00:00In Michigan, voters just did something rare. They walked into a booth and killed a data center by
00:06nearly 9 to 1. Across the country, from North Carolina commission chambers to Florida zoning
00:13boards, the AI build-out is running headfirst into the people who live next door. Tonight,
00:20floating data centers off the Texas coast, the nation's largest grid threatening to pull the
00:26plug, and a $100 billion campus rising on a Cold War nuclear site.
00:33In Augusta Township, Michigan, a rural community near Milan, residents delivered a stunning rebuke
00:41to a proposed hyperscale data center. On August 4th, voters overturned the rezoning of more than
00:48500 acres of farmland by an overwhelming margin. Unofficial results show 2,314 residents,
00:56nearly 90 percent, voted no, against just 269 in favor. The land, eyed by New York-based Thor Equities,
01:06had been flipped by the township board from agricultural to general industrial.
01:12Residents gathered enough petition signatures to force the question onto the ballot.
01:18And then buried it. If certified, the properties revert to farmland. And they're not finished.
01:25Organizers have filed petitions to recall all seven members of the Board of Trustees.
01:30That fight is now spreading into county commission chambers across the country.
01:37Take Stokes County, North Carolina, where local officials just defied their own community.
01:43In a packed hearing, overflow rooms full, people spilling onto the sidewalk. The Board of
01:50Commissioners voted 3-2 to reject a six-month moratorium and instead approved
01:56text amendments that swing the county's doors open to data center development.
02:01Every single public commenter spoke against it.
02:05Looming over the vote is Project Delta, a data center planned near Walnut Cove.
02:10The county had actually approved the rezoning for it back in January.
02:15But a judge declared that approval null and void in April after a lawsuit argued the public hearing.
02:22Notice failed to meet state requirements.
02:25Developers say construction could start within 18 months and eventually bring 200.
02:3150 to 500 jobs.
02:33Even as residents fight, the industry is inventing radical new ways to build, some of them floating.
02:41That's not a metaphor.
02:44Samsung Heavy Industries, one of the world's largest shipbuilders,
02:48has signed an engineering contract with Texas-based developer Mousterian to build the first moored
02:55floating data centers in the United States.
02:58The deal, executed at a ceremony in late July, moves the partnership into detailed design of
03:05purpose-built floating units, each delivering 50 megawatts of critical computing capacity,
03:12destined for Texas and other key markets.
03:15The logic is speed.
03:17By anchoring these platforms next to existing power plants on the water,
03:21developers can sidestep the land, permitting, and grid delays choking conventional projects.
03:30Mousterian's flagship, Project Zeus, envisions a 500-megawatt hybrid floating and land-based campus
03:38beside a gas plant in Houston, targeted to go live in the first half of 2028.
03:45But every one of these experiments runs into the same hard wall.
03:49Power.
03:51And the grid is buckling.
03:53On the nation's largest power market, PJM, which stretches across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic,
04:01operators are now warning they may have to temporarily cut power to data centers to prevent
04:07cascading blackouts.
04:09The alarm is real.
04:11Earlier this year, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a rare Level 3 alert.
04:18Its most urgent category.
04:20After blocks of data center demand exceeding 1,000 megawatts dropped offline within seconds in
04:26response to minor grid disturbances,
04:30U.S. data center electricity demand has nearly doubled,
04:34from 23 gigawatts in 2023 to 42 gigawatts today.
04:39Federal regulators at FERC have given grid operators roughly 60 days,
04:45until about mid-August, to file new rules or justify the old ones.
04:51The strain on the grid, though, is only half the story.
04:56Water tells the other half.
04:59Because these machines don't just drink electricity, they drink water.
05:04A sweeping new analysis finds that about two-thirds of the 809 data centers now
05:09planned across the United States are slated for land that has been gripped by drought over the past
05:16year.
05:17Here, the hot spots are alarming.
05:19In the Phoenix area alone, nearly 60 facilities require roughly 177 million gallons of water every
05:28single day.
05:29A single large data center can swallow up to 5 million gallons daily,
05:34as much as a town of tens of thousands of people.
05:38And here's the kicker.
05:40The federal plan forcing California, Arizona, and Nevada to cut Colorado River usage by 16-20%
05:48doesn't even account for this.
05:51New demand.
05:52State and local officials are scrambling to respond.
05:56In Palm Beach County, Florida, they're trying to slam the door.
06:01On August 6th, the county's zoning commission voted unanimously to recommend a one-year moratorium
06:08on new, large-scale data center applications.
06:13But commissioners went further, urging county staff to toughen the proposal, warning the current
06:19definition leaves too many loopholes for developers to slip through.
06:24It's the latest front in a national wave.
06:27Moratorium bills have surfaced in at least 11 states this year.
06:31And dozens of municipalities have already imposed local construction pauses.
06:37Shifting the real center of gravity away from statehouses and toward county commission rooms
06:42The message from local government is increasingly blunt.
06:46Not so fast yet despite that regulatory wave.
06:50Construction is pressing forward at a scale that's almost hard to fathom.
06:56Consider OpenAI's newest bet.
06:59The company behind ChatGPT has unveiled Project Camellia, a colossal AI data center campus in
07:06Effingham County, Georgia, representing at least $20 billion in private investment.
07:13And by OpenAI's own estimate, more than $30 billion at full build-out.
07:18The plan calls for four buildings across roughly a hundred acres inside the 2,600-acre Savanna
07:25Gateway Industrial Hub, drawing up to 3.2 gigawatts of electricity from Georgia Power.
07:32Delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032.
07:37Bracing for backlash.
07:39OpenAI is promising that Georgia families won't subsidize the project.
07:44Pledging $80 million in community benefits.
07:48And touting a closed-loop cooling system it says will use minimal water.
07:52And the financial commitment behind construction like this is staggering.
07:58Nowhere is that clearer than in Paducah, Kentucky.
08:02Energy giants NextEra Energy and Brookfield are teaming up on a transformation valued at more than
08:09$100 billion, converting a shuttered Cold War uranium enrichment facility into one of the
08:16largest data center campuses in the country.
08:20The project, unveiled alongside the U.S. Department of Energy, would build a 2-gigawatt natural gas
08:27power plant at or near the government site, backed by as much as 2.6 gigawatts of battery
08:34storage to feed the sprawling compute halls.
08:36It's a fitting symbol for this moment.
08:39The very ground once used to enrich uranium for the nuclear age is being repurposed to power
08:45the artificial intelligence age, from a Michigan farm town that voted no to a $100 billion bet
08:53in Kentucky.
08:54The question echoing across America is no longer whether this build-out can be stopped.
09:00But who will ultimately pay for it?
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