A group of Texans believe they’ve discovered evidence that the state’s environmental regulatory agency has continued to issue permits to data centers despite Governor Greg Abbott’s call for it to stop. 

The nonprofits Public Citizen and FracTracker Alliance, working with local activists in Texas, looked through the public database of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and discovered that the organization has worked on multiple permits for data center projects since Abbott called for a pause in the process on September 21. Abbott’s office denied approving any new permits in a statement to 404 Media. 

According to Public Citizen and the FracTracker Alliance, which cite documents publicly available on the TCEQ’s website, the agency has reviewed documents and assigned engineers related to more than a dozen permits related to data center projects in the state. Public Citizen listed more than 15 and the Fractracker Alliance found 35. The same day the nonprofits announced their findings, The Texas Tribune published a report that Abbott had received $9 million in donations from developers and owners of data centers.

According to the documents reviewed by 404 Media, TCEQ issued air-emission limit certificates to a large data center in Houston; approved the construction of stormwater coverage for data centers in Abilene, Barstow, and Royse City; and fast tracked gas power plants for more than a dozen data center projects.

“The TCEQ’s own data indicates that it’s business as usual for data centers and affected communities were promised a freeze. And instead what they’re getting is another reason to distrust the TCEQ and ultimately ineffective attempts to govern by press release,” Kathryn Guerra of Public Citizen said during a press conference on Monday about the findings. “Absent any comprehensive guardrails imposed by the Texas legislature, the industry will continue to move forward as fast as it can, and the TCEQ may let it.”

"They're still putting in that power plant, and there ain't nothing me and my people can do about it. We're just going to have to keep that boot on our neck. It ain’t right.”

Texas is poised to be the data center capital of the world. Three hundred already operate in the state, 100 are under construction, and 200 more are being planned. The projects include Big Tech companies like Meta — which is constructing a $14 billion data center in El Paso — smaller scale local projects like one in Taylor that would be built on land meant for a public park, and massive startups like the nuclear-powered Fermi data center in Amarillo.

In general, people hate data centers and it’s become a major political issue for voters in Texas. On September 21, Abbott directed the TCEQ to “halt all permits sought by data centers.”  Abbott said he’d told the state’s water and electric utility agencies to audit all the projects and directed “the TCEQ to pause the issuance of all permits related to data center projects until [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas] completes its review.”

Abbott’s order is broad and data centers are large and complicated construction projects with a lot of moving parts that require dozens of permits and plans. It’s possible that some of the permits uncovered by the nonprofits were filed before Abbott’s September 21 pause.

Many, however, were clearly issued afterward. Twelve of the 14 applications for gas plants and generators were filed in October. TCEQ used an expedited review process for eight of them. One was an air permit for engines and turbines that would power a data center in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas. The builder submitted the permit for expedited review on October 6 and a TCEQ engineer completed the initial review two days later, according to publicly available documents reviewed by 404 Media.

“No permits have been approved,” Governor Abbot’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris told 404 Media. “In line with the Governor’s directive, TCEQ has not taken and will not take any proactive actions related to the approval of data center permits. Likewise, no other state agency will approve data center-related permits until the Public Utility Commission, ERCOT, and the Water Development Board have the information they need to make informed decisions. Texans must come first.”

404 Media asked Abbott’s office why there are multiple data center related stormwater construction projects listed as “approved” and was told to talk to TCEQ. "The Commission has not issued any permits related to data centers and is complying with Governor Abbott’s directive," TCEQ told 404 Media.

Sam Law, a researcher and manager of communications at FracTracker Alliance, told 404 Media that TCEQ gave him “a more exacting interpretation of their own situation,” he said. “Which is that they are accepting applications, but not moving forward with reviewing them. That was shown to not be true.”

Law also noted that the stormwater construction permits that read as “approved” in the TCEQ system are the result of a regulatory loophole. “The state has just approved a generic construction stormwater permit, and then to get onto that permit, people file a notice of intent and then they add them to a pre-existing permit,” Law said.

