❯ Musk Reported to Pour $100M–$200M into Midterms, Betting on Texas

FUND FLOWAccording to Wired, Trump-aligned figures expect Musk to spend $100 million to $200 million in the November midterms, operating through his super PAC America PAC, with the focus on voter mobilization in key districts — the primary battlefield being his home state of Texas. Earlier reports also put his commitment at up to roughly $120 million across eight states.

WHY TEXASThe Texas Senate race is tight: Republican candidate and state attorney general Paxton is clearly trailing in fundraising behind Democratic rival Talarico. Texas is also home to Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, and the state with the largest queue of AI data centers in the country — this week, the state’s grid regulator just froze grid-connection approvals for all data centers pending a queue audit. According to SemiAnalysis, the queue stands at roughly 474 gigawatts, nearly five times the state’s historical peak load.

CONVERGENCEEnergy permitting and political money are both escalating in the same state, and the practical impact on the AI industry is more direct than the election outcome itself. In data-center siting decisions, the calculus used to be electricity prices, land costs, and fiber. Now, the political environment around grid interconnection has to be priced in separately — a single permitting freeze can stall multi-billion-dollar projects halfway. The first to feel the pressure are developers who have already secured land but not grid access.

▪ SIGNALOnce compute expansion hits the grid bottleneck, who makes the permitting calls becomes a question worth $200 million to influence.