00:00In the Nevada desert, a town is squaring off against an $18.4 billion data center.
00:06And the fight over who gets a say is spreading from packed hearing rooms to federal courtrooms.
00:12All the way to Washington, communities are pushing back, judges are stepping in,
00:19and a quarter trillion dollar bet is about to redraw the map of American computing.
00:25In Pahrump, Nevada, a desert town an hour west of Las Vegas,
00:31residents packed the county commission chambers this weekend to confront a project most of them
00:36only recently learned about the Mance Technology Campus, formerly known as Project Blackjack,
00:44would put an $18.4 billion, roughly 900-acre data center development on the edge of their community.
00:52County officials billed the Saturday town hall as a chance to ask questions.
00:58But the mood in the room was unmistakable.
01:01A clear majority stood opposed.
01:03And one worry came up again and again.
01:06Water.
01:07This is the Mojave Desert.
01:09Where every gallon is spoken for.
01:12Developers say construction would not start until 2027.
01:16Pending approvals.
01:18And county leaders face a critical vote as soon as August.
01:23That demand for a real public process is now being enforced by federal judges.
01:29In Wilmington, Ohio, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Hopkins ordered the city to redo three ordinances
01:36tied to Amazon's four billion dollar data center project, covering generator noise,
01:43rezoning, and data centers as a permitted land use.
01:48Homeowners sued after the council passed those measures without the notice Ohio law requires.
01:5430 days of published notice ahead of public hearings.
01:58Plus written notice mailed to neighboring property owners at least 20 days in advance.
02:04Until the city runs that process properly.
02:07It cannot act on Amazon's site plan.
02:10Wilmington's council now plans three fresh public hearings.
02:14This time with the public actually in the room.
02:18And when the public does get in the room.
02:21It can change outcomes.
02:23In El Segundo, California.
02:26Developer 8 form wanted to tear down a 15-year-old Hyatt Place hotel and replace it with a
02:32data center.
02:33After residents turned out for a contentious planning commission hearing that stretched
02:38three hours.
02:39Hammering one issue above all.
02:42The project's enormous appetite for electricity on a grid that is already strained.
02:47By the time the hearing closed.
02:50The application had been withdrawn entirely.
02:53No lawsuit.
02:54No moratorium.
02:56Just a room full of neighbors who showed up and made their case.
03:00It is a reminder that in the data center boom.
03:02The most powerful permitting document in America may still be a sign-in sheet at City Hall.
03:10But in Washington, the rules about who gets heard may be about to change.
03:16The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to hand states the power to decide how much
03:21notice and how much input residents receive on so-called minor source air permits.
03:27That category covers concrete plants and rock crushers.
03:32But it increasingly includes the massive diesel backup generators that data centers install
03:38by the dozens.
03:40The agency held a public hearing on the proposal Wednesday.
03:44And written comments are due August 21 supporters call it streamlining.
03:49Critics, including the Sierra Club, say it would effectively eliminate the public from the permitting process for the fastest-growing
03:58industrial build-out in the country.
04:01At exactly the moment communities are demanding more say, not less.
04:07Water is driving the same demands in America's heartland.
04:11In Columbus, Ohio, one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the nation, city council members
04:19are being pressed to hold data centers accountable or ban them outright.
04:23Officials are now weighing a regulatory framework that would include water conservation requirements
04:30and force developers to fund their own infrastructure rather than passing costs on to residents.
04:37Central Ohio has become a magnet for hyperscale projects.
04:42And residents packed recent meetings demanding a moratorium.
04:46City leaders have not gone that far yet.
04:49But the message from the council chamber was clear.
04:52The era of no questions asked approvals in Ohio's capital is coming to an end.
04:57And water is at the center of the reckoning.
05:01Some governments are simply hitting the reset button.
05:05In Charles County, Maryland, commissioners scrapped a proposed zoning text amendment
05:11that would have opened parts of the county to data center development.
05:16Instead of pushing the plan through, they directed staff to come back with a framework for a task force.
05:22An outside consultant to run technical analysis and public outreach.
05:28And a plan to wait for further guidance from the state.
05:31It is a full restart.
05:33And a telling one.
05:34After watching neighboring counties adopt moratoriums and two-year pauses.
05:40Charles County chose to slow down before the first shovel hits the ground.
05:45Rather than fight it out in court afterward.
05:48In this market, patience has become its own kind of policy.
05:53Yet despite all that friction, construction ambitions keep getting bigger.
05:58And showing up in unexpected places.
06:01In Russell, Kentucky, Rubik's data centers is proposing a campus worth $8 to $12 billion at the site of the
06:09former AK Steel Mill on the Ohio River.
06:13However, the plan calls for up to 2 gigawatts of computing capacity.
06:18Enough to consume more than 10% of Kentucky's entire peak summer electricity production.
06:24Plus an estimated 55 million gallons of water every year.
06:29For a steel town that lost its anchor employer.
06:32The pitch is jobs and a second industrial life.
06:35For the region's grid and its river.
06:38It would be a transformation on a scale Appalachia has rarely seen.
06:44And the financial commitment behind this build-out has reached numbers with no precedent.
06:50The Wall Street Journal reports NVIDIA is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion.
06:56Dollars in financing for OpenAI.
06:59A backstop that would help the chat GPT maker lease a 10-gigawatt campus that SoftBank's energy arm.
07:07Is developing in southern Ohio.
07:09Counting the chips inside.
07:11The total project could exceed half a trillion dollars.
07:15And NVIDIA is separately discussing financing up to $350 billion of OpenAI's.
07:22Chip purchases.
07:24The first phase.
07:25Around 800 megawatts.
07:27Is targeted for 2028.
07:30The talks are early and could still collapse.
07:33But the fact they are happening at all tells you exactly where this industry believes it is headed.
07:46It helps us cover more of these stories.
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