Wholestory

Opposition has crossed into the coalition of the buildout's loudest supporter. An NBC News Decision Desk poll taken between 20 August and 1 September found 69 percent of respondents opposed to an AI data center in their local area, 45 percent strongly — and opposition holding in every partisan group: 81 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents, 57 percent of Republicans. That tracks the 71 percent Gallup measured in May, and settles what earlier surveys left open: this is not a partisan issue. In Buchanan County, Iowa, which voted 63-35 for the President, a Republican supervisor backed a moratorium.

The Interior Board of Land Appeals stopped construction of the 167-megawatt Townsite Data Center on federal land near Boulder City, Nevada on 1 September. The Bureau of Land Management had approved it in June without a new environmental study, reusing the 2023 assessment written for a 19-megawatt solar plant that was never built on the site, reasoning that the two were "essentially like" each other. Boulder City, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club appealed and are likely to win, the board found: "a 300,000-square foot data center is a different project from a 19-MW solar power generating facility." Folding the solar plant's twelve-month build and the data center's eighteen into one "12-18 months" range, it added, masked a possible 50 percent increase in construction impacts. BLM had invoked the 2025 executive order directing agencies to speed data centers onto public land. The record is due 21 September.

Census figures released on 1 September put data center construction at an annual rate of $75.2 billion in July, up 6.2 percent in a month and 57.2 percent on July 2025, while all private construction fell 5.5 percent. They are now most of the office category that contains them, $75.2 billion of $123.3 billion; strip them out and the rest of it fell 11.3 percent. The measure counts work actually put in place, so it records building rather than announcement. It counts only the shell: Cushman & Wakefield puts construction at roughly a fifth of a data center's all-in cost.

New Jersey became the first state to make data centers tell a regulator what they consume. A law Governor Mikie Sherrill signed on 27 August requires every owner and operator to file semi-annual reports with the Board of Public Utilities covering total energy use, the electricity drawn by IT equipment and by cooling, peak daily water use, water sources, and on-site and backup power. The figures are self-reported, no audit is written into the statute, and a carve-out limits access to them under the state's public-records law. The same day she signed the End Data Center Tax Credits Act, blocking the unawarded $250 million of a $500 million incentive created in 2024. The one award already made stands: up to $250 million to CoreWeave for a $1.8 billion, 250-megawatt campus in Kenilworth projecting 143 permanent jobs. More than 50 New Jersey municipalities have already banned or paused the facilities.

The buildout's biggest line item is becoming the memory, not the accelerator. TrendForce reported on 25 August that server DRAM contract prices rose a cumulative 64 percent in the second half of 2025, and expects roughly another 270 percent across 2026. On its estimates DRAM and NAND flash together take 47 percent of the major cloud providers' capital spending this year and 68 percent next. Suppliers are steering scarce capacity to servers: high-bandwidth memory and server modules alone are put at 51 percent of DRAM bit supply. The 2027 shares are projections, not observed prices.

Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Jolly, who vows a one-year construction moratorium if elected, said '70, 80% of people across Florida are saying don't build data centers.' PolitiFact rated it Mostly True: five 2026 Florida polls range from 49% to 89% opposed depending on question wording — a nonpartisan University of North Florida poll Jolly cited found 68% opposed, a Change Research poll found 79%, and an industry-aligned AIF poll framed around tax relief and jobs found 64% in favor. It corroborates, at state and electoral scale, the national opposition this page recorded via Gallup in May. Separately, New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte said on September 2 she will propose a multi-year statewide moratorium in her next budget, opposing a reported hyperscale project in Bow.

Amazon is withdrawing an application to renew a Potomac-aquifer groundwater permit (up to 6.4 million gallons a year, for non-cooling uses) at its planned Birchwood Drive campus in King George County, Virginia, after a Virginia DEQ report found groundwater east of Interstate-95 'declining [in] availability in the near future' and a state senator publicly urged DEQ to deny it. Amazon said it is 'looking at alternatives' and investing in reclaimed water. It is the first recorded instance of a hyperscaler retreating from a specific water permit because of a state agency's own primary finding rather than public pressure alone — the DEQ report separately prompted a bipartisan call for a special legislative session on the aquifer.

CBRE's H1 2026 market report found primary-market data-center capacity under construction hit a record 7,481 MW nationally (up 24.8%), with vacancy at a record-low 1.4% — and for the first time, Atlanta overtook Northern Virginia as the top US market by construction volume: 2,882 MW under way (up 52.3% year over year) against Northern Virginia's 2,420 MW, whose growth CBRE attributes to land and permitting constraints. CBRE flagged local opposition and zoning delays as now as decisive to site selection as power availability — a real-estate-market confirmation, independent of any single developer's claims, of how far and how unevenly the buildout has actually progressed.

Illinois paused new Data Center Investment Program tax-incentive agreements from July 1, with Governor JB Pritzker pressing for a broader framework assigning grid costs to developers, requiring energy and water reporting, and banning non-disclosure agreements. The same day, Arizona's 2026 tax legislation began a three-year moratorium, through June 2029, on new applications for the state's computer-data-center tax exemption, pending a policy reassessment. Both are a second-generation reversal of the sales- and property-tax abatements a first generation of state policy — Louisiana's among them — used to court projects.

