00:00Residents in one South Carolina county showed up with homemade signs and refused to let a vote go.
00:06Quietly, a Pennsylvania judge froze an entire township's data center review, then undid it a day later.
00:14And the operator of America's largest power grid has now asked federal regulators for permission to cut electricity to data
00:23centers before it cuts anyone's home.
00:26Here is what actually moved.
00:28We begin in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, where a council meeting turned into a standoff.
00:36Frustrated residents filled the chamber holding homemade signs reading, quote, no more data centers and, quote, no more poi sun
00:46spelled with a dollar sign.
00:48They came for a vote on a countywide moratorium that would pause new data center applications for a year.
00:56However, council had already given the measure two readings.
00:59Instead of finishing the job, members pushed the third and final reading to the September 21st meeting,
01:07saying they wanted more time to hear from experts and to hold a special safety session first much.
01:13Of the public comment was aimed at the $3 billion Northmark project, where construction has already started.
01:21Exchanges between residents and council members grew sharp.
01:25That kind of frustration is increasingly ending up in front of judges.
01:31In King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, the legal fight ran in both directions inside 48 hours.
01:39Developer Brian O'Neill sued Upper Marion Township, its board of supervisors and its planning commission after officials moved to
01:47run out the clock on his applications.
01:50A Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas judge granted an injunction that temporarily barred the township from taking any action,
02:00which forced the cancellation of a planning commission meeting where O'Neill's team was set to present.
02:07By Thursday afternoon, the same judge vacated that order.
02:11The board met and denied two extension requests that would have given the developer more time.
02:16The project, called the Renaissance Park and Innovation Data Center campus, would exceed 4.5 million square feet.
02:26O'Neill says he will push forward.
02:28Underneath every one of these fights sits the same question.
02:32Where does the power come from?
02:36PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that keeps the lights on for 67 million people across 13 states,
02:43and Washington, D.C., has asked federal regulators to let it cut power to new data centers before it cuts
02:51power to anyone.
02:53Else, the filing responds to a June 18 order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,
03:00which gave PJM a 60-day clock that ran out on August 17.
03:04Under the proposal, any end-use customer drawing 50 megawatts or more at a single site is classified as a
03:12large load.
03:14If the utility serving that load has not designated enough qualifying new generation to cover its peak demand,
03:22the uncovered portion gets curtailed first.
03:25Ahead of ordinary demand response,
03:28Projects can escape that exposure through a mechanism PJM calls bring your own new capacity.
03:35Power is only half the constraint.
03:37Water is the other half.
03:40Virginia is the largest data center market on Earth.
03:44And its own environmental agency has just published a study that undercuts the industry's expansion.
03:50East of Interstate 95, scientists at the Department of Environmental Quality examined the Potomac Aquifer,
03:59the largest and deepest groundwater source in eastern Virginia,
04:03accounting for roughly 70% of all withdrawals in the state's eastern Virginia groundwater management area.
04:11Levels had risen and broadly stabilized until about 2021,
04:16when the trend stalled and began to reverse.
04:18The report projects declines resuming within the next 5 to 10 years
04:23and concludes the aquifer cannot support meaningful new industrial withdrawals.
04:29In practical terms,
04:31that means new water-cooled data centers would struggle to obtain reliable groundwater permits.
04:38The study was legally due January 1st.
04:41It took an open records request to get it released.
04:44Regulators are not the only ones recalculating the cost.
04:49In Raleigh, Duke Energy Progress's rate case is back before the North Carolina Utilities Commission.
04:57And the argument outside the hearing room is about data centers.
05:01Duke has proposed a settlement with the state public staff and other parties that cuts its original
05:07increase by more than half,
05:10landing at roughly 3.4% a year over two years
05:14For a household using a thousand kilowatt-hours a month,
05:18that is about $9.62 more starting January 1st of 2027,
05:25followed by another $5.89 in 2028.
05:29The contested question is who should pay for the grid upgrades needed to serve enormous new
05:36customers.
05:37The Environmental Defense Fund's North Carolina policy director put it plainly.
05:43Other states let data centers bring their own power and pay for it themselves.
05:48And North Carolina does not.
05:50Lawmakers elsewhere are reaching for a different lever entirely.
05:55Virginia billed its data center industry on a sales tax exemption now worth about $1.6
06:02billion a year,
06:04and the state Senate wants to switch it off.
06:07Senate budget writers proposed phasing out the exemption on January 1st of 2027.
06:13An expedited sunset from the original 2035 end date,
06:19the roughly $1 billion that would generate over two years is earmarked for rebates sent
06:24directly back to Virginians.
06:27Senate Finance and Appropriations Chair Louise Lucas,
06:31a Democrat from Portsmouth,
06:34argued it is time for data centers to pay their fair share.
06:38The House took a different position,
06:40and Governor Abigail Spanberger has been more sympathetic to keeping the incentive.
06:46So the two chambers have been working the difference through conference.
06:50Yet none of this regulatory pressure has slowed the shovels.
06:55Vantage Data Centers has broken ground on Frontier,
06:59a campus in Shackilford County, Texas,
07:03roughly 125 miles west of Fort Worth and close to Abilene.
07:08It is part of the Oracle and OpenAI Stargate expansion.
07:12And Vantage calls it the largest project in the company's history.
07:17At full build-out the 1200-acre site will hold 10 single-story data centers totaling
07:23about 3.7 million square feet and 1.4 gigawatts of capacity.
07:29Air and liquid cooled,
07:31engineered for densities above 250 kilowatts per rack.
07:35Total investment is put at more than $25 billion,
07:40with more than 5,000 jobs across construction and operations.
07:45The first building is due to go live in the second half of this year.
07:49And the money standing behind projects like this keeps getting stranger.
07:54And the financial engineering behind all of it took another turn.
07:59In a securities filing,
08:01NVIDIA disclosed a set of residual value guarantee agreements
08:05tied to OpenAI's 20-year lease of
08:07an enormous Ohio data center campus.
08:11NVIDIA's combined payment obligations under those agreements
08:15cannot exceed $105 billion.
08:19The guarantees cover OpenAI's initial 4.25 gigawatt commitment
08:24at the Port's Pike campus,
08:27built on the grounds of a Cold War-era uranium enrichment plant,
08:32with capacity phasing in from 2028 and a path toward 8 gigawatts,
08:38which would make it the largest single-AI data center anywhere.
08:42OpenAI still owes the rent.
08:45NVIDIA only pays if OpenAI becomes insolvent or defaults.
08:49Separately, NVIDIA is investing $1.5 billion into SB Energy,
08:55while SB Energy and SoftBank commit at least $4.2 billion
09:00to regional grid infrastructure.
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