00:00When a city council in Minnesota voted 3-2 to block a data center this morning,
00:05the crowd erupted in cheers, even as the developer warned it could cost the city $150 million.
00:13From Inver Grove Heights to Dowajac, Michigan to Minneapolis,
00:19communities are drawing lines that the tech industry never expected to face.
00:25In Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, Friday morning started with chaos.
00:31A five-minute recess had to be called after the packed council chamber erupted in jeers before the
00:37vote even began.
00:39When the gavel finally came down, the result was 3-2.
00:44The city would impose a one-year moratorium on new data center construction.
00:49The developer behind the project, T5 Data Centers, had already sent a warning shot,
00:56a letter threatening more than $150 million in damages if it's proposed.
01:0255,000-square-foot facility was halted.
01:06The city retained Jason Kubitschik of the Iverson Rivers Law Firm through the League of Minnesota.
01:12Cities to defend the decision.
01:15Officials say the pause is simply to allow time to study zoning,
01:20infrastructure, and land use impacts.
01:23But with $150 million in potential liability looming,
01:29Inver Grove Heights has drawn a line,
01:31and bet its tax base on holding it,
01:34that battle is playing out in courtrooms too.
01:38That opposition is now making its way into courtrooms about 500 miles east in Dowajac, Michigan.
01:46A different kind of confrontation is unfolding.
01:49On the same day Inver Grove Heights was voting,
01:52Hyperscale Data Incorporated announced it had completed the acquisition of 48 and a half
01:58acres of forested land,
02:01more than doubling its Michigan campus to 83 total acres.
02:05The company has designs on eventually reaching 3,000 megawatts of capacity at this site,
02:12which it plans to convert into a combined AI data center and robotics hub with over 100,000 square feet
02:20dedicated to robotics assembly and high-performance computing.
02:24But it is doing all of this while facing a class action lawsuit filed by nearby residents.
02:29Neighbors say the noise from the existing 30-megawatt facility is unbearable.
02:36The company is pressing forward regardless.
02:39Purchasing land.
02:41Announcing new customers.
02:42And hosting an investor call delayed specifically to June 26th to address what it called
02:48positive developments.
02:51Residents call it something else entirely.
02:54That opposition is making its way into city halls across Minnesota.
02:59On the same Friday that Inver Grove Heights voted,
03:03Minneapolis City Council passed its own pause.
03:06A five-month moratorium on all new data center development within city limits.
03:12The Twin Cities metro has now become a flashpoint in the national data center battle.
03:17With two jurisdictions acting on the same day, Minneapolis officials say the moratorium gives the city time
03:25to study the full impacts of data center development, including power draw, water consumption,
03:33noise, and land use, before approving any new projects.
03:38The decision is part of a broader wave that has now produced formal moratoria in more than
03:4569 local governments across the United States.
03:48From Denver to Baltimore to the Twin Cities.
03:52Communities are buying themselves time.
03:54What they do with it may shape where the data center industry builds for the rest of the decade.
04:00And the reason this wave keeps gaining momentum comes down to one thing.
04:05Resources.
04:07And the reason this legislation keeps gaining momentum comes down to one thing.
04:12Resources.
04:14In Virginia, the state that hosts more data centers than anywhere else on Earth,
04:20a drought emergency is forcing an uncomfortable question.
04:24Who gets the water?
04:26About one-third of the state is now under extreme drought conditions.
04:30And Governor Abigail Spanberger is urging all Virginians to conserve.
04:35State water regulators have clarified that data centers,
04:39which can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day.
04:44Equivalent to a city of 50,000 people,
04:47face the same mandatory restrictions as every other residential and commercial customer.
04:53There are no carve-outs.
04:55No exceptions.
04:57No priority access for the tech giants.
05:00In Loudoun County alone,
05:02more than 300 data centers operate in what locals call data center alley.
05:07For residents already competing with those facilities for electricity and road space.
05:14Now they are competing for water too.
05:16The pressure on the grid is only half the story.
