00:00A packed room in rural Kansas just forced its own planning commission to back down.
00:05Meanwhile, analysts have discovered that more than two-thirds of the electricity America's data centers claim to need may not
00:14exist at all.
00:15From a $200 million lawsuit in Georgia, to a $100 billion campus rising on an old nuclear site.
00:23Here's what's really happening behind the AI build-out.
00:27We begin in Leavenworth County, Kansas, where residents have decided that showing up quietly is no longer enough.
00:36A proposed 1,000-acre hyperscale campus known as Project Bluestem, planned just south of Tonganoxie near Interstate 70, has
00:46galvanized a group calling itself Citizens Against Bluestem.
00:50Roughly 25 to 30 active members including lawyers, engineers, and lifelong residents who say the project surfaced without adequate public
01:01notice.
01:01When the County Planning Commission met to take up new data center regulations, opponents packed the room demanding tougher rules
01:10on noise, water use, and health impacts.
01:15Commissioner Marcus Major acknowledged the crowd before joining an 8-to-1 vote to send the regulations back for another
01:23look.
01:23County commissioners have also passed a 90-day moratorium, and under Kansas law, if opponents gather signatures from owners of
01:3220% of neighboring land, any permit would need a three-quarters supermajority to pass.
01:39That kind of organized resistance is now landing squarely in the courts.
01:45That resistance has a price tag, and in Georgia a developer is trying to collect it.
01:51Shadowbox Studios and an affiliated real estate company called Henrico 183 have sued DeKalb County in Superior Court, asking a
02:02judge to declare the county's data center moratorium illegal.
02:05The companies say they spent more than $30 million developing a nearly 200-acre property at 3600 International Park Drive
02:15in South DeKalb, after county officials assured them a data center would be permitted there.
02:22Then the moratorium landed, and it has now been in place more than a year.
02:27However, the lawsuit claims the freeze has slashed the property's value by $200 million, and seeks not just permission to
02:35build, but just compensation for what it calls a violation of property rights, plus attorney's fees.
02:43A second company has since come forward with a nearly identical complaint.
02:48Behind every one of these fights sits a single question.
02:52How much power do these projects actually need?
02:56And here is where the story turns genuinely surprising.
03:00New analysis from Wood Mackenzie finds that more than two-thirds of the electricity being requested
03:06for America's AI build-out will almost certainly never be delivered.
03:11Grid operators and utilities are sitting on requests totaling 1,066 gigawatts
03:18of new data center load,
03:20But analysts expect only about 28% of that to ever be committed.
03:26That leaves roughly 768 gigawatts of what the industry now calls phantom load.
03:32The reason is straightforward.
03:34Developers, unsure which utility could deliver power fastest and cheapest,
03:40simply filed the same project with several utilities at once.
03:44Nothing required them to put money down.
03:47So every duplicate request landed in an interconnection queue and got counted as real demand.
03:54Utilities, grid planners, and state policymakers then built forecasts,
04:00rate cases, and power plants around numbers that were never real.
04:04Yet for the utilities actually delivering power, the growth is very real indeed.
04:11Take Southern Company, one of the largest utilities in the country.
04:16Its latest results show data center electricity usage across its system jumped 55%.
04:22Compared with the same quarter a year ago, and 49% year-to-date,
04:28In raw terms, system-wide data center load pushed past 1.2 gigawatts during the quarter.
04:35An increase of more than 500 megawatts in 12 months.
04:40That surge helped drive adjusted earnings to $1.13 a share.
04:45Up 21 cents from a year earlier.
04:48But the number that should get everyone's attention is the pipeline.
04:52Southern has now signed contracts for 17 gigawatts of large-load customers.
04:57After adding 6 gigawatts in a single quarter.
05:02Among them is Georgia Power's 25-year, 3.2 gigawatt agreement with OpenAI.
05:08This is what real, committed demand looks like.
05:11And it is arriving faster than almost anyone planned for.
05:15But electricity is only half of the resource problem.
05:19Water is the other half.
05:22In California's Imperial Valley, a water agency has done something almost unheard of.