Global Energy Monitor's half-year update finds US gas-fired capacity in development up 50 percent since January, from 252 to 378 gigawatts — about a third of the world's total — of which 189 GW is planned specifically to power data centres, nearly double the 97 GW it counted at the end of 2025. Texas alone has 122 GW in development, more than any country on earth, and 77 GW of that is for data centres. Built in full, the US gas fleet would grow by roughly two-thirds at a capital cost GEM puts above $647 billion. Two words carry all the weight: in development, meaning announced, pre-construction and under construction together. GEM's own release supplies the reason to doubt the total — the three main turbine makers report rising backlogs and multi-year lead times.

Lancium will deploy Nvidia's AI-factory technology across what the Texas developer says is 4 GW of leased capacity and more than 15 GW of powered land in development, using Nvidia's DSX designs and power-management systems — including equipment meant to adjust a facility's draw in response to grid conditions. Nvidia is also taking an undisclosed stake in Lancium, which Blackstone backs. The capacity figures are the developer's own and unaudited. The grid-responsive design is what to watch: a datacentre that throttles on a grid signal is a different object, for ratepayers and planners, from one that does not.

The Department of Energy's draft National Transmission Needs Study, out for comment until 7 September, says the country has moved from decades of flat demand to unprecedented load growth, and names hyperscale AI datacentres first among the causes. It finds a pressing need for new transmission; that most congestion is concentrated in five percent of the hours; and that MISO, SPP, PJM and ERCOT have each recently approved among their largest transmission portfolios ever, MISO's 2024 approval being the biggest in US history. At the Missouri feedback session on 24 August, the figures attached were roughly 4,000 miles of line needing replacement every year for decades, a network mostly built in the 1960s and 70s, and projected US electricity consumption up 16 to 25 percent by 2034. It is a draft in consultation, not a finding, and it says explicitly that it does not propose solutions.

The memory squeeze has arrived at the price of a rack. Bloomberg reported on 22 August that contract manufacturers building servers for Microsoft, Google and Oracle have told customers that Nvidia-based systems shipping early next year will cost more than 15 percent more, with the increase varying by chip generation and memory configuration and applying to Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell machines. The cause is DRAM: an accelerator's usable performance depends on how much memory it is paired with, and Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — between them most of world DRAM output — have unprecedented leverage over buyers who cannot substitute. This is a capital cost climbing into the buildout's capex rather than a demand signal, and it is not confined to AI: Apple and Qualcomm have both said chip shortages are forcing their prices up.

Opposition to AI data centres has become an electoral position with less than three months to the US midterms. On the day of Florida's gubernatorial primaries — won comfortably by Representative Byron Donalds — data centres were a central issue; Donalds introduced a Protecting Ratepayers Act in July to put development costs on private developers rather than taxpayers, and was congratulated on his win by Leading the Future, the Marc Andreessen-backed AI political action committee that had financially backed him. Both facts stand together. The same day, Pennsylvania's governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order imposing strict standards on data-centre development in his state.

The Tennessee Valley Authority's board approved its 2026 Integrated Resource Plan on 20 August, alongside a budget carrying a $3.5 billion gas plant and roughly $13 billion of grid investment over three years. The Sierra Club, which opposed it and is an interested party, says the plan sets up an overbuild of gas to serve AI data-centre demand while shrinking the renewables programme; TVA's own IRP document has not been read here. The distinction worth holding: this is a utility building generation for grid-served load, not a data centre building generation for itself. It arrives in the same week TVA put data centres in a separate, higher rate class.

The pushback recorded across the summer began converting into binding government action at two levels within two days. In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05 directing the state environmental agency to review a data-centre permit only where the developer has made a legally binding commitment to a set of "Responsible Infrastructure Development" standards — on energy affordability, environmental protection, transparency and community engagement — and has already won local approval; the order pulls all AI data-centre projects out of the state's fast-track permitting program and forbids nondisclosure agreements on them. A day later, on 19 August, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Development Commission voted 6-0 to bar approval of any new data centre in Marion County, Indiana until at least 31 December 2027, effective immediately, and to convene a residents-and-experts panel on size, height, noise and environmental limits before zoning resumes. One is a statewide condition on permitting, the other a hard local pause in a metropolitan county of a million people; together they mark opposition moving from sentiment into instruments a developer must clear.

