The lawyers closing the Texas data centres, so far as we can see, sit in Houston, and most of them were energy lawyers before anyone asked them to look at a campus.

The building is the easy part. A site in the Panhandle or out towards the Gulf Coast stands or falls on the power: whether it can be connected, whether the gas or the offtake is real, and whether the ground lease survives the lender’s counsel. Houston has been answering those questions for years. What looks different now is the size of the load, and the fact that the rules are shifting while the documents are still open.

Senate Bill 6 was a ratepayer point dressed up as grid policy. A large customer triggers transmission spend, then does not arrive, and everyone else pays. The PUCT put numbers on it in September 2026. Loads of 75 MW and above at one site have to post security before the studies run, at $50,000 per MW. The Governor has separately paused TCEQ permits for data centres while ERCOT and the Water Development Board look at the grid and the water. ERCOT’s ride-through rules for large computational load add a design point that a normal industrial offtake never had. Our reading is that a projects partner who last did a solar interconnection in 2022 will struggle to lift the old schedule. The condition precedent has moved.

The hiring, from what has been announced and from the searches we are in, has a shape.

Baker Botts has a data-centre group of more than fifty lawyers sat on its projects practice, and it has been adding in Houston rather than pulling the work back to Dallas. Anna Irion came from Jackson Walker in November 2025 to do gas supply and on-site generation. Andrea Moore Stover and Regina Pearson joined the same group. When the permitting pause landed, the firm had a client webinar up in under a day. About 180 people dialled in. That is only a clue to where the instructions are, but it is a better one than a press release.

Norton Rose Fulbright acted for Crusoe on the Abilene ground lease for the Stargate site. Bryn Sappington ran a team of fourteen. The firm has said that the instruction came out of earlier Texas power work, including Crusoe’s mining matters, not out of a technology pitch. It launched a data-centre and digital infrastructure group in March. In July it hired Nate Hurlbut and John Zarbock out of Greenberg Traurig, corporate partners, in a year when it added nine lateral partners and made seven promotions. Ammad Waheed’s real-estate group in Houston looks to us like the local end of that. Kirkland advised Blue Owl on the joint venture funding Abilene. Husch Blackwell’s team closed Galaxy’s $1.4 billion Helios financing. Bracewell’s Houston projects partners are on the same sorts of mandates, and have been willing to say that the regulatory noise is now a reason for capital to go elsewhere.

Associate hiring is harder to see, and we would not pretend the pattern is settled. The seats we are being asked about are mostly three to six years’ PQE, in projects, energy regulatory, and the finance side of a construction covenant. Real estate comes up too, but only where the associate has done large ground leases, options and abatements. We have not seen anyone trying to retrain a retail leasing lawyer into this. Corporate is being added at the edge, usually to sit over a joint venture or a platform sale, which is why those two Greenberg partners made sense. Litigation and environmental are busy. They do not, yet, seem to be taking people at the same rate. Developer in-house teams still look small, and the grid work still seems to be going out. An energy associate with one finished interconnection on the CV is, for now, easier to talk about than a general corporate associate from a better-known firm. That may not hold.

Conflicts run through the conversations we are having. Vinson & Elkins, Baker Botts and Jackson Walker act for the regulated utilities. A lateral who is unclean on CenterPoint or Oncor can be difficult to place, even where the practice fit is obvious. Firms without that utility relationship have moved to advance waivers so they can keep the developer. Haynes Boone and Norton Rose are both there. General counsel appear to be asking about it before they ask about portable business. On our searches it is coming up on the first call, not at conflicts clearance.

We do not think the next couple of years will look like the announcements. Some of the kit already ordered will probably sit in a warehouse. Norton Rose has already described that. A few named campuses may not reach financial close, and a partner taken on for the headline, with no power practice behind it, could have a thin year. Equally, the load already sat in the ERCOT queue does not obviously vanish because a permit is paused. We would be surprised if clients who use Houston for pipelines and generation handed the offtake to a technology group in New York.

Our guess is that someone else in Texas will get tired of staffing this from spare energy capacity and will pay for a projects team. Associate hiring, if the partner hires stick, should follow, perhaps a year behind. The rate argument is likely to sit with anyone who has already negotiated gas to a large load. We may be wrong on the timing. We are more confident that this work is not tied to a single campus, and that it is what a Houston energy practice may look like for the next stretch.