00:00The largest data center project ever proposed, a campus bigger than the Pentagon, planned right beside a Civil War battlefield,
00:09has just collapsed after years of resistance.
00:12From a record crowd packing a courthouse in Arkansas to Maine becoming the first state in the nation to slam
00:19the door shut, the revolt against the AI data center boom is no longer on the fringes.
00:26It's winning.
00:28We begin with a stunning defeat for the data center industry.
00:32After years of lawsuits, protests, and public hearings, the company QTS has walked away from the Prince William Digital Gateway,
00:42a project that would have been the single largest data center campus on the planet.
00:47On July 2, QTS quietly withdrew its final appeal before the Supreme Court of Virginia, killing a 2,100-acre,
00:5822-million-square-foot complex planned right at the edge of the Manassas National Battlefield.
01:04Where Americans fought and died in the Civil War, Virginia courts had already voided the project's rezoning over a flawed
01:13public notice.
01:13And the co-developer, Compass, had abandoned the site back in May, for the preservationists and neighbors who fought this
01:22for years.
01:23The timing, just before the nation's 250th birthday, could not be sweeter.
01:31That victory in Virginia is part of a much larger legal war now raging in courtrooms across the country, and
01:39Kentucky has become a key battleground.
01:41In the small town of Cave City, a group calling itself the Kentucky Industrial Alliance has sued to overturn the
01:49city's one-year moratorium on data centers, arguing the pause is unreasonable and that officials never clearly explained why it
01:58was needed.
01:59The city isn't backing down, it has asked a judge to throw the lawsuit out entirely, with a crucial hearing
02:06scheduled for July 20th, and Cave City isn't alone.
02:11A parallel legal fight is unfolding in nearby Simpson County, where local governments, concerned residents, and a data center developer
02:21are squaring off over a proposed site near Franklin.
02:24The message from the industry is blunt, challenge us, and we'll see you in court.
02:31But if developers were hoping the public would lose interest, this next story shows the exact opposite.
02:38In Union County, Arkansas, county leaders called an emergency quorum court meeting on June 30th, and residents showed up in
02:47numbers officials say were the largest that court has ever seen.
02:51When the vote came, it wasn't close.
02:55Every single member voted to approve a one-year moratorium on new data centers.
03:00At the center of the fight is Paradox Data, which already runs a small cryptocurrency mining operation in El Dorado
03:08and had signed a binding
03:10letter of intent with a Florida firm, Z-squared.
03:14To expand it, residents worried about power, water, and noise-packed the room and made their opposition impossible to ignore.
03:24The pause runs through July of next year, giving the county time to study what such a facility would really
03:30mean for the community.
03:33That anxiety over strained utilities is grounded in hard numbers.
03:38And this week the pressure on the power grid came into sharp focus.
03:43In Virginia, the world's largest data center hub, a brand new tax took effect on July 1st,
03:50charging data centers just over one cent for every kilowatt hour of electricity they consume.
03:56A direct attempt to make the industry help pay for its enormous appetite.
04:02And that appetite is exploding.
04:05Nationwide, data center power demand has nearly doubled.
04:09From 23 gigawatts in 2023 to around 42 gigawatts today.
04:15The country's largest grid operator, PJM,
04:19now warns it could fall roughly 6 gigawatts short of its reliability target as soon as 2027.
04:27In other words, the machines behind artificial intelligence are growing faster than the grid that powers them can
04:34possibly keep up.
04:37The strain on the grid is only half the story.
04:41Water tells the other half.
04:43And a sweeping new analysis lays it bare.
04:46However, researchers found that about two-thirds of the 809 data centers now planned
04:51across the United States are slated for land that has been gripped by drought over the past year.
04:58The scale of the thirst is hard to fathom.
05:01A single large facility can consume up to a billion gallons of water a year.
05:06And as much as 2.7 million gallons on a single hot summer day.
05:11Just to keep its servers cool, communities are pushing back.
05:1636 states are now weighing new rules on data center water use.
05:21And North Carolina has already approved a one-year pause driven specifically by water concerns.
05:28In a warming country, that quiet competition between server farms and household taps is only intensifying.
05:37State legislators are taking notice.
05:40And one state has now gone further than any other in the nation.
05:45Maine's lawmakers gave final approval to a bill known as LD307.
05:50Banning any data center larger than 20 megawatts until November of 2027.
05:57With that vote, Maine became the very first state in America to enact a statewide data center moratorium.
06:04Not a local county pause.
06:07But a blanket freeze across the entire state.
06:10And it's part of a remarkable surge.
06:12More than 300 data center related bills have now been filed across some 30 state legislatures.
06:20Just this month, Arizona froze its data center sales tax exemption for three years.
06:26While Illinois and Ohio paused their own incentive programs after years of rolling out the red.
06:32carpet, state houses are now competing just as hard to slow the boom down.
06:39Yet despite that regulatory wave, construction is pressing forward at breathtaking scale.
06:46In the fast-growing corridor between Austin and San Antonio,
06:50the developers Cloudburst and Evolve are building a flagship artificial intelligence campus.
06:57Designed to reach 1.2 gigawatts of capacity.
07:00Enough to power a small city.
07:03The price tag is roughly $14.5 billion.
07:07Spread across 10 to 12 buildings and some 3 million square feet.
07:12With the first 50 megawatt phase set to go live by the end of this year.
07:17Most striking is how they plan to power it.
07:20A deal with energy transfer will pipe in up to 450,000 million BTU of natural
07:26gas every single day.
07:29Enough to generate more than 1.8 gigawatts of electricity on site.
07:34Largely bypassing the strained public grid entirely.
07:38It's a vivid glimpse of how the industry intends to keep building.
07:42No matter the resistance.
07:45And the financial firepower behind all this construction is simply staggering.
07:51This week, the data center operator Switch launched a private funding round targeting $2 billion.
07:58Led by Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most famous venture firms.
08:04Which is committing $400 million of its own money.
08:08The raise would value the Las Vegas-based company at close to $50 billion including debt.
08:15As it prepares for a possible public offering as soon as next year.
08:20Switch already operates major data centers in Nevada, Michigan, Texas, and Georgia.
08:27Serving marquee clients like Nvidia, Google, and Tesla.
08:32For all the fights playing out in county courthouses and statehouses.
08:36Wall Street and Silicon Valley clearly still see these server farms as some of the most valuable
08:42real estate on earth.
08:45That tension between booming investment and rising resistance
08:48is the story we'll keep following.
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