OpenAI agreed to take about 8 gigawatts-IT at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, on the grounds of the decommissioned Portsmouth gaseous-diffusion plant. SB Energy will build, own and operate the site under a 20-year lease to OpenAI; NVIDIA will be the exclusive compute provider, guaranteeing land, power and shell for an initial 4.25 IT-gigawatts with an option on the remaining 3.75, and investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy. The parties put the buildout at six years, through 2032, with 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 permanent ones, an $80 million community fund and $84 million in ChatGPT Codex credits for Ohio students. OpenAI says the campus will pay its own energy and grid-upgrade costs "not shifted to Ohio or other ratepayers," use closed-loop air cooling drawing water "comparable to an office building," and publicly report expected water use once designed — the same self-funding, low-water framing operators now attach to every large campus, and each of those claims is a filing the record will test rather than a fact yet established.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center's survey of 1,320 American adults, fielded from 16 June to 19 July, found 61 percent opposed to the construction of new data centres in their area — 44 percent strongly — against 14 percent in support, compared with 49 percent opposed and 21 percent in support in the survey ending in March. The twelve-point move is the largest shift on any artificial-intelligence question the centre has measured in these surveys, and it is close to the only one: over the same four months Americans' expectations of AI's effect on the country were statistically unchanged, with 39 percent still expecting a negative decade, and the two-thirds who say government has done too little to regulate AI did not move either. What shifted was the building, not the technology. Opposition crosses party lines — 69 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of independents — and is highest among adults under 30 at 70 percent, falling to 57 percent among those 65 and over, the reverse of the usual pattern for a new technology. It also survives familiarity: heavy AI users are far less negative about AI in the abstract than non-users, 29 percent against 54 percent, but data-centre opposition is flat across usage groups at 64, 60 and 60 percent. The absolute level is instrument-dependent and should be read with care — Gallup's telephone survey in March put local opposition at 71 percent where Annenberg's comparable spring reading was 49 — so it is the movement within one instrument, not the number, that is the finding. It is arriving in council chambers. On 17 August three North Carolina local governments took up pauses in a single day: Greensboro a 120-day moratorium on facilities drawing more than 10 megawatts, having rejected one 5-4 in July; Yadkin County a twelve-month moratorium covering data centres, cryptocurrency mining and associated uses its ordinance says are “not yet defined”; and Alamance County a hearing on the two-year pause requested by the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and the Haw River Assembly, to allow a land-use study and confirmation that the water supply is adequate for the homes and farms already there. Two days earlier a developer withdrew an annexation request for a data centre in southeast Raleigh after opponents filled all thirty public-comment slots at the scheduled hearing. Surry County had approved 24 months in July, and an Elon University poll of 800 North Carolina adults at the end of July found 53 percent opposed against 20 percent in support, up from 44 percent opposed in March. How far this has gone is itself disputed: NC Newsline puts it at more than twenty North Carolina local governments with moratoriums, while a tally by Frank Muraca, a former state commerce department analyst, gives ten counties, seventeen cities and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, with terms from one year to 32 months — the longest state law allows without legislative approval. Nationally, Jeremy Solomon of Learnewable, which sells analysis of county ordinances and so has an interest in the count, puts roughly one in seven of the 3,144 US counties under some form of restriction and says developers are shifting toward lower-population counties in the Upper Midwest, Colorado, Wyoming and Alaska.

PC Partner, which makes the Zotac, Inno3D and Manli graphics cards, filed half-year accounts to 30 June that put numbers on what the AI buildout's demand for memory is doing downstream of it. Own-brand card revenue fell 9.2 percent to HK$4.46 billion on units down 18.4 percent, with a 10.7 percent higher average selling price making up part of the gap; the company reports a further supply constraint on both processors and graphics memories through the second quarter, and cut work in progress by 68.8 percent on reduced output. It shipped less and earned more: group revenue was near flat at HK$6.45 billion, up 1.5 percent, while gross margin rose from 10.5 to 16.5 percent and profit attributable to owners more than doubled, up 117.9 percent to HK$545.5 million, as raw materials fell from 87.1 to 81.7 percent of sales. One line looks like a price surge and is not — contract manufacturing revenue rose 73.9 percent on an average selling price up 181 percent, but units fell 38.4 percent and the filing attributes the change to being awarded more orders for high-end boards, which is a change of mix rather than of price. The company also blames long lead times and limited availability of processors and memory for declines in its other businesses, without quantifying any lead time. A second account of the same market disagrees with the first on volumes. Jon Peddie Research reports consumer add-in board sales up 28 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2026, from 9.25 to 11.82 million units, with point-of-sale dollars up 76 percent from $6.18 to $10.85 billion, and Jon Peddie suspects board makers are “taking advantage of all of the press reports on higher memory prices and shortages to raise AIB prices more than the delta in memory costs.” The two are not strictly contradictory — an industry-wide retail tracker against one manufacturer's own shipments — and neither side reconciles them. The harder evidence for Peddie's suspicion is in the filing rather than his tracker: margin expanded by six points on flat revenue and falling volume.

