00:00In northern Michigan, hundreds of people packed a township hall, spilled down the staircase,
00:06and crowded into the lobby, all to stop the data centers before they arrive.
00:11And that's just the opening shot. Tonight a developer is suing to kill a city's moratorium.
00:18America's biggest grid is running up a $16 billion tab,
00:22and two-thirds of the nation's planned AI build-out is rising on drought-stricken land.
00:29We begin in Garfield Township, Michigan, just outside Traverse City,
00:35where hundreds of residents packed the planning commission Wednesday night,
00:39filling the meeting room, spilling down the stairs, and crowding into the first-floor lobby.
00:45What they came for was a freeze.
00:48The commission voted to recommend a zoning amendment giving the township board the power to halt
00:53data center applications by simple resolution.
00:57An initial moratorium of up to 12 months, with a possible six-month extension,
01:04for a maximum of 18, water dominated the public comments.
01:08One resident reminded the room that the Great Lakes hold 20% of the world's surface.
01:15Freshwater.
01:16Another speaker, State House candidate Mitch Distan,
01:20pointed downstate to Saline Township, which voted a data center down five to one,
01:26was threatened with a lawsuit by Oracle, and was ultimately forced to accept the project.
01:32The amendment now heads to the township board for a second public hearing.
01:38That opposition is now making its way into courtrooms.
01:42But in Minnesota, it's the developer doing the suing.
01:46Eagan Capital, which owns a data center in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan and wants to expand it,
01:53has asked a judge to void the city's one-year moratorium on large-scale data centers,
01:59calling it unlawful and ill-advised.
02:02The complaint, filed June 15, argues the city is really trying to regulate energy usage,
02:09and that under Minnesota law, only the state's Public Utilities Commission has authority over
02:16electricity demand.
02:17If that argument works, it could hand developers across the country a template for attacking local
02:23moratoriums, not by fighting the zoning itself, but by claiming towns have no right to regulate
02:31power at all.
02:32Eagan passed its pause earlier this year to study the industry's impacts.
02:37Now a court will decide whether the pause survives.
02:42In South Carolina, the same collision is playing out in reverse.
02:47There, it took a lawsuit to force the pause.
02:50Colton County has now enacted a six-month moratorium on data center development.
02:56After the Southern Environmental Law Center sued the county over zoning changes it says don't
03:02conform with the county's own comprehensive plan.
03:06With the freeze in place, the law center has agreed to suspend its case for the duration
03:12six months for the county to rewrite its rules and decide what it actually wants.
03:18The truce is fragile.
03:20If the county's new ordinances fall short, the litigation resumes right where it left off.
03:26It's part of a national pattern.
03:28By one industry count, communities have rejected or restricted more data center projects in the
03:35first four months of this year than in all of last year combined.
03:40And the reason these fights keep multiplying comes down to one thing.
03:45Power.
03:46On the nation's largest grid, PJM, serving 65 million people across 13 states,
03:54the cost of keeping the system running has jumped nearly 70% this year,
03:59topping $16 billion, with roughly $3.8 billion of that tied directly to data center demand.
04:07During this month's heat wave, wholesale prices briefly rocketed past $2,000 a megawatt hour,
04:15and the grid braced for a record load of more than 166 gigawatts.
04:20Breaking a mark that had stood since 2006.
04:24Federal emergency orders even authorized PJM to push data centers of 50 megawatts or more onto
04:31their own backup generators to keep the lights on.
04:35PJM expects peak demand to grow by 32 gigawatts by 2030.
04:40And all but two of those gigawatts are data centers.
04:45The pressure on the grid is only half the story.
04:49Water tells the other half.
04:51A new analysis by The Guardian finds that two-thirds of the 809 data centers planned
04:57across the United States are slated for land that has been in drought within the past year.
05:04517 projects.
05:06According to federal drought monitoring data,
05:08A single large AI campus can consume as much as 5 million gallons of water a day.
05:15And more than 60% of the country is currently experiencing drought conditions.
05:21In Virginia, officials watching reservoirs drop through a dry summer are now asking publicly what the data
05:28center build-out means for drinking water.
05:31The industry answers that agriculture uses far more.
05:35But critics say cooling is only one leg of the demand.
05:39Before you count the power plants and chip factories rising behind the same boom.
05:46State legislators are taking notice.
05:48And in New Jersey, the governor just put her signature where the anger is.
05:53Governor Mikey Sherrill signed a package of utility bills this week headlined by the data center
05:59Fair Share Act, which requires large data centers to pay their own way for energy instead of shifting
06:07costs onto families and small businesses.
06:10The package also repeals a bonus incentive that let utilities earn extra returns on infrastructure,
06:18spending, and tightens state oversight of grid investments under the Advanced Grid Technologies Act.
06:25Her administration says its energy actions over the past six months will save New Jersey ratepayers
06:31more than a billion dollars a year, citing an analysis by Synapse Energy Economics.
06:38New Jersey now joins Virginia, which began taxing data center electricity this month at more than a penny per kilowatt
06:46hour
06:47in making the industry pay up.
06:50Yet despite that regulatory wave, construction is pressing forward, and at record scale,
06:57new census data shows data centers are now the single largest segment of U.S. commercial building
07:03construction, with project spending running at an annual rate of $51 billion.
07:10More than traditional office development, the newest shovel in the ground belongs to Microsoft,
07:17which just broke ground on a data center in La Porte, Indiana.
07:22Alongside the groundbreaking, the company announced a partnership with Ivy Tech Community College to open the state's first
07:30Microsoft Data Center Academy, training local workers for the jobs the facility will bring.
07:37It's part of a wider Midwest push.
07:40Microsoft just brought its $3.3 billion Mount Pleasant campus in Wisconsin.
07:45Fully online, as hyperscalers bet that the heartland's land and power can carry the next phase of the AI boom.
07:55And the financial commitment behind that construction is staggering.
07:59AI cloud provider CoreWeave revealed it has signed more than $40 billion in new customer
08:05commitments, pushing its contracted revenue backlog to nearly $100 billion.
08:12The company also confirmed that partner Galaxy Digital has completed delivery of 200
08:18megawatts of power at the Helios campus in West Texas under a 15-year lease.
08:25With commitments covering 526 megawatts across three phases,
08:30it's a bet that long-term contracts can outrun thin margins and a heavy debt load.
08:36As CoreWeave races hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta for AI workloads,
08:44communities may be packing town halls from Michigan to South Carolina,
08:48but with nearly $100 billion in demand already under contract,
08:53the build-out isn't slowing down, it's accelerating.
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