The stormwater construction permit is required to raise and level ground. “It’s often the final approval needed to move forward to prepare the site to actually build the physical structure," he added. In areas where there’s no zoning restrictions or the city is unincorporated, then that permit is all a company needs to start building.

“The Caldwell Technology Park [...] the Stargate facility, and a bunch of other very large hyperscale facilities have gotten regulatory approvals in the form of this notice of intent, so it's not like a real pause,” he said.

Law said he believes Abbott is trying to project opposition to data centers without doing the real regulatory work. “If the point of the pause is to stop the sort of approvals of data centers, that's not what's been happening,” he said.

Multiple data center projects are underway in Abilene, Texas — including OpenAI’s Stargate project. According to TCEQ’s records, it issued a water quality permit for the Abilene data center on September 23. “We are, in fact, going to get a massive gas turbine plant right to people’s houses,” Abilene resident and Democratic state senate candidate Riley Rodriquez said during Public Citizen’s press conference.

Rodriquez said that residents had gotten letters from TCEQ about the incoming gas plant and how it might affect air quality in the region. The people of Abilene have fought and won the right to testify at upcoming public hearings. 

“At the end of the day they’re going to flip that switch. Doesn't matter what we have to say at that public hearing, and I know that is a doom and gloom way to look at this. But that's the fact,” Rodriquez said. “The fact of the matter is, we can go to that. We can have the best comments. We can have the best information [...] and I could have 500,000 people behind me, and it doesn't matter because they're going to flip that switch because they put the money on it anyways. And we got to live with that  — with those consequences.” 

Rodriquez said the people of the region found out about Stargate too late to do anything about it. “We're in a unique situation for us because we didn't have a chance to do any of the things that these great people are doing. We didn't have a chance to do any of that. ‘It was built, concrete's poured, generators are going in, boys. Sorry,’” he said.

“So Abbott made his announcement. That's really great, that's really awesome,” Rodriquez said. “Guess what? They're still putting in that power plant, and there ain't nothing me and my people can do about it. We're just going to have to keep that boot on our neck. It ain’t right.”

In his September 21 letter, Abbott said he’d ordered the pause because “the goal is to put Texans first.”

Update 10/19/26 at 8:20PM: This story has been updated to include a response from TCEQ.

Ukrainian drones hit Russia’s largest data center on Wednesday. This was Ukraine’s fourth strike on Russian data centers in the past week and confirmation of a new reality of war: data centers are valuable enemy assets and they will be targeted.

In 2006, British economist Clive Humby declared “data is the new oil,” and big tech adopted the metaphor. Twenty years later, a dark side of the truism has been revealed. If the places where oil is refined are valuable targets in a war then so, too, are the places where data is refined. We’ve seen this not just in the Russia-Ukraine war, but also with Iran hitting Amazon Web Services data centers in Dubai in retaliation for America’s strikes on the country. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed strikes on Russian data centers and oil refineries in a post on X and called them a “symmetrical response" to Russian aggression. Here we have oil and data together again, not as a metaphor in an economics lecture, but in the pronouncement of a world leader defending his country. conducting a war.

Three of Ukraine’s strikes hit data centers that belonged to Yandex, Russia’s Google-equivalent, and damaged the company’s supercomputers that housed some of its AI models. The latest attack hit a data center operated by Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank. It’s too early to tell what the effects of the strike on the Sberbank data center will be, but the three strikes on Yandex have disrupted internet and communications across Russia.

An online rumor said that the strikes on Yandex had the effect of taking down Russian bot farms, but this wasn’t true. The effects of the strikes on the civilian population were much more severe. Yandex is ubiquitous in Russia — it has its own app store, payment services, dating services, taxi and bus apps, and email services. The company operates six data centers in Russia and the strikes knocked two of them offline completely. People in Russia have lost access to their email, some of their data is seemingly gone, and taxi and bus apps only work intermittently.