A group called North Carolina Connects has spent about two months running television, radio and social-media advertising in favour of data centres without disclosing that it is backed by the Data Center Coalition, the Virginia trade association whose members include Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The coalition has formed comparable non-profit groups in Ohio, Virginia and Texas, whose websites resemble one another and carry no contact information beyond an online form, and its own revenue has grown from $304,000 at its launch in 2019 to $4.6 million in 2024 on federal tax records. Asked about the link to the North Carolina group, the coalition's executive vice-president for state policy, Dan Diorio, kept his camera off, declined to answer and directed the reporter to a written statement. A second market has formed alongside the first, in watching the opponents rather than persuading them. The American Prospect, which obtained the document, reports that RANE Network sent federal energy regulators a product solicitation in March 2025 offering an assessment of “rising anti-technology sector sentiment” and its implications for the agency; that Liferaft, an online surveillance firm owned by the security company Securitas, published a report on 31 July summarising months of monitoring of social-media and forum posts it characterises as threats to AI infrastructure and executives; and that Kroll has begun selling data-centre operators risk intelligence covering public controversy, labour tensions, executive visibility and activism. Nothing on the record says the regulator responded to or bought RANE's offering, and no operator is named as a client. What the campaigns are not doing is publishing numbers. In North Carolina a data centre need not disclose its employment even when it takes a tax break: Google signed an agreement with the city of Lenoir designating its job figures a trade secret, and Amazon has told Richmond County officials that 500 people will eventually work at its Hamlet campus, with no date and no mechanism to check it. Developers routinely require host governments to sign non-disclosure agreements. Amazon asked the state's Division of Air Quality to keep details of an air-permit application confidential and relented only when regulators questioned the reasoning; Microsoft said in the spring that it would stop requiring the agreements and terminated existing ones, including with Person County. The coalition acknowledges that operators keep some operational details confidential and says the industry is working out what to release.

The bargain host states have offered the buildout — tax exemptions in exchange for investment — began to unwind in the 2026 legislative sessions. At least 25 states introduced bills to repeal or restrict data-center tax subsidies and eight enacted them, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, with Maine the only state to fully repeal all available subsidies; its new law removes data centers that begin operating on or after 1 August 2026 from eligibility for the business-equipment tax exemption. Where legislation stalled, governors moved by executive action: Illinois's J.B. Pritzker paused new agreements under the Data Center Investment Program from 1 July, Ohio's Mike DeWine paused the state's sales-tax exemption for new projects, Massachusetts's Maura Healey halted applications and issued a protective framework, and Nebraska's Jim Pillen blocked data centers from the state's main business-incentive program. Washington eliminated its sales-and-use exemption for urban data centers qualifying through refurbishment, and North Carolina repealed its electricity sales-tax break while keeping equipment incentives. The context is fiscal: some 40 states offer data-center subsidies, ten of them losing over $100 million a year each and Texas and Virginia each over $1 billion, while at least 14 states do not disclose the cost; legislators filed more than 300 data-center bills across 41 states in 2026, roughly double the prior year. Arizona went furthest of the executive actions: Governor Katie Hobbs signed a three-year freeze on new applications and renewals under the state's 2013 data-center incentive as part of an $18.3 billion bipartisan budget, effective 1 July, which her office puts at $57 million in avoided cost. The programme it suspends exempts developers from tax on equipment purchases if they invest $50 million in a larger county or $25 million in a smaller one within five years, for ten years or twenty if the project qualifies as sustainable redevelopment — and the fortnight before the gate closed produced the clearest measure yet of what these exemptions are worth to the industry. The Arizona Commerce Authority received 113 applications between 15 and 30 June, all but matching the 123 it had taken in the previous thirteen years, since the programme opened in August 2013. Eighty-three of those earlier 123 were approved; the new batch was still inside the authority's 60-day window at the time of reporting, and the authority said many were for facilities at sites that already host data centers. The Data Center Coalition's Arizona lobbyist, Russell Smoldon, called the rush "a little bit of panic" and speculated most would not become real data centers — an industry reading of the industry's own filings, and unverified. In North Carolina the electricity exemption repealed in early July had been worth as much as $2.2 million a year to a project drawing 100 megawatts, on state Commerce Department figures; the equipment exemption that survived is worth more than $45 million a year that would otherwise reach state and local government. The trend is not universal — Kentucky expanded its sales-and-use exemption in 2024 and 2025, drawing what one tax attorney called 'dozens' of new projects — but the direction in most statehouses has turned from courtship toward re-opening the arithmetic.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to conduct a comprehensive verification and audit of every data center advancing through ERCOT's interconnection process, and barred any such project from proceeding until its audit is complete — with non-compliant projects to be denied a grid connection outright. It is a statewide freeze on new data-center interconnections in the largest US load region, and it lands against an interconnection queue that has swollen past accounting: ERCOT is weighing roughly 474 gigawatts of interconnection requests, about 90 percent of them data centers and more than five times the state's record peak demand. The audit must document, for each project, its tax incentives, whether it draws on on-site or grid power, its water sourcing and cooling, its community-impact mitigation, and its ownership. The order builds on Abbott's 10 June directive to "shield Texans from data-center infrastructure costs," but this is the harder instrument — the queue is the ground truth of the buildout in Texas, and the state has now stopped it moving until each entry proves itself real. The approval pause is a land-use and consent action even though its motive is grid strain; what a household's bill will do sits with the grid and its regulators, not here. On 14 August, at an emergency meeting of the utility commission — the first public discussion by the regulator and the grid operator since the pause was ordered — ERCOT put a size on the exercise: the audit will cover roughly 250 to 300 projects, most of them data centers, representing about 200 gigawatts of future demand, more than twice the record peak the Texas grid set in July. ERCOT has also asked to hold back the notifications it was due to send developers in the first tranche of its Batch Zero interconnection study, while still aiming to finish that study on its original April timetable, and says the audit will take several months. Both institutions played down the novelty of the order — general counsel Chad Seely said the letter "really" means "moving that verification process now to the front of the line before we begin the interconnection study process," and commission chair Thomas Gleeson said its goal "is to provide more certainty and confidence in the Batch Zero process" — which is a reordering of work already planned rather than a new test. The queue behind it is the reason the reordering matters: more than 1,800 individual projects, 90 percent of them data centers, and both ERCOT and data-center company representatives now say plainly that many will never be built for want of financing or a tenant who has agreed to lease server space. The queue has grown large enough that ERCOT has stopped issuing demand forecasts against it.

