00:00A coal plant that became a crypto mine now wants to become an artificial intelligence
00:05campus on the shore of one of New York's Finger Lakes, with a permit to draw 139 million gallons
00:13of water a day.
00:14A state senator carried the fight straight to that waterfront, and by the end of the
00:20day, Wall Street was asking whether the entire data center trade had finally cracked.
00:27We begin on the shore of Seneca Lake, in Geneva, New York, where State Senator Kristen Gonzalez
00:34brought her statewide tour against artificial intelligence data centers to the Finger Lakes
00:41Welcome Center.
00:42The target is the former Greenwich Generation plant in the town of Torrey, a facility that
00:48started as coal, converted to natural gas, became one of the country's best-known Bitcoin
00:54mines, and has now rebranded itself as Vulcan Infrastructure and Power.
01:00The company wants roughly 200 additional megawatts from the state grid to redevelop the site as
01:07a hyperscale campus, and it raised nearly $40 million to try.
01:12Gonzalez and Seneca Lake Guardian point to a permit that still allows the plant to withdraw
01:18a 139 million gallons of lake water every single day, and they want the governor to sign a moratorium
01:26before any of it moves.
01:30That opposition is now landing in courtrooms in Grayslake, Illinois.
01:35Nine Lake County residents and a newly formed collective have asked a judge to erase the approvals
01:41behind one of the largest data center campuses ever proposed in the Chicago area.
01:47The project, filed under the code name T5 at Chicago 4, covers 472 acres, as much as 10 million
01:57square feet of buildings, and an electrical demand of 1.55 gigawatts, a phased development
02:04the village itself has valued at up to $18 billion.
02:09The lawsuit's sharpest allegation is procedural.
02:13According to Village Minutes, one of the key public hearings opened at 6.02 in the evening
02:19and closed at 6.03, with no public comment at all.
02:23And the filings never described the project as a hyperscale data center until the final agenda
02:29in.
02:29The approval sequence.
02:32The legal and political pressure is now showing up somewhere it never used to.
02:38In share prices.
02:40On Monday, CNBC's Jim Cramer told viewers the artificial intelligence trade is, in his words,
02:49currently broken, and said the data center thesis, perhaps the greatest investment theme in a
02:55generation, is under attack and may never be the same.
02:59Data center stocks had already ranked among the worst performers of the prior week.
03:04What change does not demand.
03:07It is permission.
03:08Cramer pointed to Pennsylvania and Texas, where governors who once actively courted these
03:14projects are now calling for stricter requirements.
03:18His counterintuitive read is that tougher rules could actually favor Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft
03:25and Meta, by squeezing out the smaller developers competing for the same land, the same labor,
03:32and the same electricity.
03:34And the reason the politics keep hardening comes down to the grid.
03:39PJM Interconnection, the largest power market in the United States, serving more than 65 million
03:47people across 13 states, now projects it will fall a full 6 gigawatts short of its own reliability
03:54requirement in 2027.
03:57Its answer is blunt.
03:59Rather than risk rolling blackouts across the mid-Atlantic, PJM says it will curtail very large
04:05electricity users during shortages.
04:08Cutting supply to data centers of 50 megawatts or larger beginning in June of 2027, the numbers
04:16behind that decision are just as stark.
04:19Capacity prices inside the PJM footprint rose 833% between the 2024 and 2025 delivery years,
04:29driven overwhelmingly by projected data center growth, and those costs land on ordinary customers.
04:37The pressure on the grid is only half the story.
04:41Water tells the other half.
04:43In Columbia County, Georgia, hydrologists looking at Google's enormous new campus warn that the
04:50real risk is not any single facility, but the arithmetic of several of them drawing from what
04:56one expert called the same general pool.
04:59A pool that is somewhat limited.
05:01Google's existing campus in neighboring South Carolina already uses roughly 500 million
05:07gallons of water a year, comparable to the annual household use of about 2 million people.
05:15Nationally, American data centers directly consumed 17.4 billion gallons in 2023,
05:22and the Environmental Protection Agency projects that figure will land somewhere between
05:2838 and 73 billion gallons by 2028, and when an aquifer drops, the wells simply have to go deeper.
05:39State legislators, and now Congress, are taking notice.
05:44State legislators, Rep. Andrea Salinas of Oregon has introduced the Data Center Community Reinvestment
05:50Act, which would place a 1 cent per kilowatt hour federal excise tax on electricity consumed
05:57by any data center with more than a megawatt of capacity, and route that revenue back toward
06:04the communities carrying the load.
06:05A companion effort, the Data Center Water and Energy Transparency Act, would force operators
06:12to actually report what they use, something most of them are not required to disclose at all today.
06:19And it fits a much larger pattern.
06:22Lawmakers in more than 30 states have introduced over 300 data center bills this year.
06:27A loan, covering moratoriums, tax incentives, special utility rate classes for very large customers,
06:37and mandatory water reporting.
06:40Yet despite that regulatory wave, construction is pressing forward, and in some places,
06:47right next to the power source itself, Amazon Web Services has laid out plans to invest
06:53$11 billion by 2040 across two data center campuses in Louisa County, Virginia, inside a technology
07:03overlay district the county created in 2023 specifically to attract them.
07:09One of the sites, the Lake Anna Tech Campus, sits on 153 acres directly adjacent to the North
07:17Anna Nuclear Power Station.
07:19The other, Northeast Creek, spans 374 acres and is planned for 10 data center buildings of roughly
07:29382,000 square feet each, plus three substations.
07:34All of it is one piece of a broader $35 billion Amazon commitment across the state of Virginia.
07:42And the financial commitment is finally flowing in a direction customers can actually see on a bill.
07:49AEP Ohio announced that five of the largest data center operators in the state,
07:55Meta, Amazon, Google, QTS and SoftBank Energy, have collectively pledged more than $18 million
08:03to a utility bill assistance fund.
08:06In what the utility describes as the first arrangement of its kind involving a group of data center
08:12companies, Meta committed $2 million a year for five years.
08:18QTS pledged $1 million annually for three, Amazon added $2.5 million for this year, SoftBank Energy
08:27$1 million, and Google $1 million split between assistance and efficiency upgrades.
08:33The money moves through the neighbor-to-neighbor program as one-time grants of $500
08:38or less to customers already 30 days behind.
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