00:00A Michigan City Council let a data center die without even holding a vote.
00:05Across the country, the fight over data centers is moving from packed meeting rooms into courtrooms,
00:12regulators' offices, and state capitals.
00:17A data center plan in Michigan just died without a single vote.
00:22On Monday, October 19, residents packed Inkster City Hall to capacity,
00:28with some people waiting outside, to oppose a proposal to turn a vacant 40,000-square-foot warehouse on Southern
00:36Street,
00:37off Michigan Avenue, into a data center.
00:40The planning commission had recommended conditional approval after a public hearing on October 12,
00:48but when the council took it up, no member made a motion,
00:52so the special land use request was never voted on.
00:55Developer Robert Cato of Clever Technology Center says he will not appeal and will not pursue the
01:02project at that site.
01:04He says it will go forward in a neighboring municipality,
01:07and he has the building under contract.
01:11Residents cited noise, light pollution, and environmental impact.
01:17That kind of opposition is now making its way into courtrooms and regulators' offices.
01:23Mississippi environmental officials are seeking civil penalties of up to $25,000
01:29per day from a SpaceX AI subsidiary,
01:33MZX Tech,
01:35with preliminary exposure of about $6.1 million.
01:39According to an SEC filing,
01:42the state alleges construction began at three data center sites,
01:46just over the line from Memphis,
01:49before the company had coverage under the state's large construction stormwater permit.
01:55Two of the sites,
01:56called Macroherd and Macroharder,
01:59are operating,
02:00and a third,
02:01Miniherd,
02:02is under construction.
02:04Separately,
02:05U.S. District Judge Deborah Brown rejected a Justice Department attempt to block an NAACP lawsuit
02:12over the company's gas-fired power plant in South Haven,
02:17ruling that the EPA's enforcement role does not let the federal government unilaterally dismiss
02:23Clean Air Act cases.
02:26In Virginia,
02:28that fight is already in front of a judge.
02:30In Goochland County,
02:32near Richmond,
02:34several hundred residents gathered on Monday to talk about four proposed data center campuses in
02:39the eastern part of the county.
02:42The next morning,
02:44Circuit Judge Timothy Sanner spent about three hours hearing arguments on the county's motion to
02:49dismiss a residence's lawsuit challenging its tech overlay district,
02:55and took the motion under advisement with no timeline.
02:58Plaintiffs dropped four of their nine claims,
03:01leaving three.
03:02The proposals total roughly 2,900 megawatts,
03:07900 from developer tract,
03:101,200 near West Creek,
03:12600 off Ashland Road,
03:14and 200 more east of Route 288.
03:17As of March,
03:19Dominion Energy's queue held about 15 years of projects.
03:24Meanwhile,
03:26another lawsuit asks what happened to the water under people's homes.
03:30Four Georgia families are suing Mehta,
03:33claiming construction of its Stanton Springs data center,
03:36on the Newton and Walton County line,
03:39fouled the wells they depend on.
03:41The 180-page suit says blasting,
03:45excavation,
03:46and land clearing disturbed the groundwater system and sent sediment into the aquifer.
03:51Beverly and Jeff Morris,
03:54who live about 400 yards away,
03:57say they have gone through three washing machines and at least two dishwashers,
04:02and haul water for drinking and animals.
04:05Meta acknowledges limited blasting about 1.1 miles away,
04:10but says an independent study found the data center was not likely the cause,
04:15and that every gallon it used came from the local utility.
04:19Congressman R. O'Connor toured the area.
04:23State maps show the site sits in a recharge area.
04:27Oregon's answer to those water and power concerns is a freeze,
04:31and one small city is calling it an emergency.
04:34On October 20, five of the six Umatilla City Council members present voted to declare a state of emergency over
04:42Governor Tina Kotec's order,
04:46which stops the State Department of Environmental Quality from issuing new air and water pollution
04:51permits for data centers until July 2027.
04:56City Manager Dave Stockdale estimates the region could lose more than $5 billion in
05:02private development.
05:04And the city faces about $6 million in direct losses,
05:09plus up to $12 million in water infrastructure and community benefit costs.
05:15Umatilla has four operating data centers,
05:18one under construction,
05:20and two more planned by Amazon and Sebi.
05:23The governor's office says the pause protects public health while she reviews recommendations.
05:30Yet despite that regulatory wave,
05:33construction is pressing forward.
05:36At a Thursday night meeting with Linn County residents,
05:39Google laid out plans for a six-building data center campus in Palo,
05:45Iowa,
05:45on a site near a nuclear power plant that is planned to reopen.
05:50Google wants the first piece operating within two years,
05:53with ground-breaking planned for early next year and the full project finishing in 2031.
06:00Water use is expected at 10 to 14 million gallons per day.
06:04And the facility will not use closed-loop cooling,
06:08though a panelist told the meeting the basin has low overall physical water scarcity.
06:13Google originally looked at Linn County itself,
06:17which says the company moved on after the county passed stricter environmental rules and asked for
06:23more money.
06:25Google says it will work to avoid the traffic problems seen in Cedar Rapids.
06:31Inside these campuses,
06:34the technology is changing just as fast.
06:36Meta published details on its Prometheus campus in New Albany,
06:42Ohio,
06:43where the first phase is already live and has been used to train the company's Muse Foundation.
06:49Models.
06:50Hundreds of thousands of GPUs are running now across multiple interconnected buildings.
06:55And at full-scale the campus is planned to reach roughly 1 million GPUs at a planned 1 gigawatt.
07:03The hardware includes NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 systems.
07:09With Vera Rubin expected soon.
07:12Each building's Ethernet fabric connects up to 20,736 GPUs.
07:19And a back-end network links buildings across distances from 2 kilometers to more than 100.
07:25Cooling options include air-assisted liquid cooling and facility liquid cooling.
07:31The scale of that build-out raises an obvious question about the money behind it.
07:37And the financial commitment behind all of it is staggering.
07:41A new Bank of America Global Research Forecast Project's global data center spending will reach
07:47about $1 trillion in 2026 and roughly $2.1 trillion by 2028.
07:55Driven by AI demand.
07:57The firm sees the overall market growing from $275 billion in 2022 to
08:04$2.93 trillion by 2030.
08:08A 37% compound annual growth rate from 2025.
08:13Building a data center costs about $49 million per megawatt.
08:18With IT equipment making up 78% of that, and servers alone near $31.4 million, AI-focused
08:27NeoCloud facilities run closer to $57 million per megawatt.
08:33Chip makers and server developers, particularly in the United States, have been among the biggest
08:40winners so far.
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