ChrisO_wiki, an anonymous researcher who translates Russian social media posts for the western web, chronicled how the Yandex outages are hitting everyday Russians. “A taxi driver from Yekaterinburg says that after the service disruptions, he can no longer view his order history, and the status of trips is updated with a delay,” ChrisO_wiki said in a post on X and Bluesky. 

“The loss of Yandex's cloud services is also having severe impacts on Russian commercial logistics. Those who work with electronic document management are unable to register incoming goods, severely affecting manufacturers and distributors,” they said in another post.

These attacks are just the latest in a long line of strikes on data centers this year. Russia has been targeting Ukrainian data centers for months and Iran hit AWS data centers in Dubai in March, knocking out digital infrastructure in the Middle East.

Klaudia Klonowska, a researcher who studies the effects of emerging technologies on international law, told 404 Media that attacks on data centers are so new that international law around them is still developing. “You have very limited situations in which they would actually qualify as lawful targets when they're used by the military, and even then, it's very difficult for the attackers to know whether that's happening or not,” Klonowska said.

If the data centers are purely processing military data, then they could be legitimate targets, according to Klonowska. But many, if not most, data centers are dual-use, meaning they house both civilian and military data. In many cases, disrupting daily life seems to be part of the point.

When Russia struck data centers in Ukraine in September, state-backed news agencies claimed it hosted data for Palantir that supported Ukrainian intelligence efforts and was a lawful target. Ukraine denied the allegation. “So you see how difficult, because of the nature of these centers, it's really to pinpoint what is happening with them and who is using them and for what means,” Klonowska said. “Sometimes [Ukraine] mentions that these data centers contribute to Moscow's revenues that then fuel the war machine. But that's not enough to make them lawful targets. Retaliation is not enough under law.”

Klonowska noted that it is civilians who suffer most, not the military, when data centers go offline. “There are questions about proportionality given how widespread the attacks are,” she said. “A lack of internet access for very prolonged periods affects everything. It's all of the civilian services that are being disrupted, which you can imagine also includes things like hospitals, traffic, judicial services, etc. etc.” It’s worth noting that Russia has repeatedly attacked civilian targets in Ukraine, including apartment buildings, public transportation, and hospitals.

According to Klonowska, international and humanitarian law needs to catch up with the issue and that scholars like herself are only just starting to understand the ramifications. “I think there's also another bigger question behind all of this,” she said. “Why have we gotten to the point where we have permitted militaries of various states to use civilian commercial data centers for their military purposes? By potentially using them and relying on them, they have opened them up to the possibility of becoming military targets.”

Disentangling civilian and military data probably won’t take data centers off the target list, but it will make international law more clear on which buildings are legitimate targets. It may also change how data centers processing military data are built. 

“France has recently announced that they have unveiled their underground data center on the outskirts of Paris that will be exclusively for military use,” Klonowska said. “Just as we expect them not to use schools or hospitals or other civilian residential areas to host weapons or other military equipment, we would, I think, increasingly need to mention this in the case of data centers.”

The idea that a data center might be a military target is not lost on the American communities facing construction of them in their backyards. America’s nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) have partnered with the University of Michigan in an attempt to build a data center in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan. The people and government of the Township aren’t thrilled about it for a number of reasons and the city attorney has said that the data center would be a “high value target” in wars of the future. Los Alamos pushed back on this in a letter to the community in September, around the same time Russia was striking data centers in Ukraine. LANL accused the township attorney of creating “that terminology without basis. It should not be interpreted as evidence of a known, specific, or imminent threat to the facility or the surrounding community,” the letter said. 

“Like other major research facilities, the center would employ appropriate security measures, including controlled access, cameras, and on-site security personnel,” it said. “Los Alamos and U-M would coordinate with local, state, and federal partners on matters related to safety and security.”

It’s easy to see where the people of Ypsilanti Township are coming from. When Ukraine struck three Yandex data centers in Russia over the weekend, its drones slipped past Russia’s air defenses. The idea that a town next to a data center, especially one with ties to America’s nuclear weapons programs, could sustain damage if the data center was ever attacked isn’t unfounded. The data centers smoldering in the world’s war zones proved that the township’s fears aren’t theoretical.

