Texas Orders Data Centers to Fund Grid as Blockworks Buys Messari for $10M

Crypto News

Texas has moved to stop households from subsidizing the artificial-intelligence buildout, with Governor Greg Abbott directing state regulators to make data centers pay for the grid they strain. In a June 10 letter to the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT, Abbott instructed both agencies to keep infrastructure costs from passing to residential customers and to begin shifting them onto the companies driving demand. He ordered the commission to start lowering residential transmission charges by the end of July and asked for a joint memo by July 17 outlining their existing authority. The shift could become a template for how other states regulate surging power consumption.

The directive also reopened scrutiny of one of the state's costliest incentives. Texas's sales tax exemption for qualifying facilities waives the 6.25% levy on servers, cooling systems, and the vast quantities of electricity these sites consume, and the comptroller's office estimates it will cost roughly $3.2 billion in forgone revenue over the next two years, with about $1.3 billion landing this year alone. There are currently 121 facilities drawing on the break. Abbott asked regulators to weigh whether the exemption should survive at all, alongside calls for water-efficient cooling and mandatory reporting on power and water use across the sector.

The scale of construction explains the sudden change in posture. Texas now holds roughly 6.5 gigawatts of data-center capacity under construction, about a fifth of the entire national pipeline, and real estate analysts project the state could overtake Northern Virginia as the world's largest data center market by 2030. ERCOT set its all-time peak demand at 85,508 megawatts in August 2023, and AI workloads threaten to push that ceiling far higher. After a decade of courting cloud providers, AI firms, and Bitcoin miners with cheap power and abundant land, the state is recalibrating who absorbs the cost of that growth.

A parallel consolidation is reshaping how the crypto market itself is measured. On June 12, Blockworks acquired Messari, folding two of the largest data and research operations in digital assets into a single platform covering more than 40,000 tokens. The reported price sat above $10 million, a steep markdown from the roughly $300 million valuation Messari carried after its 2022 Series B round, underscoring how sharply the economics of crypto information have shifted in four years. The combined entity is positioning itself as a reference layer for investors, regulators, and the automated systems that increasingly parse market data without human intermediaries.

The acquisition follows an aggressive capital strategy. Blockworks raised funds in April at a $192 million valuation in a round led by ParaFi Capital and Reciprocal Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures participating, and stated openly that it intended to use the proceeds to buy competitors. Co-founder Jason Yanowitz has framed the ambition plainly: he wants to build the Bloomberg of crypto, a terminal and data business that earns from feeds and API calls rather than readers. Such an operation answers to compliance officers and quants more than to an audience, making it structurally different from the newsroom it grew out of.

Underpinning both deals is a distribution crisis that artificial intelligence has accelerated. Google search referrals to publishers fell roughly 33% globally in the year to November 2025, with US referrals down 38% and European referrals down 17%, as AI summaries absorb the queries that once funded digital media. With routine news and research increasingly commoditized by machines, the value in financial information is migrating from the article to the database beneath it. For crypto media, the firms assembling AI-ready datasets on every altcoin and protocol are positioning to become the canonical source that markets, machines, and regulators treat as authoritative.

Taken together, these developments trace a single arc: artificial intelligence is now rewriting the cost structure of both the power grids and the information markets that crypto depends on. COINOTAG's aggregate market data frames the stakes, with the Fear & Greed Index pinned at 23, firmly in Extreme Fear, Bitcoin dominance at 70%, and total crypto market capitalization near $1.84 trillion. As Abbott's regulatory directive reshapes who funds AI infrastructure and data consolidation concentrates market intelligence in fewer hands, the question of who controls the grid and the database may define the next cycle more than any single price move.