant; a decision could come later this year. Third, both governors have shifted positions. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who last year said Project Jupiter “reaffirms New Mexico’s leadership in global trade, advanced manufacturing, and digital infrastructure,” has more recently said she takes seriously residents’ concerns about the data center and “expects any data center operating in New Mexico to meet the state’s rigorous environmental standards and use water responsibly.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this summer directed the Texas Public Utility Commission to ensure data center projects pay for their own infrastructure and do not raise bills for residents, recommended the Legislature pass data-center regulations next year concerning water and electricity use, and recently told the Texas Water Development Board to penalize data centers that do not report their water usage — but, as Texas Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody noted, “in the governor’s directives, we’re not talking about local control and local autonomy to make decisions on these projects.” Abbott’s directives do not address air pollution, climate change, or the effects of a data center project in one state on another.

In the first of four scenarios, judicial standard-setting: a court decision — most plausibly the New Mexico examiner’s ruling on the Project Jupiter air permit — imposes emission thresholds or operating conditions that propagate across subsequent state proceedings and produce de facto regional rules without statutory change. In the second, fragmented continuation: each state proceeds on its own timeline, Texas does not adopt greenhouse gas disclosure, the New Mexico permit is finalized with conditions, and the Fort Bliss project proceeds under separate negotiations, leaving the cross-state accounting gap intact. In the third, coordinated action: federal legislation, an interstate compact, or coordinated state action through the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the New Mexico Environment Department imposes a regional framework including disclosure, mitigation, and grid-impact review. In the fourth, moratorium: state legislative action pauses approvals while a framework is developed, slowing but not necessarily preventing eventual build-out. Across all four scenarios, certain elements are predetermined on the substrate reported: the three projects already permitted or in negotiation will continue through their current stages; El Paso’s and New Mexico’s climate goals will continue to face an unaccounted-for emissions load of the reported magnitude; and AI demand will continue to drive new site selection.

The cost-of-compliance scenario assumes that disclosure and mitigation requirements can be absorbed by developers without altering demand — the reporting does not establish whether Oracle, Meta, or the Carlyle Group would withdraw from the projects if faced with full disclosure and operating restrictions, only that the companies have pledged mitigation. Oracle maintains that its emissions will be lower than what it sought in its air permit application and that it plans to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2031; officials with both Oracle and Meta have said they plan to develop clean-energy projects elsewhere to offset their emissions. Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Riverside, told El Paso Matters that “the health impacts can be significant for local communities” even at low levels of air pollutants such as particulate matter and nitrogen oxides — outcomes that, once documented epidemiologically, would raise the political cost of inaction but would not retroactively reduce already-emitted pollutants. Nancy Seidman, a senior adviser with the nonprofit Regulatory Assistance Project, told El Paso Matters that “regulators should weigh all emissions and other impacts like water usage, noise and local air pollution, which can affect public health, when they make decisions about data center projects” — a point she framed as “particularly important when projects are phased over time, so that an accurate account can be made of the total, holistic impacts.” A phased-accounting standard of the kind Seidman describes does not, on the substrate presented, currently exist in either state’s permitting process.

The forward architecture the reporting supports is one in which a regulatory framework designed before AI-driven hyperscale demand produces an incoherent regional outcome by construction; in which the same data center would face materially different review depending on which side of the state line it sits; and in which the leading indicators — court rulings, utility-commission decisions, and the Texas legislative session — will resolve the path forward within roughly a year. The reporting does not establish that any single instrument — federal legislation, state coordination, judicial review, or company mitigation pledges — will close the gap, but the substrate supports the analytical claim that the gap is structural rather than incidental, and that closing it requires intervention at a level above the jurisdictions currently evaluating the projects. The medical framing DuBois offered — that building large natural-gas-fired data centers “is kind of like bringing back a lot of the retired plants that were more dirty, like coal” — captures the operational concern that the emissions profile under review belongs to a generation of power infrastructure the two states’ climate plans had been written to phase down rather than to absorb.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Root-Cause Analysis
Traces a symptom back along its causal chain to the conditions that actually generated it.
Scenario Planning
Builds a small set of distinct, plausible futures to plan against.
Wicked Futures
Explores a long-horizon, deeply entangled future with no clean resolution.
Incentives
People respond to the rewards a system actually pays out — often not the ones it intends.
Tragedy of the Commons
A shared resource is depleted because each user’s incentive is to take more.