The binding constraint on AI compute has shifted from accelerators to the memory beside them. C.K. Chang, chief executive of the Taiwanese module maker Apacer, told the company's half-year investor conference that supply of DRAM from the major manufacturers to independent module makers could fall to about 30 percent of this year's volumes in 2027, and that roughly 60 percent of DRAM capacity is now directed to server-related applications. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, who between them hold more than 90 percent of the market, are prioritising high-bandwidth memory and server parts bought directly by large AI and cloud customers, leaving conventional memory to compete for what is left. Chang expects contract prices to rise about 30 percent in the third quarter of 2026, with flash up more than 20 percent, and says his firm's greatest risk is no longer overpaying for chips but being allocated none at all — it raised inventory by about 48 percent in a quarter and is arranging a five-year syndicated loan to buy whatever the manufacturers release. Chinese suppliers have closed the price gap without adding enough capacity to change the balance. The effect reaches well past the industry: memory is now a rising input cost in consumer computers and in cars. Chang's figure is not the market's consensus, and the gap is worth stating: TrendForce, the specialist contract-price tracker, puts server DRAM at 13 to 18 percent quarter on quarter in the same quarter — roughly half his estimate — while agreeing on the direction and extending it, forecasting a server DRAM shortage in 2027 and quarterly increases from the second half of 2026 through the second half of 2027 at a gradually moderating pace. The pass-through to consumers is now visible in retail indices: Germany's DDR5 price index rose from 445 to 486 percent of its July 2025 level during August, leaving a typical kit close to five times its price a year earlier.

The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data-centre fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling operations after tracing Cupriavidus gilardii, a metal-resistant bacterium, in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus. The bacterium interfered with two water-reclamation plants and put the reuse system offline for months of cleanup; the board revoked the contractor's fill-and-flush discharge privileges on 24 March and the suspension now covers every data centre connected to city services. The finding matters beyond one city because of which cooling design produced it. Microsoft and Nvidia market sealed liquid loops as a near-zero-water alternative to evaporative cooling, filled once during construction and then recirculated — but the one-time fill is itself a discharge, because crews flush the piping to clear debris and that water leaves the site before the loop is sealed. Frank Strong, the board's engineering and water resource division manager, told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle that the fill water had been bought from the board itself, that the bacterium's origin remains unknown, and that laboratory staff caught it in February during routine sampling for a different organism: “This isn't something we normally test for.” Cupriavidus gilardii is not a regulated contaminant, yet the discharge disrupted treatment enough to trigger pass-through and interference findings under the Cheyenne city code and federal pretreatment rules, and the board's stated concern runs wider than one organism — closed loops can carry glycol and other chemicals municipal plants are not built to process, and Cheyenne sprays its reclaimed water on parks and golf courses, where an aerosol is a plausible exposure route. Meta says it is supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite, and that independent testing found no trace; testing at the Dry Creek and Crow Creek facilities cleared in late June and the reuse system is back online. A city councilman, Pete Laybourn, called the disclosure “a very, very unpleasant surprise.” The board has not said how the suspension affects the other Cheyenne data centres still under construction.

