00:00The federal government approved a data center on public land and never asked the city next door.
00:06Now a Nevada town and national conservation groups are racing to stop it before it becomes the
00:12blueprint for the entire American West. Meanwhile, a developer who promised not to touch a single
00:19drop of the Colorado River is suing for 287 million gallons of it, and the nation's largest
00:27power grid just warned data centers they could be forced offline.
00:32Just outside Boulder City, Nevada, the federal government approved something no one else in
00:39America has seen. A data center on public land. Without a single new public meeting,
00:46the Bureau of Land Management signed off on the townside data center. An 81-acre project in the
00:53El Dorado Valley Desert. By amending a permit originally issued for a solar and battery farm.
01:00On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club's Toyabi Chapter filed a formal appeal.
01:08Arguing the agency unlawfully sidestepped environmental review, Boulder City's council had
01:14already voted unanimously to appeal and to seek a stay halting. Construction, saying the public was
01:22shut out entirely, city officials call themselves a test case. Because if this shortcut stands here,
01:29developers could repeat it on federal land across the West. That fight over process is now colliding
01:37with a fight over water. In California's Imperial Valley, the developer behind what would be the
01:43state's largest AI data center once promised his project would run on recycled wastewater. In his words,
01:52it does not touch a single drop of the Colorado River. Now his company is suing the Imperial
01:58Irrigation District for access to 287 million gallons of Colorado River water a year to cool a 330-megawatt
02:08facility. After two cities declined to sell the project their wastewater. Developer Sebastian Rucci says there is no
02:16other choice. The plan would retire irrigation on farmland, roughly the equivalent of a 160-acre farm, and redirect
02:25those water rights to servers. In a valley where farming jobs and river allocations are already stretched to the
02:33breaking point. And where courts and agencies fail to settle these disputes, voters are stepping in directly.
02:42In Sunbury, Ohio, a small city northeast of Columbus, residents gathered 450 signatures, nearly three times the
02:52number required, to force a charter amendment onto the November 3rd ballot. If it passes, no data center in
03:00Sunbury could draw more than 25 megawatts of peak power. That would effectively kill the $2 billion Amazon data
03:08services campus planned for the city's new technology park, and slam the door on every other hyperscale
03:16project eyeing the area. City Council certified the measure unanimously, and Mayor Joe St. John confirmed 351
03:25signatures came from verified Sunbury residents. For the first time in Central Ohio's data center boom,
03:33the final word will belong to the voters themselves. Behind all of this local resistance sits one hard
03:41physical reality. The grid is running out of power. PJM Interconnection, the largest grid operator in
03:49America, serving 67 million people from Chicago to Washington, announced Monday it will launch an
03:57emergency auction in September to plug a nearly 7 gigawatt generation shortfall for 2028. The costs of
04:05this so-called reliability backstop procurement will be charged to data centers themselves. And PJM went
04:14further. Data centers that failed to secure enough generation could face involuntary outages,
04:21temporarily dropped from the grid during peak demand. As soon as mid-2027, the warning lands just days
04:29after a massive block of data center load abruptly disconnected on July 22nd, causing a voltage disturbance
04:37felt from Washington, DC all the way to Chicago. That scramble for power is now stalling one of the biggest
04:45builds in the country. In Doña Ana County, New Mexico, Oracle's 2.5 gigawatt project Jupiter, a 1400 acre campus
04:56being built by stack and border plex digital assets to host AI infrastructure for open AI, has hit a wall.
05:05For the
05:05second time, the state land office has rejected the 17-mile green Chile pipeline that would carry four
05:13100 million cubic feet of natural gas per day to power bloom fuel cells on site. The land commissioner
05:20cited heavy water use, added carbon emissions, and too little revenue for the state, saying approval would
05:28not be in New Mexico's best interests. The rejection makes Oracle's August 15 in service target
05:35all but impossible and may force the pipeline onto private land, adding months of new negotiations.
05:43State and local lawmakers are watching all of this and reaching for the pause button. On Monday alone,
05:51two Midwest cities froze data center development. In Otsego, Minnesota, the city council held a public
05:59hearing on a one-year moratorium on new data center applications designed to buy time to write uniform
06:06standards instead of reacting to each project one by one. And in Lansing, Michigan, a 182-day moratorium
06:16officially took effect the same day. After a seven-to-one council vote, that freeze runs through late
06:23January while the city studies zoning and infrastructure impacts. They join a growing list. North Mankato and
06:31Carleton County, Minnesota, have hearings of their own scheduled, as the Midwest becomes the newest front
06:38in the movement to slow the data center boom down. And if you think none of this touches your life,
06:46check the price of computer memory. One gigabyte of RAM that cost about $2.80 last year now runs around
06:54$12. A six-fold increase because memory manufacturers are redirecting their production lines toward high
07:03bandwidth memory. For AI data centers, the same demand wave is rippling through the entire hardware market.
07:11Gamers, laptop buyers, and small businesses are paying more because hyperscalers are buying first.
07:19At nearly any price, analysts say the crunch will not ease until new fabrication capacity comes online.
07:26And that is years away, not months. It is the clearest example yet of how the data center boom has
07:33stopped being an abstract infrastructure story and started showing up on ordinary receipts.
07:41Yet none of the friction, not the lawsuits, the ballot measures, or the price shocks, has slowed
07:49the money. Meta and BlackRock announced a venture to develop a $14 billion data center campus in
07:56El Paso, Texas. Funds managed by BlackRock will own 80%. Meta keeps 20, contributing land and in-progress
08:06construction worth about $2.3 billion, while BlackRock puts in $4.9 billion in cash,
08:14backed by $12.5 billion of debt. The campus, already under construction, is designed for a full gigawatt of
08:22compute capacity. With operations expected in 2028, Meta will lease the entire site back under an initial
08:31four-year deal extendable to 20. It is Wall Street and Big Tech splitting the check on American AI
08:37infrastructure. One gigawatt at a time.
09:01that's good.
09:01that's a great point.
09:02this is Wall Street.
09:02that's a great point.
09:02it's the Wall Street.
09:02it's the Wall Street.
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