00:00A Texas judge just stopped one town from voting on a data center because the neighbors filed suit first, and
00:08the buildings would have sat about 506 feet from their backyards.
00:13In Michigan, a developer is suing a city right back for blocking its project.
00:19And in Montana, 3,600 signatures and one deadline that quietly moved may decide whether data centers reach the November
00:29ballot.
00:30We start in North Texas, where the fight over a data center has become a fight between two towns.
00:38Judge Kimberly Fitzpatrick of the 342nd District Court issued a temporary restraining order blocking Westlake officials from voting on, approving,
00:49or taking any action on the Circle T data center.
00:53After the lakes at Marshall Ridge Homeowners Association and two residents filed suit,
00:58The project would place roughly 1.1 million square feet of buildings on about 88 acres off Highway 377, as
01:08close as a few hundred feet from Keller backyards.
01:12Keller City Council voted unanimously to hire outside council and begin the process for a 90-day local moratorium.
01:21Mayor Ross McMullin said every legal option is on the table.
01:25Westlake defends the site as industrially zoned and says it would lift town revenue 14 percent.
01:32But not every developer waits to be sued.
01:36Some of them sue first in Gibraltar, Michigan.
01:40The developers behind a proposed 100-megawatt data center on the former McLeod Steel site have taken the city to
01:48federal court.
01:50Raiden Acquisitions and Cal Realty filed a lengthy complaint in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of
01:58Michigan,
01:58arguing that Gibraltar's one-year moratorium was adopted only after they submitted their site plan
02:05and was designed specifically to stop their project.
02:09They say the use is already permitted under existing zoning
02:13and that the city improperly enacted the pause as a resolution rather than an ordinance.
02:19The complaint alleges due process and equal protection violations and an improper taking of
02:25property rights and asks a judge to declare the moratorium invalid and order the plans approved.
02:33Courts are becoming the venue of choice and residents are using them, too.
02:39In Butte, Montana, the question in front of a district court judge is whether 3,652 signatures still count.
02:49The group 406 people first delivered them,
02:52and the county clerk accepted the petition on July 31st.
02:56Ten days later, the initiative was
02:58rejected for failing to meet requirements under a Montana law adopted in late 2025,
03:05and the group was told the real deadline had been July 13th all along.
03:11Not August 14th,
03:13Judge Frank Joseph has already issued a temporary restraining order barring the city county from
03:19destroying or segregating the petition sheets or treating the initiative as finally rejected.
03:26Attorney John Meyer argues the statute itself is unconstitutional
03:31and that the power of initiative belongs to residents rather than the legislature.
03:36A ruling is expected within days.
03:39Out West, one county did not wait for a court.
03:44Nye County, Nevada simply banned them.
03:48Commissioners voted 5 to nothing to prohibit data centers in the Pahrump Valley and Basin 1.
03:5462.
03:56After a meeting that drew hundreds of attendees and more than two hours of public comment,
04:01even with a two-minute limit per speaker.
04:04Commissioner Ian Bain, who made the motion,
04:08amended it so the ban covers the Pahrump groundwater basin rather than the entire county.
04:13A scope commissioner Bruce Jabbour said he preferred,
04:17since other parts of Nye may still welcome the industry.
04:21Resident Teresa Reddell told the board the community had grown frantic over the issue.
04:27Commissioners separately voted 4 to 1 to schedule a hearing on a companion bill creating land.
04:33Use rules and special use permitting elsewhere in the county.
04:38A proposal for a countywide special election died without a motion.
04:42Groundwater is the thread running through all of this.
04:47Nowhere more so than Piedmont, Oklahoma,
04:50where residents need 172 valid signatures to force a public vote.
04:56Three citizen initiative petitions are circulating.
05:00One pairing a temporary moratorium with impact studies.
05:04One setting hard limits on noise.
05:06And one requiring citizens to approve any project based on those study results.
05:12The target is Project Open Sky,
05:15a cloverleaf infrastructure campus that would rezone roughly 630 acres for about a
05:21billion dollars in investment and as many as 500 permanent jobs.
05:27Resident Ali Taylor says water is the central concern in an agricultural town.
05:33And that it should go to farming and livestock rather than industrial cooling.
05:38Cloverleaf chief executive David Berry counters that the design uses closed-loop cooling.
05:44Comparing it to an air conditioner.
05:47The Planning Commission has recommended denial.
05:50State governments are now writing rules of their own.
05:55Pennsylvania's is the strictest yet.
05:57Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order directing the Department of Environmental
06:03Protection to refuse to even review a data center permit application unless the developer has made
06:10a legally binding commitment to the state's responsible infrastructure development requirements and
06:16has already secured local government approval.
06:20Those requirements cover energy affordability, environmental protection,
06:26workforce and economic development, transparency and community engagement.
06:31The order also removes AI data center proposals from Pennsylvania's fast-track permitting process
06:38entirely and prohibits the use of non-disclosure agreements on these projects.
06:44The secrecy that has defined so many of them.
06:48Shapiro said the state is tracking roughly 100 proposals, only about five of which actually hold
06:54permits and called many of them poorly planned.
06:58He signed it after the legislature declined to pass the standards itself.
07:03Another governor spent this week apologizing for a process.
07:09Utah's Spencer Cox told reporters at his monthly news conference that the approval process behind
07:15the Stratus Data Center in Box Elder County was, in his words, not good, and that the Military
07:23Installation Development Authority that shepherded it needs major reform.
07:29MIDA was created to handle development around military installations.
07:34Cox says it has suffered mission creep.
07:36And he wants the governor's office given a larger role when lawmakers return to the capital in
07:42January.
07:44This is a notable shift.
07:46Cox once defended the Stratus project, which is backed by the investor Kevin O'Leary.
07:52Partly on national security grounds.
07:55Before public pushback softened his tone, he has since signed a separate executive order
08:01creating a statewide framework for evaluating large data centers, prioritizing water, the
08:09Great Salt Lake, ratepayers and air quality.
08:12And yet the capital keeps arriving anyway.
08:16In the Texas panhandle, Infratech Capital is advancing a $2.7 billion data center campus
08:24across more than 5,000 acres in Carson County.
08:28Just outside Amarillo, the firm is assembling a consortium of institutional investors, with
08:35a major hyperscaler expected to serve as anchor tenant.
08:39Though the anchor, the counterparty and the co-investors all remain undisclosed until definitive
08:45agreements close.
08:47Beyond the campus itself, Infratech says it will fund expanded fiber-optic cable manufacturing
08:54capacity, adding new production lines with a global manufacturing partner to supply this
09:00platform and other large-scale digital infrastructure projects.
09:05There is no final investment decision and no announced construction start date.
09:10It is a reminder that while towns argue over setbacks, groundwater basins and petition
09:17deadlines, the money behind these campuses is still being raised at a scale most local
09:22governments have never had to answer.
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