A transmission line fault in Ashburn, Virginia — “Data Center Alley”, the world’s densest concentration of data centers — caused hyperscale facilities to transfer automatically to backup power, removing more than 3 GW of demand from the PJM grid within seconds, about 3% of system demand at the time, and producing a measurable voltage and frequency disturbance across a grid reaching from the Mid-Atlantic into the Midwest. PJM reported no reliability impact; at the time it had published no event analysis and had not disclosed the fault’s cause, though its 6 August Operating Committee review later did (see below). Dominion Energy said the utility shed no load and disconnected nobody: “the data centers’ own control systems transferred them to backup power for a very short period of time.” That is consistent with the primary record. NERC’s January 2025 incident review of a comparable July 2024 event in the Eastern Interconnection found approximately 1,500 MW of loss, all of it disconnected on the customer side, all of it data-center-type load; about 1,260 MW did not return for hours. The mechanism NERC documents is not a simple voltage trip but a counter: a protection scheme tallies voltage disturbances, and typically three within a minute sends the facility to backup power until someone reconnects it manually. A three-attempt automatic reclosing sequence on the faulted line produced six faults in 82 seconds. NERC also notes its own glossary defines load loss in two ways that both explicitly exclude this kind of customer-initiated reduction — which is how a 3 GW disappearance and “no load was shed” can both be true — and states that there are currently no voltage ride-through Reliability Standards for large loads at all. Its March 2026 white paper found the existing standards inadequate for integrating loads of this kind; responses to a Level 3 Essential Action Alert are due 3 August 2026 and an initial standard is expected by year end. Three weeks earlier PJM had issued its first-ever backup-generator warning during a heat wave; no generators were dispatched. Against the 1,500 MW of July 2024, the July 2026 response is roughly double. PJM's 6 August Operating Committee review fixed the figures: about 3,800 MW disconnected in two waves — 2,970 MW, then a further 1,099 MW as the resulting high voltage propagated — the largest such event in PJM's history, with overall load falling from 99,984 to 96,205 MW and the balancing-area control error recovered within nine minutes against a 30-minute standard. Its operating-committee chair said the loads are simply too sensitive: “this was a normally cleared fault; they should not disconnect from the grid.” On 11 August PJM said it had begun writing ride-through and other interconnection requirements for computational loads — but the mandatory NERC computational-load standards FERC ordered, due in a first phase by 31 December 2026, will not include the minimum voltage and frequency ride-through envelope until 2027, after much of the load is connected.

The Texas Senate Finance Committee held a hearing scrutinizing the state's data-center tax exemption, now projected to cost $3.3 billion in forgone revenue — a program written for a smaller industry, repriced by the AI buildout. The hearing is scrutiny rather than repeal, but it puts Texas on the same arc this record shows elsewhere: jurisdictions that courted data centers with decade-scale abatements are re-opening the arithmetic as the facilities' scale, and their claims on grid and water, land on public balance sheets.

The Texas Public Utility Commission unanimously approved rules requiring large computational loads to ride through voltage and frequency excursions rather than disconnect — the regulatory answer to the failure mode that materialized thirteen days later, when a single fault dropped more than 3 GW of data centers off the ERCOT grid in seconds. Ride-through obligations have bound generators for decades; extending them to loads formalizes what the interconnection queue has made obvious, that gigawatt-scale consumers are now grid infrastructure with grid responsibilities.

Meta and BlackRock announced a venture to own the El Paso data centre campus, one of the few projects at the built rather than announced end of the spectrum: already under construction, more than 2,300 workers on site, one gigawatt of compute capacity, first capacity expected in 2028. Funds managed by BlackRock take 80 percent and Meta 20 percent of roughly $14 billion in development cost, with Meta contributing about $2.3 billion of land and construction in progress, BlackRock about $4.9 billion in cash, and a portion of BlackRock's side funded from a $12.5 billion debt financing — so the campus is predominantly borrowed against rather than owned outright. The ownership split describes less than it appears to. Meta leases the entire campus back as sole occupant, provides the construction and property management, and gives residual value guarantees with an aggregate threshold of about $13 billion — close to the whole development cost — decreasing over time. On what El Paso gets and gives, the release is one-sided: more than 4,000 construction jobs at peak against 300 permanent ones, a ratio of roughly thirteen to one, consistent with the twelve-to-one and fifteen-to-one splits disclosed elsewhere this month; a $500,000 grant to the city's public schools; and water addressed only as unquantified "restoration projects," with no consumption volume, aquifer or utility named for a gigawatt campus in the Chihuahuan Desert. No tax abatement, payment in lieu of taxes or utility rate arrangement is mentioned anywhere.

Columbia County's development authority named Google as the sole end user and operator of the proposed Columbia County Data Center — 23 buildings across 1,900 acres northwest of Augusta, eight million square feet — and the county commission's chairman appeared onstage in Washington with President Trump to tout the deal. The announcement came from the county, not from Google, which is not quoted; a Trammell Crow Company subsidiary of CBRE filed the regional-impact application in April 2025. The project is at rezoning stage, with commissioners attaching conditions on noise limits, separation from existing homes and a landscaped berm. Neither the county's dedicated project website nor the trade account of the announcement gives a capacity in megawatts, an investment figure, a jobs number, a water or power consumption figure, or any tax abatement term; the site's frequently-asked-questions section is present and empty. Its benefits appear as unquantified headings — a school-district partnership, workforce programmes for veterans and military families — beside the commission chairman's argument that the campus will broaden the tax base so that schools, roads and public safety "rely less on residential property owners."

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission directed the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to write new or modified Reliability Standards for integrating "computational loads" into the bulk-power system, and to revise its rules of procedure — including registry criteria for "computational load entities" — by 31 December 2026, with a further filing due 1 March 2027 on the next phase. Reliability Standards, once approved, are mandatory and enforceable, so the order starts the process that would make a data centre's electrical behaviour a compliance obligation rather than a contractual matter. NERC's own April proposal would register an entity that contributes at least 20 megawatts of aggregate connected load at a single bulk-power-system interconnection at 60 kilovolts or above and hosts at least one megawatt of computational load — a threshold that reaches owners, tenants, colocation providers and hosts alike, and leaves open which of them carries the obligation. The Commission cited disturbances NERC has documented in which computational loads caused or contributed to grid instability.

