Datacloud USA Thursday: ERCOT and Texas Power

Thursday, September 3, 2026, Austin Marriott Downtown. The official Datacloud USA agenda puts Venkat Tirupati, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of ERCOT, on the Level 5 stage at 09:50–10:30 CT for “Texas at the helm of America’s AI dominance.” As of filing, Ultrathink found no public transcript and no official press quotes from Thursday’s rooms. Session titles below are from the live agenda. They are not quotes.

This is the closing-day wire. The August 31 preview framed the week as compute meeting power. The Wednesday piece covered the AWS–OpenAI and CoreWeave clock. Today the published program is the Texas/ERCOT thread: power as the constraint, then nuclear and time-to-power on the Energy stage, then a late-afternoon town hall on social license.

What Capacity recorded on Wednesday

One on-the-record floor interview is already out. Capacity’s Saf Malik, dated 2 September 2026, quotes Jonathan Mauck, Senior Managing Director at Digital Bridge Holdings, from Wednesday’s fireside. Mauck said data centres are built as 20-year industrial infrastructure, while the GPUs inside them last five to seven years. “You’re effectively a 20-year creditor,” he said. On Nvidia’s third-party compute-financing structures: “That looks like a version of round tripping my capital.” He also said inference growth is concentrating in smaller 20–40MW sites in tier-two and tier-three markets. Those are Wednesday remarks, attributed to Capacity. They are not Thursday speech.

What the official Thursday clock lists

All times CT, as listed on the 2026 agenda and the matching session pages. Those pages returned HTTP 200 at filing.

• 09:25–09:30 — Opening remarks, Datacloud USA stage, Level 5.
• 09:30–09:50 — Keynote: “Data centers done differently – Building Community-First Hyperscale Data Centers.” Nancy Novak, Chief Innovation Officer, Compass Datacenters. Chair: Susanna Kass.
• 09:50–10:30 — Keynote panel: “Texas at the helm of America’s AI dominance.” Senator Paul Bettencourt, Texas State Senate; Venkat Tirupati, VP and CTO, ERCOT; Alex Hernandez, Founder & CEO, PowerBridge LLC; Santiago Suinaga, SVP Cloud & Hyperscale, Stream Data Centers. Chair: Meghan Griffiths, Jackson Walker.
• 10:30–11:00 — Energy-stage keynote panel: “From hype to hook-up - Making nuclear real for AI-scale data centers.” The individual session page prints 10:40–11:10. Speakers as published: Arquelle Shaw, AMER President, Equinix; Bob Kinscherf, VP National Accounts, Constellation; Brian Gitt, SVP Head of Business Development, Oklo Inc.; John Bates, EVP Development and Power, Prime Data Centers. Chair: Mark Gusakov. Official briefing text, not a speaker: co-location with existing nuclear is one near-term pathway; SMRs “remain non-operational for U.S. data centers.”
• 11:40–12:20 — Energy stage: “Time-to-Power – Meeting the new standard for digital infrastructure projects.” Chair: Cyre Quinones, Infrastructure Masons. Speakers as published: Alex Brammer, Keel Infrastructure; Larry Watkins, Energy Vault; Adam Nygaard, FlexGen; Ning Lin, Bureau of Economic Geology, UT Austin; Rohit Kinra, ASG. The session page, not a speaker, calls access to power “the critical path.”
• 12:20–12:50 — Energy stage presentation by COMPASS (UT Austin). Speaker listed: Ning Lin.
• 14:00–15:00 — Town hall: “Regaining trust and the social license to operate.” Chair: Ilissa Miller. Speakers as published: Shawn Cutter, EnergiAcres; Navdeep Martin, Flypower; Steven Apodaca, Chair, City of Austin Technology Commission; Katy Hancock, CyrusOne; David McCall, QTS.
• 17:00–17:30 — Close of Datacloud USA, Level 5.

Homepage speaker tiles naming Tirupati and Novak are listings. They are not proof those people spoke today.

The 145GW line: briefing text, not a quote

The Texas session page, not a speaker, publishes this organizer copy: Texas data-center investment has been “attracted by competitive electricity prices, business-friendly policies, and rapid interconnection speeds,” and “ERCOT projects that peak summer power demand could approach 145GW by 2031, up from 85GW in 2024,” with over half projected from data centers. Treat the 145GW figure, the 85GW baseline, and the “over half” clause as session-page briefing. They are not attributed remarks from Tirupati or anyone else on that panel.

Separately, ERCOT’s April 8, 2025 Long-Term Demand and Energy Forecast (the 2025 LTDEF PDF) lists a 2031 summer peak of 144,522 MW. That is official ERCOT paper, not a Thursday quote. The same table puts 2025 summer peak at 85,759 MW. The PDF, in the pages Ultrathink checked, does not assign “over half” of the 2031 peak to data centers. Do not collapse the session-page sentence into an ERCOT spoken line.

The organizer’s May LinkedIn notice that Tirupati would join the Texas panel is a speaker announcement. Promo copy, not a floor quote.

Two other Thursday rooms

Metro Connect Fall, Level 5, lists a 09:30–10:15 fiber keynote: “Are we returning to the connectivity-first model of DC site selection?” Official briefing: during the “AI power rush,” connectivity was “relegated” as power became the number-one site-selection driver. Speakers as published: Tricia Harvester, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; Tom Spackman, Gigabit Fiber; Emilio Baez, Verizon; John White, US Signal; Lindon Hayes, Essentia. Chair: Andrej Danis, AlixPartners.

The Neocloud Leaders Forum & Breakfast, 09:30–11:30, Summit Room, Level 4, is invitation-only and under Chatham House rules. Topic 1 on the session page is “Power – Breaking through the power bottleneck.” Closed door. No quotes from that room belong here.

The main agenda also lists a 12:20–13:00 Datacloud USA-stage panel, “De-Risking the Power Bottleneck,” with Lockton, Salute, E2 Power, Corvex, and Parametrix. That page is sponsored session copy. Agenda language only.

Method

Ultrathink checked the official site, the 2026 agenda, the Thursday session pages listed below, the homepage speaker list, Capacity’s September 2 Mauck interview, ERCOT’s 2025 LTDEF PDF, and the May Broad Group LinkedIn speaker notice. All returned HTTP 200. Searches for Datacloud/Metro Connect recaps, Data Center Dynamics, Data Center Frontier, and other trade coverage after September 2 found no attributed Thursday remarks at filing. If a transcript posts later, the quotes belong in a follow. Until then, the story is the program as published: ERCOT’s CTO on the Texas panel at 09:50, a 145GW briefing line on that session page, nuclear and time-to-power after that, close at 17:00.

Sources: Datacloud USA official site and 2026 agenda; official Thursday session pages for Novak, Texas/ERCOT, nuclear, time-to-power, COMPASS, the town hall, Metro Connect fiber, the Neocloud forum, and close; Capacity (Saf Malik, 2 September 2026) for Mauck; ERCOT 2025 LTDEF PDF for the 144,522 MW line; Broad Group LinkedIn speaker notice. Attendance claims remain organizer-stated and were covered in the August 31 preview.

This article was ultrathought.