Drones struck a plant making fuel components for Russia's Kh-101 cruise missiles and a second Yandex data center overnight on 9 October, Russian officials and monitoring channels reported. The same night, fires were reported at a refinery in Russia's far north and an oil depot near Belgorod. Russia claimed it downed more than 500 drones, and Ukraine has not claimed any of the strikes.

Ukraine has spent months hitting refineries and arms suppliers deep inside Russia. Russia, meanwhile, keeps firing Kh-101 cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities, including the one that killed 22 people in Pryluky on 7 October.

The plant behind the Kh-101's fuel

The Redkino Experimental Plant in Tver Oblast came under attack overnight, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported. It said the plant makes components of Decilin-M, a fuel for Kh-55 and Kh-101 cruise missiles, as well as additives for diesel and aviation kerosene.

Tver Oblast Governor Vitaly Korolev claimed a plant in Redkino caught fire as a drone attack was being repelled. He did not name the plant. No workers were hurt, he said.

The plant also makes ferrocene derivatives, which serve as burn catalysts in solid-fuel rocket motors, Militarnyi reported. The UK sanctioned it in September 2025. Drones attacked it in September 2023 and twice in one night in June 2024, the outlet said.

In February, drones of the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) Alpha unit struck the plant, sparking a large fire, SBU sources told Kyiv Post. The Kh-101 is the missile Russia used against Pryluky on 7 October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Yandex loses a second data center

Part of Yandex's data center in Kaluga was damaged in the drone attack, and several modules were completely knocked out, the company's press service told Interfax, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported. Some Yandex services may run with interruptions, no one was hurt, and the company is still assessing the damage, Yandex said.

Kaluga Oblast Governor Vladislav Shapsha claimed nine people were injured in the overnight attack on the region. A day earlier, a drone attack forced Yandex to fully shut its data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast.

A refinery in the north, a depot near Belgorod

Locals reported an attack on the Ukhta refinery in the Komi Republic, followed by a fire, Exilenova+ said. The Lukoil-owned plant can process about 4.2 million metric tons of oil a year, making gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, and vacuum gasoil. The extent of the damage is unclear.

An oil depot north of Belgorod was also burning after the night's attack, the channel posted. Belgorod's regional headquarters claimed two people were killed and four injured, including a child, in the Belgorod district.

A large fire also broke out in Pushkino near Moscow, likely at a truck parking lot, Astra reported. The cause is unknown.

Repeated strikes on Redkino target a specialty fuel that Russia's cruise missiles depend on, while two Yandex data centers hit in two nights bring the war to services ordinary Russians use every day.

A drone attack overnight on 8 October caused a fire that hit part of Yandex's data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, about 580 km from Ukraine, and the site is fully stopped, the Russian tech company told Russian media. The data center sits on the grounds of Sasta, a sanctioned machine-tool plant, Russian outlet Astra said, citing Wikimapia data. Astra's OSINT analyst found from eyewitness footage that the fire hit the plant.

Since late September, Russia has been striking data centers in Kyiv that keep Ukraine's internet and online services running. Now a drone attack has stopped one of the data centers that Russia's largest tech company relies on.

Yandex counts the damage

Yandex warned that some services may be unavailable, while its core services kept running and no one was hurt. Ryazan Oblast Governor Pavel Malkov claimed two drones were downed, a roof caught fire at an enterprise in the Sasovo district, and windows were blown out in several homes.

The power failure took down a wide range of Yandex Cloud infrastructure, including computing capacity, networks, data storage, databases, Kubernetes, cloud services, AI, and security and monitoring systems, Ukrainian outlet ZN.ua reported, citing Exilenova+.

Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported that the plant was hit, without naming an attacker. The channel said Sasta, which claims a place on Russia's register of defense-industry companies, makes computer-controlled machine tools, including five-axis machining centers, and previously supplied the Tactical Missiles Corporation (KTRV) and Roscosmos. The plant's value to the arms industry lies in machines that cut precision parts, not in finished weapons, the channel said.

