What this Texas Republican primary revealed about the politics of AI data centers

An agriculture commissioner race is probably not where you would expect the politics of AI to play out. Yet that’s exactly what happened in this week’s Republican primary in Texas. The state’s longtime incumbent, Sid Miller, spent much of his campaign warning about the spread of data centers across rural America. The server farms powering the AI boom, he argued, were swallowing farmland and draining already-overtaxed water supplies. In a state that prides itself on its cowboys and farmers, Miller framed the industry as an existential threat to ranch country.