00:00A city council meeting in a town of 400 people had to be postponed because of death threats.
00:06And when it finally happened, police were called to the room.
00:11One vote decided it.
00:13Meanwhile, new national polling shows three quarters of Americans now say they would fight a data center built anywhere near
00:21them.
00:22We start in Salix, Iowa, a town of roughly 400 people that just decided the fate of 900 acres.
00:31The city council voted 3-2 against a 12-month moratorium on data centers, clearing the way for MidAmerican Energy
00:40and Google to keep exploring a project on farmland the city.
00:44Annexed back in April, that single vote came from council member Denise Burkhardt, who had supported a pause a month
00:52earlier and changed her position once Google was publicly identified as the customer.
00:59She argued that shutting off communication for a year would stop the city from asking the questions.
01:05It needs answered.
01:07The August meeting had already been postponed after death threats aimed at local officials appeared.
01:12On social media, and when this one ended, Mayor Kevin Nelson called out for officers as the room erupted.
01:21Woodbury County is separately challenging the annexation in court.
01:26What happened in Salix is not an isolated flare-up, and new national numbers show exactly how far this has
01:33moved.
01:34A heat map pro poll of 2045 registered voters, conducted by Mbold Research between August 8th and 13th, found that
01:4475% of Americans would oppose a new data center built near where they live.
01:51More than 6 in 10 say they would oppose it strongly.
01:54Only 21% would support one.
01:57What makes that number remarkable is the speed of the collapse.
02:01Asked the same question one year ago.
02:0443% supported a nearby data center and 42% opposed.
02:10Opposition climbed to 51% in February.
02:13Hit 70% in May.
02:16And now sits at 75.
02:18The margin of error is 2.3 points.
02:21And the survey covered all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
02:27That collapse in public opinion is now showing up as concrete on the ground that never gets poured.
02:34Reporting published in the last 24 hours describes a backlash that has brought thousands.
02:40Of projects to a halt across the country.
02:43More than 530 American counties and localities have now banned or restricted.
02:50Data Center Construction Outright
02:52In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott issued a sweeping directive in early August ordering an audit of every data center connecting
03:01to the state grid.
03:02A move that effectively paused as many as 1,800 projects while the review runs.
03:08His guidelines require that facilities not take water needed by local communities or power needed.
03:15By the Texas grid, New York enacted a first-in-the-nation statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers.
03:24And Pennsylvania layered on new permitting restrictions.
03:28Roughly $130 billion in projects were delayed or canceled in the first quarter alone.
03:36When an issue moves that fast, campaigns notice.
03:40And in Wisconsin it has become the center of the governor's race.
03:45Republican candidate Tom Tiffany moved within days of the Democratic primary to define his opponent.
03:52Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.
03:55With a new ad branding him quote Data Center David Crowley.
03:59The strategy rests on hard numbers.
04:0366% of Wisconsin voters hold an unfavorable opinion of data centers.
04:08And 79% say the companies building them should be required to compensate.
04:14Communities through lower utility bills and taxes.
04:18Analysts describe a populist current running through the midterms.
04:22With candidates in both parties scrambling to distance themselves from projects their own.
04:28Leadership spent years recruiting.
04:31The same dynamic is playing out in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.
04:37And voters from Missouri to Utah to Michigan have launched recall campaigns against officials who
04:43approved campuses.
04:47And the reason this keeps gaining momentum comes down to one line on a monthly statement.
04:53Congressman Josh Riley of New York introduced federal legislation called the FAIR Data Act.
04:59Which would require data center developers and operators to pay for the power generation.
05:05Transmission and distribution upgrades their facilities demand.
05:09Rather than pushing those costs onto ordinary rate payers.
05:13It arrived while New York's statewide moratorium on new hyperscale facilities is already in force.
05:21And after constituents reported monthly bills more than doubling in a single year.
05:26The market data supports the complaint.
05:29Across the PJM interconnection.
05:32The largest grid in the country.
05:34Wholesale power costs rose from $77.78 a megawatt hour in.
05:41Early 2025 to $136.53 in early 2026.
05:49A jump of more than 75%.
05:51Data centers drove 63% of the last capacity auction increase.
05:58The pressure on the grid is only half the story.
06:02And water tells the other half.
06:03In Port Washington, Wisconsin.
06:07The Board of Public Works delayed action on a request from Vantage data centers to use three.
06:13Existing wells on its property during construction of its $15 billion campus.
06:19After residents packed the room and demanded the request be denied.
06:24The meeting turned contentious enough that Chairman Mike Gasper.
06:28A city alderman.
06:30Banged the gavel.
06:31Called for silence.
06:32And at one point threatened to have members of the public removed.
06:37Residents arrived with prepared questions about aquifer drawdown and groundwater contamination.
06:43And pointed out that Vantage had previously said it would use city water for the campus.
06:48Before the delay, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources had already approved four wells at the lighthouse.
06:57Campus but capped three of them at 20 gallons per minute.
07:01Well below the 60 Vantage requested.
07:05Yet despite all of that resistance.
07:08Construction is pressing forward.
07:10And in rural Utah it is happening at a scale the country has not seen.
07:15Jewel Capital Partners held a groundbreaking ceremony for an energy and data center campus spanning.
07:214,000 acres in Millard County.
07:24A project the county commission approved at an August meeting.
07:29Company representatives say they hope to begin initial energy production by the end of this year.
07:35With the site designed as an integrated generation and artificial intelligence compute campus.
07:41Rather than a conventional co-location build.
07:45The project sits inside Governor Spencer Cox's Operation Gigawatt Initiative.
07:50Which aims to double Utah's power production over the next decade.
07:55Millard County is a sparsely populated stretch of central Utah.
07:59And local officials have framed the campus as a rare source of high-paying jobs.
08:05The same state, meanwhile, is still sorting out how a different data center approval went so badly wrong.
08:13And the money behind all of this construction keeps moving faster than the politics can catch it.
08:20NVIDIA has taken a minority stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure.
08:24A two-year-old Houston company that acquires land.
08:28Secures utility power agreements.
08:31Enhance developers shovel-ready sites.
08:34Terms were not disclosed.
08:36Though reporting puts the investment in the several hundred million dollar range.
08:42Cloverleaf has already sold projects totaling more than 7 gigawatts of power.
08:47And the deal gives it access to NVIDIA's DSX platform for optimizing site.
08:53Power and cooling decisions together.
08:56On the same day, StarCloud closed a $250 million extension to its Series A.
09:03Led by Manhattan West with NVIDIA and Cisco participating.
09:08Doubling its valuation to $2.3 billion.
09:12StarCloud is building data center satellites.
09:15Betting that the cheapest way past landfights.
09:18Water permits and grid queues is to leave the planet entirely.
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