05:28It told a data center NOAA, the Imperial Irrigation District,
05:33which delivers Colorado River water across one of the driest corners of the country,
05:39denied a developer's request to tap the district's freshwater and wastewater supply for cooling.
05:45What would have been among the largest data centers in the state?
05:49The developer, Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing,
05:54has responded by suing the public agency.
05:57And the Imperial Valley is not alone.
06:00In Virginia, the world's largest data center market,
06:04state environmental scientists concluded that the Potomac Aquifer East of Interstate 95
06:10cannot support any new industrial withdrawals.
06:14A finding that would effectively bar new water-cooled facilities across a huge stretch of the state.
06:21Water, long treated as an afterthought in site selection,
06:25is quietly becoming the hardest constraint of all,
06:28which is why regulators are now scrutinizing these deals far more closely than they used to.
06:36Nowhere is that scrutiny sharper than in Georgia,
06:39where state regulators have effectively frozen the largest power deal in the state's history.
06:45Georgia Power has voluntarily pushed back the start date of its 25-year agreement to
06:51supply OpenAI's $20 billion project Camellia Campus in Effingham County,
06:58a contract that would deliver 3.2 gigawatts of electricity,
07:03one of the biggest single-site power commitments ever made in American technology.
07:08The delay came after members of the Public Service Commission signaled they would object to the
07:13contract as written. Democratic Commissioner Peter Hubbard asked the panel to formally object,
07:21raising concerns about long-term financial liability for ordinary ratepayers in the absence of
07:27clean energy provisions.
07:29The Natural Resources Defense Council,
07:32the Sierra Club,
07:34and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy have all filed objections over the deal's secrecy.
07:39Georgia Power now has until August 26th to satisfy the commission.
07:45Yet even under that scrutiny,
07:48the biggest builds are moving ahead.
07:51On the banks of the Ohio River in western Kentucky,
07:55one of the strangest and most ambitious projects in the country is taking shape.
08:00Brookfield and NextEra Energy are transforming part of the Department of Energy's former Paducah
08:07Gaseous Diffusion Plant,
08:09a Cold War uranium enrichment site,
08:12into what could become one of America's largest AI campuses.
08:16The Department of Energy selected Brookfield to lease the land and develop the campus
08:21and pick NextEra to build an own dedicated generation alongside it.
08:27At full build-out by 2032,
08:29the site targets more than 1.2 gigawatts of compute capacity supported by up to
08:361.8 gigawatts of utility capacity,
08:40with as much as 2 gigawatts of on-site natural gas generation and 2.6 gigawatts of
08:46battery storage.
08:48The companies say total investment could reach roughly $100 billion over time.
08:54With initial operations beginning in 2028,
08:58Big Rivers Electric,
09:00Jackson Purchase Energy,
09:02and Paducah Power System are all partners.
09:05And behind projects like this,
09:08the financing is getting creative.
09:11Which brings us to the money,
09:13and to a deal that shows just how far Wall Street will now stretch to fund this build-out.
09:18A developer called ZenithArk has sold $2.25 billion of green bonds to finance
09:25a data center and substation in central Oklahoma,
09:30backed by a 15-year triple net lease and guarantee from the quantitative trading giant Jane
09:36Street.
09:37The five-year notes priced at $0.99.5 on the dollar,
09:42yielding nearly 9%,
09:44a rich coupon that tells you exactly how investors view the risk.
09:48The facility will support 149 megawatts.
09:53It's part of a broader shift.
09:55Data center sustainable bond issuance climbed to $11.2 billion last year from
10:01$7.6 billion the year before.
10:05And on the same day,
10:07EQT-backed EdgeConX was in talks with Natixis and BBVA to have banks guarantee as much as
10:14$2.5 billion in power costs.
10:17A letter-of-credit facility designed purely to lock down electricity.
10:22From a packed hearing room in Kansas to a 9% bond in Oklahoma.
10:27The pressure is building on every side at once.
10:48The pressure is building on every side at once.
10:50The pressure is building on every side at once.
10:50The pressure is building on every side at once.
10:52The pressure is building on every side at once.
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