PJM, the grid operator for 67 million people from Illinois to Virginia, ran its capacity auction for the 2028-29 delivery year and cleared at $325 per megawatt-day — the maximum its price cap allows, and the third consecutive auction to finish at the ceiling. Even at the ceiling it fell about 6.8 gigawatts short of the supply needed to meet the standard of one loss-of-load event per decade, the second successive auction to clear short. Only 525 megawatts of new generation cleared, roughly half the amount that cleared six months earlier. PJM's own results report simulates that without the cap the auction would have cleared at $554.72 region-wide, and $776.69 in the Chicago-area ComEd zone. Monitoring Analytics, the independent monitor of PJM's markets, puts the auction's total capacity charges at $16.4 billion and about $6.3 billion of that directly attributable to data-centre demand — the hardest attribution figure yet produced for the buildout's cost to other electricity customers.

Gallup published the first national measurement of how the buildout is landing where it lands. Seventy-one percent of Americans said they would oppose the construction of an AI data centre in their own local area, 48 percent of them strongly; barely a quarter were in favour. The same survey asked the parallel question Gallup has put about nuclear plants since 2001, and found 53 percent opposed to one locally — so local resistance to a data centre now runs eight points above the highest local opposition to nuclear power ever recorded, 63 percent. Opposition was broadly flat across age, race, education, income and urban or rural residence, running from 63 percent in the West to 76 percent in the Midwest, and majorities of every party group opposed. The sharpest divide was environmental: 78 percent among those who worry about the quality of the environment against 52 percent among those who do not. Fieldwork was 2 to 18 March 2026, by telephone with a random sample of 1,000 adults, margin of error four points. In a separate web survey of the same panel in April, opponents most often named resource use — water and energy at 18 percent each — followed by quality-of-life effects and higher utility bills.

The Hillsboro city council voted unanimously at a special meeting to adopt a 120-day moratorium on new land-use applications for data centers and battery energy storage sites — the first Oregon city to do so, in the city with 35 data centers, more than anywhere else in the state, and at least seven more under construction or in permitting. Mayor Beach Pace said the city gave only a day’s notice of the meeting to stop developers filing applications before the pause took effect; existing facilities and already-submitted applications are exempt, and state law caps the pause at 120 days with one possible extension. The Washington County Chamber of Commerce, the Westside Economic Alliance and three construction unions opposed it, the chamber arguing the council should wait for the governor’s data center advisory council to finish. Portland General Electric and Renewable Northwest asked that battery storage be excluded; councilors Cristian Salgado and Rob Harris included it anyway. Local opposition sharpened in spring 2026 when residents learned tech companies had secured decades of property-tax breaks, and the Oregon Legislature’s one-year pause on new Enterprise Zone data-center tax breaks earlier in the year did not stop new applications being filed.

The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease SB Energy’s 10 GW campus at Piketon, Ohio, and that Nvidia is discussing guaranteeing roughly $250 billion of the financing behind the lease, with about $350 billion more of chip financing separately under discussion. Nothing is signed; neither company responded to requests for comment, and the reporting reaches this page through two write-ups of a single anonymously sourced story. What is not in doubt is the campus. SB Energy broke ground on 20 March at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which enriched uranium for the U.S. weapons programme from 1954 to 2001 and is still being decontaminated; the Department of Energy leases the federal land, and lists Portsmouth among 16 federal sites opened to data-center construction. Powering it takes 9.2 GW of new natural gas funded by $33.3 billion Japan committed under its trade agreement with the United States, plus $4.2 billion of 765 kV transmission and four substations with AEP Ohio that SB Energy has committed to pay for; the first phase of roughly 800 MW is expected in 2028, and DOE projects more than 10,000 construction jobs over four years against more than 2,000 permanent ones, with a $40 million community benefits agreement. Two things about the reported deal are checkable now. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick controls allocation of the site’s power — a cabinet officer, not a utility tariff or a market — and per the same report Anthropic, Microsoft and Google have all approached him about it in recent weeks. And the guarantee would be an order of magnitude outside anything Nvidia has disclosed: its Q1 FY2027 10-Q caps maximum gross exposure across all partner facility lease guarantees at $3.5 billion, with $712 million in escrow, and calls their fair value immaterial. $250 billion would be roughly seventy-one times that, more than a full year of Nvidia’s $215.9 billion FY2026 revenue, and about four times its $62.6 billion of cash and securities. Those filing figures reach this page through Tom’s Hardware’s reading of them rather than from the filings themselves. Nvidia’s stock fell 4.9% in midday trading on 27 July.

