00:00A record-shattering heat wave just forced America's data centers off the power grid and onto their own backup generators.
00:08From an Indiana County racing to freeze new projects, to a courtroom fight in California, to a $200 billion campus
00:17swallowing rural Louisiana, the collision between the AI boom and everyday life has never looked sharper.
00:25We begin with the power grid, because this week it nearly buckled, as a brutal heat wave settled over the
00:33eastern United States.
00:35PJM, the largest grid operator in the country, watched demand surge to roughly 163,000 megawatts on Thursday, coming within
00:46a whisker of the all-time record set back in 2006.
00:49The situation was serious enough that the Department of Energy issued its third emergency order of the year, authorizing PJM
00:59to curtail data centers and other large users drawing 50 megawatts or more, forcing them onto their own backup generators.
01:07Spot wholesale electricity briefly rocketed past $2,500 a megawatt hour, more than 60 times the normal rate.
01:18As temperatures climbed past 100 degrees across Maryland and Virginia, it was a vivid preview of the summers to come.
01:27That kind of strain is exactly what's fueling anxiety in communities across the country.
01:33And this week one Indiana County decided it had seen enough.
01:37At Thursday's meeting of the Clark County Commissioners, held early to make room for the July 4th holiday, Commission President
01:46Brian Glover floated a striking idea.
01:49Ask the county's plan and zoning board to recommend a full one-year moratorium on new data centers.
01:56The goal, he explained, is to buy time to overhaul Clark County's Unified Development Ordinance before any more projects move
02:05forward.
02:06Commissioners also said they want to benchmark their local rules against other ordinances around the state and the nation to
02:14make sure the county isn't caught flat-footed.
02:17It's a small-town decision, but it reflects a pattern now repeating in county seats coast to coast.
02:26That local resistance is increasingly ending up in front of a judge.
02:30Out in California, a data center developer has gone to court to overturn Imperial County's 45-day moratorium on new
02:40projects,
02:41asking for a temporary restraining order to stop the freeze in its tracks.
02:45In its filing, the developer argues the county never actually proved a true emergency existed and never spelled out the
02:55specific harms or resident concerns that supposedly justified slamming the door.
03:01However, it's a legal strategy we're seeing repeated from Kentucky to Texas, as the industry pushes back hard against the
03:08wave of local pauses.
03:10The outcome could set an important marker for just how much power counties really have to say no,
03:17and how quickly developers can force them back to the table.
03:22Yet for all the friction on the ground, the ambition behind these projects keeps swelling to almost unimaginable scale.
03:30In rural Louisiana, Meta is building a campus called Hyperion, a data center complex carrying a price tag of around
03:38$200 billion,
03:40making it one of the largest artificial intelligence builds anywhere on Earth.
03:45Governor Jeff Landry has been touting a deal he says will deliver $2 billion in savings to
03:52Entergy Louisiana customers over the next 20 years.
03:57And in nearby Monroe, Mayor Friday Ellis calls the project the thing his region has been asking for.
04:04But it hasn't come without friction.
04:07Residents describe cracked windshields from construction traffic,
04:11rising housing costs, and the disorienting speed at which their quiet parish is being transformed into an AI powerhouse.
04:21But all of that computing power comes with a powerful thirst.
04:25And that's colliding with a deepening drought.
04:28In central Virginia this week, leaders in Richmond and Henrico County urged every customer to start conserving water as local.
04:37Reservoirs slipped below normal levels.
04:40Crucially, officials made a point of saying that data centers are not exempt from the conservation push.
04:47Despite the enormous volumes they use to keep servers cool.
04:51And those volumes are staggering.
04:54A single large facility can draw millions of gallons a day.
04:58Roughly the same as a city of 50,000 people.
05:02As the driest start to a year in over a century grips much of the nation.
05:06That quiet competition between server farms and household taps is becoming impossible to ignore.
05:15State lawmakers are taking notice.
05:17And the policy response is hardening fast across the country.
05:22More than 300 data center related bills have now been introduced in some 30 state legislatures.
05:29Marking a decisive shift away from open-armed incentives toward tougher oversight.
05:35As of the first of the month, Arizona froze its data center sales tax exemption for a full three years.
05:43While Illinois and Ohio both paused their own incentive programs and in states including New York,
05:49South Dakota, and Oklahoma, lawmakers have floated outright moratoriums to hit pause while the impacts on power, water, and local
06:00budgets are studied.
06:01After years of competing to lure these projects in, state houses are now competing just as hard to rein them
06:08in and protect ordinary rate payers.
06:12Yet despite that regulatory wave, construction is pressing forward at full speed.
06:19On the shore of Lake Michigan, crews have just broken ground on one of the largest data center projects in
06:25Wisconsin's history.
06:27A $15 billion campus in Port Washington, north of Milwaukee, developed by Vantage Data Centers and nicknamed Lighthouse.
06:36The project will eventually sprawl across a 672-acre site, with a ceremonial groundbreaking marking the start of site preparation.
06:47For the region, it's a promise of construction jobs and long-term tax revenue.
06:52For the broader industry, it's yet another sign that even as opposition mounts and regulators tighten the rules,
07:00the race to build ever-larger facilities to feed artificial intelligence shows no sign of slowing.
07:07Down.
07:08And the financial firepower behind all this construction is simply staggering.
07:14This week, Digital Realty, one of the biggest names in the business,
07:19moved to take greater control of the world's most valuable data center market.
07:24The company agreed to buy out Blackstone's stake in three fully leased data centers in Manassas and
07:30Sterling, Virginia, in a deal that values the 288-megawatt portfolio at $7.8 billion.
07:41Blackstone walks away with roughly $3.5 billion, split between cash and Digital Realty shares.
07:47The transaction tightens Digital Realty's grip on Northern Virginia, the largest data center hub on the planet.
07:55For all the fights playing out in county meetings and courtrooms,
08:00Wall Street clearly still sees these server farms as some of the hottest real estate on Earth.
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