--- title: 'Texas: One Percent for the Living World' slug: 'texas-one-percent' date: 2026-10-24 type: 'essay' status: 'published' tags: ['enviroai', 'environmental-superintelligence', 'policy', 'tceq', 'monitoring', 'visual-essay'] abstract: 'An 11-slide proposal answering the Governor''s question of what data centers owe Texas: not money but computing. Every data center in the state pledges one percent of its capacity to a public trust that verifies what the industry reports, protects Texas water, air, coast, and land, and trains the first Large Nature Model.' license: 'CC-BY-4.0' author: 'Jed Anderson' co_authors: [] canonical_url: 'https://jedanderson.org/essays/texas-one-percent' pdf: '/pdfs/texas-one-percent.pdf' hero_image: '/images/texas-one-percent-hero.jpg' hero_image_alt: 'Title-only cover on warm off-white paper: ''Texas: One Percent for the Living World'' set in a large serif face above a short brown rule.' supporting_files: [] pdf_canonical: true --- Texas has already asked what data centers owe the state. In September 2026 the Governor halted TCEQ permits for data center projects until they pay their own way, protect the grid and water, and complete the ERCOT and TWDB audits. This deck offers an answer: the debt is not paid in money. It is paid in computing. The proposal is the Texas Environmental Compute Compact. Every data center in Texas pledges one percent of installed capacity—interruptible, audited yearly against reported load—to a public trust hosted at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and governed by state agencies, universities, operators, and industry users. One percent of today's fleet is about 80 MW, roughly 57,000 H100-class GPUs; by 2030 it is about 510 MW. Scheduled around each operator's own peak, it costs the contributors mainly power, on the order of $30M to $40M a year. The compute does three jobs as one system. It verifies what data centers report about water, power, and on-site generation, making the audit the Governor ordered permanent. It protects Texas's 23 river basins, its industrial air corridor, its coast, and its carbon storage continuously. And it trains a [Large Nature Model](/essays/large-nature-model) on Texas's own environmental record, held to an open benchmark and judged by whether living systems do better. The compact is voluntary by design: never a permit condition, announced by the Governor, no new law required. TCEQ gets immediate, no-cost access to the EnviroAI platform on day one and sets the verification requirements. The deck closes with who wins—Texans, the Governor, data centers, TCEQ, Texas universities, and nature—and the asks for the next 90 days. *The full deck is in the canonical PDF above.*