00:00across America, the fight over data centers is boiling over. In Utah, more than 1,100 people
00:07packed a county fairgrounds to battle a 9-gigawatt AI project, backed by a shark tank investor,
00:14from a congresswoman holding up jars of brown water in Washington, to a developer suing for
00:21the right to drain the Colorado River, to a $40 billion deal reshaping the entire industry.
00:28Here's what's unfolding right now. It may be the largest data center fight in the country,
00:34and it's happening on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. In Box Elder County, Utah, commissioners
00:42approved the Stratus Project, a staggering 9-gigawatt AI data center paired with its own natural gas
00:49plant, sprawling across a 40,000-acre campus. The backlash was immediate. More than 1,100 people
00:57packed the county fairgrounds, booing and chanting as commissioners waved the project through,
01:03and thousands signed a petition delivered to the governor's office reading simply,
01:08This is our water. Backers, including shark tank investor Kevin O'Leary, insist the project is vital
01:16for national security and the local economy. But when residents tried to force a public referendum,
01:23the county attorney rejected all three applications. And now even Congress is watching.
01:30That anchor over water is echoing more than 2,000 miles away, in rural Georgia. And this time it
01:38reached the halls of Congress. At a recent hearing, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held up two jars of
01:46murky, brown drinking water she said came from homes near a metadata center in Newton County. Residents like
01:54Beverly and Jeff Morris say their taps ran dry and their appliances failed within months of construction
02:01starting just 1,000 feet away. And they now face a $25,000 bill to replace their well. An EPA
02:09official has
02:10agreed to review the water quality concerns. Meta denies any connection, pointing to a third-party
02:17study and insisting it draws no groundwater. But with Newton County projected to hit a total
02:23water deficit by 2030, residents aren't reassured. And where water is scarce, the disputes are landing in
02:33court. In California's drought-stricken Imperial Valley, a developer building what could become the
02:40state's largest data center. A million-square-foot AI complex has filed a lawsuit demanding access to
02:47Colorado River water. The company, Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, is suing the Imperial
02:55Irrigation District for roughly 260 million gallons a year, enough to run cooling systems that need around
03:03750,000 gallons every single day. The developer had originally promised to rely on recycled wastewater and
03:12take nothing from the river. Now it argues it can free up that water by leasing 160 acres of active
03:20farmland
03:20and letting it go dormant. Critics call it a dangerous precedent for the entire parched southwest.
03:28That legal fight is far from the only one. In Texas, a developer is suing an entire county for daring
03:36to hit
03:36pause. Hill County commissioners voted 3-2 in May to impose a moratorium. A pause of up to one year
03:45on new
03:45large data centers, power plants, and battery storage projects in unincorporated parts of the county. The
03:54developer, RCM Hill, fired back with a lawsuit in federal court in Waco, arguing the moratorium is,
04:02in its words, illegal under Texas law and an unconstitutional taking of its property rights.
04:10It's a striking reversal of the usual script. For years, rural counties competed to attract these
04:17projects. Now some are trying to slam the brakes. And discovering that the industry is prepared to fight
04:23them all the way to the courthouse. And the reason these battles keep multiplying comes down to a
04:31number on every family's utility bill. The AI build-out is overwhelming the grid. And ordinary households
04:38are footing the cost in the PJM region. The nation's largest grid, stretching from Illinois to North Carolina,
04:46data centers drove an estimated $9.3 billion increase in the latest capacity. Market alone,
04:55that translates into real money. The average residential bill is expected to climb about $18 a
05:02month in Western Maryland and $16 a month in Ohio. Nationwide, utilities requested more than $29
05:10billion in rate increases in just the first half of last year. Double the year before,
05:18seven major AI companies have now signed a White House pledge to fund grid upgrades themselves.
05:24But for many Americans, the higher bills are already here. With bills climbing, voters are trying to take
05:33matters into their own hands. And in Ohio, they're racing the clock. Activists there have been scrambling to
05:40gather more than 413,000 valid signatures by a July 1 deadline, hoping to place a sweeping measure on the
05:49November ballot. If it qualifies and passes, it would prohibit the construction of any new data center in
05:56Ohio that requires at least 25 megawatts of power, a threshold that would effectively block nearly every
06:05large AI facility in one of the country's fastest-growing data center states. It's part of a broader wave.
06:13Voters and lawmakers in more than a dozen states are now pushing moratoriums, ballot measures, and new
06:21restrictions, turning what was once a quiet economic development story into a full-blown political fight.
06:29Yet despite that regulatory wave, the mega-projects keep rising. And one of the biggest is taking
06:36shape in Wisconsin. Construction is underway on a $15 billion data center campus in Port Washington,
06:45just north of Milwaukee, known as Project Lighthouse. It's being developed by Denver-based
06:51Vantage data centers. With artificial intelligence heavyweights OpenAI and Oracle lined up as the end
06:58users. The scale is enormous. The campus is designed to anchor a new generation of AI supercomputing
07:06capacity. And under current timelines, Vantage expects it to open its doors in 2028. For a lakeside
07:14Wisconsin community of just 12,000 people, it represents one of the largest private investments in
07:21state history. And a vivid sign that even as opposition mounts, the race to build AI infrastructure is
07:28only accelerating. And the money flowing into this industry has reached a scale that is almost hard
07:35to comprehend. In one of the largest infrastructure deals in history, a group of the world's most powerful
07:42investors has agreed to acquire aligned data centers in a transaction valued at roughly $40 billion.
07:49The buyers read like a who's who of the AI economy. MGX, BlackRock's infrastructure arm, Microsoft,
07:59Nvidia, Elon Musk's XAI, Singapore's Temasek, and the Kuwait Investment Authority. The deal, expected to
08:09close in the first half of this year, underscores how finished. Income producing data centers have become
08:16some of the most sought after assets on the planet. It's a staggering bookend to today's stories.
08:22Even as communities from Utah to Georgia fight to slow the boom,
08:27tens of billions of dollars keep pouring in to speed it up.
08:46People of L
08:46the although checkers, theds of large banks beaucoup go out of time, when anything arant goes to speed it up.
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