00:00Hundreds of Americans just faced off with Amazon in a high school parking lot.
00:05And they're only the beginning.
00:07From a developer suing an entire city,
00:10to a Texas Bitcoin mine reborn as a supercomputer,
00:14to a $40 billion buyout on Wall Street,
00:18the fight over America's AI build-out is escalating on every front.
00:22Here's what's driving the revolt,
00:25and the staggering money still pouring in anyway.
00:29We begin in Burbank, Washington,
00:32where the fight over Amazon's Wallula Gap data center spilled into the street.
00:37As roughly 20 Amazon officials hosted an open house inside Columbia High School,
00:44between 50 and 75 protesters gathered across the road,
00:48chanting through a megaphone, handing out flyers,
00:51and even blasting recordings of the constant humming noise a data center produces around the clock.
00:58The plan on the table is enormous.
01:01A $4.8 billion complex of 16 data centers overlooking the Columbia River.
01:07On more than 500 acres the local port agreed to sell.
01:12Members of the Walla Walla Anti-Data Center League are now lobbying the county to halt the project
01:18and impose a one-year moratorium while it studies the impacts.
01:23That grassroots anger is increasingly ending up somewhere else,
01:27inside a courtroom.
01:30That opposition is now making its way into the courts.
01:34In Nashville, developer DC Blocks has filed a federal lawsuit against Metro government,
01:41challenging the city's data center moratorium and its refusal to process permits for a project next.
01:47To the Nashville Zoo, DC Blocks argues the site already operated as a data center under a previous tenant,
01:56Asurian, and says Metro's actions violate its right to due process,
02:01equal protection, and the constitutional protection against taking property without just compensation.
02:08The company is asking a judge to let its permits move forward and to award damages and attorneys.
02:15Fees.
02:16Metro Council passed new data center regulations in July,
02:20along with a construction moratorium that runs through December.
02:24It's part of a growing wave of developers who are done waiting and are suing the very towns that
02:30told them no.
02:32Now to a transformation that captures where this whole boom is heading.
02:37In Dickens County, West Texas,
02:40a site that was mining Bitcoin as recently as 2022 has been reborn as one of the country's most
02:47powerful AI campuses,
02:50Galaxy Digital's Helios campus,
02:53near the tiny town of Afton,
02:55has now secured approval for more than 1.6 gigawatts of power.
03:00And every bit of it is leased to AI cloud provider CoreWeave.
03:04Galaxy has already delivered the first 133 megawatts,
03:10with rent now flowing,
03:11and has filed permits for a second phase carrying a $3.5 billion price tag.
03:18Fully built,
03:19the campus could eventually support up to 3.5 gigawatts.
03:23The crypto-to-AI pivot isn't just a corporate story.
03:27It's a scramble for the one scarce resource that matters most.
03:32Electricity.
03:34And the reason every level of government keeps intervening comes down to the grid itself.
03:40Federal energy regulators have handed the nation's grid operators a roughly 60-day deadline.
03:46Landing right around now,
03:48in mid-August,
03:50to file revised rules that speed up how quickly data centers can connect to the power system.
03:56Or to explain why their existing rules already measure up.
04:00The pressure is easy to understand.
04:03U.S. data center electricity demand has nearly doubled in just three years.
04:08Climbing from about 23 gigawatts in 2023 to 42 gigawatts today.
04:14And analysts' project AI could push that toward 134 gigawatts by 2030.
04:21With interconnection queues stretching five to seven years and infrastructure aging,
04:26operators are increasingly turning to on-site gas and nuclear just to keep up.
04:32But electricity is only half the strain.
04:35Water tells the other half.
04:38Because these facilities don't just consume power.
04:41They consume staggering amounts of water.
04:45Often in the places that can least spare it.
04:48In Texas alone,
04:49data centers drank more than 50 billion gallons of water in a single year.
04:54And a recent analysis found that roughly two-thirds of the 809 data centers planned
05:00across the country are slated for land that has been in drought over the past year.
05:06Meanwhile, the federal government has finalized cuts requiring California,
05:12Arizona, and Nevada to reduce their Colorado River use by 16-20% through 2028.
05:20A plan critics point out never once mentions the surging thirst of data centers.
05:25For communities already rationing every drop,
05:29the arithmetic is becoming impossible,
05:31and state lawmakers are starting to respond.
05:36State and local governments are taking notice fast in Texas.
05:40The Fort Worth City Council voted unanimously to take the first step toward a 90-day moratorium
05:46on new data center construction,
05:50expected to take effect early next year.
05:53The pause is designed to give city leaders time to craft development regulations and to weigh how
05:59these projects affect water, land, and residents' quality of life.
06:05And Fort Worth is far from alone.
06:08More than 300 data center bills have been filed across at least 30 states this year.
06:13As lawmakers pivot away from handing out generous tax incentives and toward demanding accountability,
06:20specialty, special utility rate classes, water disclosure requirements,
06:25and outright moratoriums, New York even passed a first-in-the-nation statewide pause.
06:31Yet even amid this regulatory wave, construction is pressing forward at a breathtaking pace.
06:39Nowhere is that pace clearer than on the shores of Lake Michigan.
06:44In Port Washington, Wisconsin, developers held a ceremonial groundbreaking as construction
06:51officially began on a $15 billion data center campus known as Lighthouse.
06:56Built by Denver-based Vantage Data Centers, the project will serve two of the biggest names in artificial intelligence.
07:05OpenAI and Oracle
07:07As part of the sprawling $500 billion Stargate initiative, the land itself tells a quieter story.
07:15A firm called Cloverleaf Infrastructure quietly assembled more than 1,900 acres from
07:21over a hundred individual properties,
07:24turning some local farmers into overnight millionaires.
07:28The build is expected to generate more than 4,000 construction jobs and about 1,000
07:34permanent ones.
07:36With the doors set to open in 2028,
07:39and the money flowing behind builds like this is even more staggering.
07:44Which brings us, finally, to the money,
07:48and the numbers are almost hard to comprehend.
07:51A consortium led by BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners and MGX.
07:57Investing through the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership
08:01has closed the acquisition of Aligned data centers in a deal valued at roughly $40 billion.
08:08Aligned controls more than 6.4 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity.
08:14Making this one of the largest data center transactions ever recorded.
08:19And helping drive U.S. data center deal activity to a five-year high.
08:24It's a vivid snapshot of a single truth running through every story today.
08:30From a protest in a Washington high school parking lot,
08:33to a $40 billion buyout on Wall Street,
08:36the AI build-out is only accelerating.
08:40And the question of who pays,
08:42and who decides,
08:44is getting louder by the day.
09:06What does the 짓 map look like?
09:06that doesn't actually correspond.
09:07kuva
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