00:00Arizona set up five overflow rooms across three separate buildings just to hold the people who
00:06showed up. Then the board voted the project down. Four to one. That is where the fight
00:12over American data centers stands this morning. We begin in Pinal County, Arizona, where the
00:21board of supervisors rejected the Laosa Energy Center, one of the largest data center projects
00:27ever proposed in the state. The plan called for 11 data center buildings, a 500 megawatt natural gas
00:36plant of its own, and battery energy storage on land south of Alloy. So many residents turned out
00:43that the county opened five overflow rooms across three separate buildings, and the board sat through
00:50hours of public testimony before voting. Neighbors raised water, air quality, noise, wildlife,
00:57and property values. What makes the outcome striking is what the developers had already
01:03given up. They had cut the project roughly 80 percent from its original scale, imposed their
01:11own limits on water use, and committed to shouldering all of the energy costs. The vote was four to one
01:19That refusal is not an Arizona peculiarity. In New Jersey it has become almost routine. Jackson Townships
01:28Council voted four to one this week to ban data centers outright, making Jackson the 38th municipality
01:35in the state to do so. Councilman Ken Bressy was the only member to vote no. Jackson is also the
01:43second
01:43town in Ocean County to pass a ban in a single week. Stafford Township approved its own ordinance the night
01:50before, and North Brunswick and East Brunswick passed theirs on the same evening as Stafford.
01:57Residents pointed to the strain on the electric grid and on clean water supplies, and to the fact
02:03that part of Jackson sits inside the Pinelands National Reserve. Nearly 40 towns have now closed the door,
02:11and the count keeps moving. In Ohio, that same energy is now heading for a ballot box.
02:19Pataskala's City Council voted against a proposed aligned data center's campus,
02:25unanimously accepting the Planning and Zoning Commission's recommendation to deny it.
02:30The facility would have been a 200-megawatt, three-building site. The meeting stretched past
02:36three hours with a few dozen residents in the room. But the vote does not settle the question,
02:43because residents had already gathered more than 500 signatures to force a separate
02:48measure onto the November ballot. That measure would let voters decide whether Pataskala allows any
02:55data center drawing more than 25 megawatts of power. So the council said no to one project,
03:02and in November the city itself says yes or no to the entire category.
03:09Not every developer accepts a denial quietly. In Ransom Township, Pennsylvania, the stone quarry
03:17owner Scranton Materials has appealed the township's refusal to grant a data center zoning overlay on its
03:24251-acre property off Newton Road. Supervisors rejected the request two-to-one at a packed evening
03:32meeting, with two officials noting the developer had brought no expert testimony and little
03:38evidentiary support. Attorney Michael May now argues the supervisors acted improperly and went against
03:46the advice of their own solicitor, and the appeal makes a much broader claim that because the township's
03:54zoning ordinance makes no provision for data centers anywhere within its borders, it unlawfully
04:01excludes them. Pennsylvania law requires municipalities to allow every lawful land use
04:07somewhere. That doctrine is now the industry's opening in court. The pressure is not only local.
04:15This week the president signed an executive order declaring a national emergency over the security
04:21of the American bulk power system, invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the
04:29National Emergencies Act. Any acquisition, import, transfer, or installation of foreign-produced bulk power
04:37equipment initiated after that date is prohibited. Where designated entities are involved, the list of
04:45targeted technology is broad. Transformers, inverters, energy storage systems, and industrial control gear
04:54including remote terminal units, programmable logic controllers, and safety systems administration
05:01officials tied the urgency directly to the expansion of data centers, artificial intelligence, and defense
05:10production. The Department of Energy has 120 days to write the rules, and the order permits restricting equipment
05:18already installed on the grid. Electricity is one constraint, water is the other. And in Virginia a very large
05:27company just blinked. Amazon Web Services has withdrawn its application to draw from the Potomac Aquifer for its king.
05:36George County Data Center campus. The permit renewal would have allowed withdrawals of up to 6.4 million gallons a
05:44year.
05:44The retreat followed objections from a state lawmaker and a Department of Environmental Quality
05:51study that reached a blunt conclusion. The Potomac Aquifer cannot support any new industrial water withdrawals
05:59at all. That study covers Virginia east of Interstate 95, the heart of the world's largest data center market,
06:07when the aquifer beneath the biggest hub on earth is declared full. The map of where these buildings
06:13can actually go begins to change. State governments are drawing lines of their own. And the largest one is
06:22in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to conduct a
06:30comprehensive verification and audit of every data center advancing through the interconnection
06:36process. And no new project can be approved to connect until that audit is finished.
06:41The review covers roughly 250 to 300 projects. Together they account for about 200 gigawatts
06:50of requested demand, which is more than twice the all-time peak demand record on the Texas grid.
06:56ERCOT says the work will take several months, and it has halted its batch zero transmission
07:02planning study in the meantime. In the most permissive large market in America, the queue has stopped moving.
07:11And yet the capital keeps arriving. Anthropic has expanded its partnership with Google and Broadcom to
07:18secure roughly 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation tensor processing unit capacity. With the first of it
07:27coming online in 2027, the majority of that infrastructure is to be built in the United States.
07:33The context here is demand. Anthropic says run rate revenue has passed $30 billion,
07:48up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, with more than 1,000 enterprise customers each spending over
07:56a million dollars a year. 3.5 gigawatts is not a forecast it is a signed contract.
08:11It helps us cover more of these stories.