05:19Water tells the other half.
05:23Qualcomm made a surprising move this week.
05:26Unveiling a new eye-optimized data center central processing unit
05:30and signing Meta platforms as its inaugural major customer.
05:35The announcement marks Qualcomm's first serious push into data center Silicon.
05:41Territory long dominated by NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.
05:46Meta is expected to use the new chips to power AI inference workloads across its global data center
05:53fleet, which runs to nearly 2 million servers.
05:57Analysts say the deal signals that the AI chip market is beginning to fracture.
06:02With hyperscalers increasingly willing to diversify away from NVIDIA's dominance as supply.
06:10Constraints and pricing pressure mount.
06:13For Qualcomm, the Meta deal provides instant credibility in a market it has long watched from the sidelines.
06:20If the chips perform as advertised, it could open the door to contracts with Amazon,
06:26Microsoft, and Google, reshaping the economics of AI infrastructure at a time when every chip
06:33purchases a multi-billion dollar commitment.
06:38Despite the resource tensions, construction is pressing forward.
06:43Yet despite the resistance, construction is pressing forward at a scale few predicted.
06:49Deep in Texas, construction crews have broken ground on what could become one of the most powerful data center.
06:57Campuses in North American history,
07:00Cloudburst Data Centers has begun work on a 1.2 gigawatt flagship campus.
07:05A scale that would make it among the most powerful single-site data center facilities ever built.
07:12Texas has been aggressively positioning itself as an alternative to Virginia.
07:17Offering cheaper land, abundant power from its deregulated grid,
07:22and a government that has generally been more welcoming to tech development.
07:27The Cloudburst campus will eventually draw electricity equivalent to what is needed to power a
07:33mid-sized American city.
07:36Whether the Texas grid can sustain that kind of load,
07:39especially during summer heat events,
07:42remains an open question.
07:44The Electric Reliability Council of Texas is already managing record demand this summer.
07:50And the financial commitment behind that construction is staggering.
07:55And the financial commitment behind that construction is staggering.
08:00The largest data center acquisition in history is on the verge of closing.
08:05A consortium led by BlackRock's global infrastructure partners,
08:10and including Microsoft,
08:12NVIDIA,
08:13Elon Musk's XAI,
08:15MGX of Abu Dhabi,
08:17and the Kuwait Investment Authority,
08:20is finalizing its $40 billion purchase of Aligned data centers.
08:25Aligned operates more than 50 campuses across the United States and Latin America.
08:31With over 5 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity,
08:35BlackRock described the deal as foundational AI infrastructure,
08:40the physical layer on which the next generation of artificial intelligence will run.
08:45The deal represents a new breed of data center ownership,
08:49not by the tech companies themselves,
08:52but by sovereign wealth funds and asset managers who see these facilities as essential public
08:58infrastructure.
09:00At $40 billion,
09:02it dwarfs every previous data center acquisition.
09:06The message it sends to markets is simple.
09:09This asset class is now too important to fail.
09:13And underlying all of this is a challenge that money alone cannot solve.
09:18A new analysis found that two-thirds of the 809 data center projects currently
09:24planned for construction in the United States are located in areas already experiencing drought
09:30conditions.
09:32According to the U.S. Drought Monitor,
09:35nearly 63% of the entire country is currently under some form of drought.
09:40The concentration of data centers in drought-stressed regions is not accidental.
09:46These facilities are drawn to locations with cheap land,
09:50available power,
09:51and cooler ambient temperatures.
09:54But cooling a data center also requires enormous amounts of water.
09:59And as drought conditions worsen,
10:01the competition between data centers,
10:04agriculture,
10:05and municipal water systems is intensifying.
10:08Researchers say power generation accounts for roughly 54% of the additional water
10:15demand from AI,
10:17while semiconductor manufacturing takes another 42.
10:21The data center itself is only a fraction,
10:24but it is the visible,
10:26local face of a much larger and growing thirst.
10:37It helps us cover more of these stories.
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