00:00A thermal drone flew over a half-built AI campus in southern New Jersey last week and found dozens
00:06of tractor-trailer-sized generators burning fuel the state never permitted.
00:12A mile away sit two schools. That is where this briefing begins.
00:18We start in Vineland, New Jersey, at Data One, the largest planned AI data center in the state
00:25and a project backed by Microsoft. A visual investigation using thermal drone footage
00:32found the partly completed site running at least 45 of its 62 generators, tractor-trailer-sized units
00:40emitting substantial air pollution roughly a mile from two schools. The New Jersey Department of
00:47Environmental Protection confirmed it has issued no permits for power generators at the facility
00:54and that no applications are even under review. A former head of air enforcement at the
01:00Environmental Protection Agency said federal law requires a final permit before those generators
01:06are brought on site, let alone fired up. Data One would not answer questions about the generators,
01:13saying only that it remains committed to meeting all applicable environmental and permitting
01:19requirements. Where enforcement is uncertain, communities are taking the decision into their
01:27own hands. In Pataskala, Ohio, the city council voted unanimously to reject a line data center's site
01:35plan for a proposed two hundred megawatt campus, and residents in the chamber cheered when the vote
01:42landed. Council members said the developer never resolved basic questions about where the power for
01:49that project would actually come from. The rejection settles this application, but not the larger
01:56question, because the issue now heads to a ballot measure in November that lets voters in Pataskala and
02:03neighboring Granville decide whether large-scale data centers are permitted at all.
02:09A council can be lobbied and a site plan can be revised. A referendum is much harder for a developer
02:16to negotiate its way around. And in Maryland, voters have already shown what that looks like.
02:24Amazon Web Services has withdrawn its proposal for roughly 2.4 million square feet of
02:31data center campus at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant. The company says the decision was not
02:38political. The timeline suggests otherwise. In the June primary, all three county commissioners who had
02:45voted against pausing data center development lost their races, including the commission president and vice
02:53president, two challengers running explicitly on the issue. County agencies sent Amazon its first round
03:00of review comments in July. Rather than move to the next round, the company pulled the application entirely.
03:08Calvert County commissioners are now weighing a six-month moratorium regardless. Because a separate
03:15developer has already proposed a facility nearby. That pressure is showing up in courtrooms too.
03:22And this week it reached a state Supreme Court. In New Mexico, justices unanimously granted two
03:29requests to pause Project Jupiter. The Oracle and OpenAI campus already under construction in Doña
03:36Ana County. The court temporarily halted an air quality permit hearing for the project's proposed natural
03:44gas fuel cell system, cancelling a September 14 hearing in Sunland Park, and ordered the office of
03:52the state engineer to stop allowing water from a particular well to be used for construction. Opponents
03:59had argued the September date left them no time to prepare expert testimony. Separately,
04:06the attorney serving as hearing officer removed himself from the case after critics said several of
04:12his rulings showed bias toward the developers. The reason those fights keep escalating is that
04:20state governments are rewriting the rules. Underneath them, in Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro,
04:28who not long ago was celebrating a $20 billion Amazon commitment, signed an executive order that
04:35dramatically restricts data center development, it removes every AI data center proposal from the
04:42state's fast-track permitting process, prohibits developers from using non-disclosure agreements
04:48with local communities, and gives municipalities more authority over what gets built. Projects with
04:55peak demand above 25 megawatts must now source their electricity from new supply, including growing
05:03amounts of firm clean power. To qualify for faster review, the order stops short of a moratorium. Its language
05:12does not. It accuses developers of predatory behavior toward the very communities they are courting.
05:20State policy is one lever. In Texas, residents are reaching for another. The Lubbock City Council has formally
05:28accepted a citizen petition seeking an 18-month moratorium on high water use and high energy use data centers inside
05:37the city limits. Organizer Stephen Sanders said the group needed 2,410 valid signatures and turned in more
05:47than 3,000. The council now has 30 days to adopt or reject the moratorium as written. With a public
05:55hearing set for
05:56September 8th, Councilman Tim Collins has already said he believes 18 months exceeds what Texas law allows,
06:03and that he has alternative proposals he considers lawful. In a city sitting on the edge of the Ogallala
06:10aquifer, the water half of that petition is not an abstraction. Water and power are two halves of the
06:19same bill, and in Florida regulators are deciding who pays it. The state's Public Service Commission is reviewing
06:26a Duke Energy proposal in what amounts to the first real test of Senate Bill 484, a new law requiring
06:34large load
06:35customers like data centers to bear their own full cost of service. Consumer advocates argue Duke's plan still leaves
06:43ordinary customers as ordinary customers exposed if announced projects. Underperform or never materialize at the scale
06:50promised. It is a live question nationally. 24 states have now approved at least one large load tariff and six
06:58more have
06:59proposals. Pending. What Florida decides here becomes a template that other commissions will read very closely.
07:08And despite all of it, the building continues at a scale that is hard to picture. In Salem Township, Pennsylvania,
07:17supervisors have been weighing an expansion of the township's data center overlay zone to enable
07:24Glenbrook Group's Salem 3 campus, 39 buildings, an on-site power generation plant, and a closed-loop water system
07:33spread across more than 4,000 acres beside the Susquehanna nuclear station. The land parcels alone are
07:41being purchased from local owners for roughly $1.4 billion. Estimated demand runs three and a half to four
07:50gigawatts. Developers say at least 80 percent of the assembled land will remain undeveloped green space.
07:57It would be the largest of three data center campuses now taking shape inside a single Pennsylvania
08:04township.
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