Citing Exilenova+, Militarnyi reported that Ukraine's Defense Forces hit the plant. It also linked Sasta to Iskander missile supply chains. No source has said whether the plant or the data center was the target, and no Ukrainian official has claimed the Sasovo strike. Sasta has been under US sanctions since November 2023, UK sanctions since February 2024, and Ukrainian sanctions since April 2025, a sanctions database shows.

Salavat: Kyiv reports a hit

Ukrainian forces hit the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat complex in Bashkortostan, about 1,380 km from the front line, causing a fire, Ukraine's General Staff said. It said the complex processes up to 10 million metric tons of hydrocarbons a year and serves Russia's armed forces. Its key unit, the ELOU-AVT-6 primary oil refining unit launched in 2012, can process 6 million metric tons a year, Militarnyi reported. Astra's analyst placed the fire a few kilometers outside Salavat, possibly near the refinery.

Salavat Mayor Marat Zagidullin claimed that debris from several drones fell in the industrial zone that morning and started a fire.

"The enterprise continues to work," he said.

Astra noted earlier hits on the complex on 24 September 2025, on 14 July 2026, when refining fully stopped, and on 13 August 2026.

Russia's strikes on Ukraine's data centers

Russia has repeatedly hit data centers in Kyiv since 23 September. Strikes hit the COSMONOVA data center twice, the second time knocking it out, and the Parkovyi data center stopped working completely on 1 October after a series of strikes. In early October, Russia destroyed the dline.ua data center in Kyiv.

Russian drones and missiles struck Kyiv data centers over 23–24 September, knocking out internet and hosting providers. The Digital Transformation Ministry said about 100,000 subscribers lost service, NV Business reported.

Russia has widened its air campaign from power plants and warehouses to railways, fuel stations, and now digital infrastructure as it tries to grind down the country's ability to function before another war winter.

"You'd have to destroy 70-80% of Kyiv's buildings"

MiroHost founder and Internet Invest Group head Oleksandr Olshanskyi told NV Business the attack destroyed his own data center.

"Most critically important data and systems have been moved abroad or to the cloud," Olshanskyi said. "If an online store stops working, that's unpleasant but not a tragedy."

He called rumors about a full internet blackout or sharp service price hikes baseless.

"Destroying all internet in a simple way is impossible—you'd have to use nuclear or chemical weapons or destroy 70-80% of buildings in Kyiv," he said.

What Russia hit

The strikes damaged a Kyiv data center housing UTELS switching equipment on 23 September. Overnight into 24 September, Russia destroyed equipment of hosting provider CityHost.UA and the data center housing MiroHost. About 95% of MiroHost's clients operate outside Ukraine and were unaffected, he said. Russia also struck the Pavutyna network's data center. Crazy Network said a missile struck Kyiv's central traffic exchange hub, cutting service for its subscribers in Vinnytsia, Kyiv, and Khmelnytskyi Oblast.

Providers KIEVNET, Domonet, FAUST, and Etherlink also reported disruptions. Ukraine's telecom regulator NKEK said on 24 September that providers were completing emergency restoration, and Domonet estimated service would return by 21:00 that evening.

The 23 September strikes killed two people and injured more than 40, and hit a college building in Kyiv while students were on campus, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote that evening. Russia targeted major Ukrainian data centers "seeking to disrupt the flow of information," he said. "This is critical civilian infrastructure that ensures people can access life-saving information. It is not a military target."

"More sanctions pressure, more missile interceptors are the only way to stop this terror," Sybiha wrote. "These attacks must not become the new normal."

Panic, not military gain

Olshanskyi said Russia uses these strikes to spread fear, not achieve lasting results.

"The enemy's goal is to cause damage, inflame panic, and heighten nervousness," he said.

His data center's destruction "will not affect the situation at the front in any way," he said.