00:00$64 billion worth of American data center projects have now been blocked or delayed
00:05by local opposition, and in one small New York town, a dozen neighbors keep showing up,
00:13month after month, determined to add to that number, from a developer suing a Minnesota
00:19suburb over its moratorium, to Indianapolis moving to freeze new construction, to federal
00:26regulators handing the nation's grid operators an ultimatum. The fight over America's AI build-out
00:32is escalating on every front. We begin in Portland, New York, a small town near Lake Erie where the
00:41fight against a proposed data center has become a monthly ritual. The site is the former Sugarhill
00:48golf course on Route 5, and every time the town board meets, opponents show up, roughly a dozen
00:55in June, and about the same in July. To say the same thing, not here. Resident Kelly Perlette's
01:03online petition against the project has gathered more than 35 hundred signatures, and lawn signs
01:11sponsored by the Grape Belt Community Group now dot yards across town. And what's happening in
01:17Portland is happening everywhere. Data Center Watch has tallied $64 billion worth of projects blocked or
01:24delayed by local opposition, and in the first four months of this year alone, communities rejected
01:32or restricted more than 70 projects, more than in all of last year combined. That kind of resistance is
01:40now landing in courtrooms. But in Minnesota, it's the industry doing the suing. Eagan Capital,
01:47a local development company, has filed a lawsuit against the city of Eagan, asking a judge to void the
01:55Twin Cities Suburbs' one-year data center moratorium and award at least $50,000 in damages.
02:03The moratorium, in place until February of next year, blocks any new data center within 500 feet of
02:11homes. Or any facility drawing more than 20 megawatts of electricity. The company's core
02:17argument is about power. Literally, it claims that regulating electricity demand belongs to the
02:24Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, not a city council, and that Eagan acted beyond its legal
02:31authority when it tied the pause to power consumption. The city isn't backing down, saying it is confident in
02:39its position and intends to vigorously defend the moratorium through the legal process.
02:45While developers fight one moratorium in Minnesota, a much bigger one may be coming.
02:52In Indianapolis, City County Council President Maggie Lewis announced she will introduce a proposal to
02:59temporarily halt new data center construction across the city. With the measure headed to the council's
03:06Metropolitan and Economic Development Committee on Monday, Lewis says the pause would give
03:12councilors, the mayor's administration, and community stakeholders time to evaluate the long-term
03:19impacts of these developments. Projects already approved, including the MetroBlox data center in
03:26Martindale-Brightwood and the Sebi facility in Decatur. Township would be grandfathered in,
03:33and Indianapolis is following its own state's lead. Researchers at Indiana University have identified
03:4011 counties with data center ordinances, at least 17 with temporary moratoriums, and two Marshall and
03:50Cass that have banned new data centers outright. That's nearly a third of all Indiana counties in a state
03:57actively courting the industry. And the reason these pauses keep gaining momentum comes down to one
04:04thing. The grid. Now federal regulators are stepping in. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued
04:13show-cause orders to all six of the nation's regional grid operators. PJM, MISO, the Southwest Power Pool,
04:22California's ISO, ISO New England, and New York's ISO, directing them to justify or rewrite the rules that govern
04:31how data centers and other giant loads plug into the grid. The first deadline hits July 20th, when each operator
04:40must file a report explaining how it will ensure enough generation exists to serve both existing customers and the
04:48data center. The data center is a wave of new large loads. After that, they have 60 days to defend
04:53their current
04:53tariffs or file reforms covering co-location, behind-the-meter generation, flexible loads, and protections against
05:02shifting costs onto ordinary rate payers. It is the most aggressive federal intervention yet in the data center power crunch.
05:12The pressure on the grid is only half the story. Water tells the other half. New market research puts a
05:19number on it.
05:20American AI data centers consumed roughly 1 trillion liters of water last year. 264 billion gallons. Equal to the annual
05:31water use of nearly 2 million Americans. And consumption is now running at 550 million gallons every single day.
05:39The timing could hardly be worse. Nearly 63% of the country is in drought. And two-thirds of the
05:47809 data centers
05:49planned nationwide are slated for land that has been drought-stricken within the past year. In Texas,
05:56facilities used an estimated 49 billion gallons last year, a figure projected to reach nearly 400 billion by 2030.
06:05And in Tennessee, one of the fastest-growing AI hubs. The Tennessee Valley Authority reports runoff at its
06:14fourth-lowest level in 152 years of record-keeping. Yet despite the drought, the lawsuits, and the
06:23moratoriums, construction is pressing forward at a scale that's hard to comprehend. And nowhere more so than in
06:31one rural Missouri County, Montgomery County, population under 12,000, has now landed $25 billion in data
06:40center commitments. Amazon is investing $10 billion in a campus dubbed Project Green, spread across a
06:48thousand acres at the Interstate 70 and Highway 19 interchange near New Florence. Google is building
06:56right beside it, committing $15 billion to a 900-acre campus of its own. Officials tout 400 permanent Amazon
07:06jobs, thousands of construction jobs, and hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax revenue over the
07:13next quarter-century. But the twin projects are dividing the community. And Amazon has responded with
07:20more than $7 million in local sweeteners, including money for emergency dispatch, the county fairgrounds,
07:29and community programs. And some of that new capacity is already switching on. In Avondale, Arizona,
07:38just west of Phoenix, Prime Data Centers has opened the first facility at what will become a 240-megawatt
07:46plant. Hyperscale campus, a more than $3 billion investment packed onto just 66 and a half acres.
07:54The full build-out calls for five buildings totaling 1.3 million square feet,
08:00each delivering 48 megawatts of critical IT capacity. To feed it, Prime has already commissioned the first
08:08phase of a dedicated on-site substation rated at 2.150 megawatts. Supporting an initial deployment of
08:16144 megawatts. And in a state where water politics loom over every project, the company is leaning on
08:24advanced closed-loop cooling technology that it says dramatically reduces water consumption.
08:31Phoenix is now one of the fastest-growing data center markets in America.
08:36And campuses like this one are the reason why.
08:40And the financial world is making its own moves, betting biggest on what's already built.
08:47Digital Realty has agreed to buy out Blackstone's stake in three fully leased data centers in
08:52Northern Virginia, the heart of the world's data center alley. The portfolio, two facilities in
09:00Manassas and one on the Digital Dulles campus in Stirling, carries a gross value of $7.8 billion and 288
09:09megawatts of capacity, all leased to three investment-grade hyperscale customers. Blackstone
09:17walks away with $3.5 billion for its 64% interest, $1.2 billion in cash and $2.3 billion
09:26in digital
09:26realty stock. In a market where new projects face protests, lawsuits, and years-long grid queues,
09:35a stabilized, fully leased data center has become one of the most valuable assets in American real
09:42estate. That's the briefing. The numbers keep getting bigger. And so does the fight.
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