President Trump announced an expansion of the voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge at an event at the Environmental Protection Agency, adding more than 200 utilities, developers, cooperatives and states. The White House says it is now signed by 23 governors and at least 187 companies — including 55 utilities and 27 data-center developers, among them NextEra, Duke Energy, American Electric Power, Southern Company and PG&E — and covers 80% of all power delivered to U.S. homes and businesses, a figure it does not show its working for. The pledge is nonbinding. Its Georgia example is worth reading against the underlying documents: the White House release says Southern Company is “freezing base rates through 2029” and delivering more than $1.7 billion in savings, over $100 a year for a typical residential customer. The Georgia Power release the White House links is titled as a freeze through 2028; Georgia Power’s own 22 July release describes a freeze through 2028 plus $102 in annual savings beginning in 2029; and Utility Dive reported in February that Georgia Power had quantified about $1.7 billion in benefits it <em>intends</em> to use to lower costs from 2029 to 2031. Matthew Freedman of the Utility Reform Network said the same companies signing the pledge are opposing California legislation that would force them to deliver on it. A recent ICF analysis projects monthly utility bills rising 15% to 40% by 2030 on demand growth.

The Texas Water Development Board approved the initial 2027 State Water Plan after denying a petition to add forecasts and historic figures for data centers’ water use; board staff recommended rejection on the ground that the state is late in its five-year planning cycle. The approved plan contains no specific data on large-scale digital infrastructure, so the statutory instrument Texas uses to plan its water supply will likely not account for the sector when it is finalized in 2027. Board attorney Breann Hunter said the agency is developing methodologies to separate data-center and crypto-miner demand for the following plan — which publishes in 2032. Board member Brady Franks defended the omission: “I just didn’t want folks to think that if it’s not in the water plan, someone’s not thinking about it or someone’s not considering it.” Texas ranks second among states for data-center-attributable emissions and second nationally for open and planned facilities. The board’s own record of the vote was not retrieved.

OpenAI announced Project Camellia, a campus it is designing and developing in Effingham County, Georgia, about 45 minutes from Savannah, and contracted with Georgia Power for approximately 3,200 MW to be delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032 under a 25-year agreement. OpenAI agreed to provide up to 1,000 MW of flexible demand response, which Georgia Power calls among the largest single-facility demand-response commitments in the country — a superlative it does not benchmark. The large-load contract was still under review by Georgia Public Service Commission staff, and OpenAI describes the project as at the beginning of development with significant work remaining on infrastructure, phasing, design, financing and operating model: contracted for power, not permitted or built. The site sits inside the already industrially-zoned Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub; Data Center Frontier relays local reporting putting the initial investment at at least $20 billion across roughly 1,400 acres, a figure neither primary document states. OpenAI committed $80 million in community benefits over the life of the project, up to $71 million in Codex credits for Georgia students at $100 each — denominated in its own product at its own list price — and an annual independent audit, with no auditor named and no first-audit date. It expects to be the county’s largest taxpayer; neither document discloses any abatement, exemption or payment-in-lieu arrangement either way. On jobs, both parties give a single undifferentiated figure: OpenAI promises “thousands of construction and permanent on-site jobs” and Georgia Power “thousands of new jobs”. The absence is the finding. Where operators did split the two this month, the ratios ran 12 to 1 at Meta’s newly operating Temple, Texas site (about 1,200 peak construction workers, about 100 permanent) and 15 to 1 at a proposed New Zealand campus.

Ohio EPA said it would not finalize draft NPDES general permit OHD000001, which would have set standard terms for data centers discharging waste- and stormwater into state waterways, and will instead review such permits individually. The draft, introduced in October 2025, stated in its own text that “a lowering of water quality of various waters of the state associated with granting coverage under this permit is necessary to accommodate important social and economic development in the state of Ohio.” More than 7,000 public comments were filed by mid-January, and opposition ran across party lines, including Senator Bernie Moreno and Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor. Nathan Johnson of the Ohio Environmental Council said a one-size-fits-all permit “would have eliminated meaningful agency review of data center water pollution discharges and cut notice and comment opportunities for local communities.” The two accounts of the permit’s reach differ: Circle of Blue describes it as covering data centers statewide regardless of size, location or type, while the Columbus Dispatch scopes it to new facilities without access to sewerage that treats wastewater. Neither the draft’s discharge volumes, pollutant limits nor receiving waters are reported, and the draft permit document itself was not retrieved.

Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order No. 62, the first statewide pause on data-center development in the United States. Two legal readings of the Order’s text describe something considerably narrower than the wire coverage of it. The Order holds in abeyance the Department of Environmental Conservation’s <em>discretionary</em> permits for facilities consuming 50 megawatts or more; it expressly does not reach permits, approvals or licenses from local governments, so site plan approval, zoning relief and municipal building permits continue on their normal track; it exempts applications already deemed complete before 14 July; and it ends not on a calendar date but when the Department of Public Service submits a Generic Environmental Impact Statement, with the one-year figure a target rather than a term. The Associated Press described the same instrument as “an order banning construction of large server warehouses in New York for a year” and Al Jazeera as a “one-year moratorium on new data centre construction”. The Order displaced the Responsible Data Center Development Act, which both houses passed in June at a 20 MW threshold and which Hochul has not signed. Roughly 12 GW of data-center load sits in the NYISO interconnection queue, more than 8 GW of it added during 2025, on the governor’s office’s figures. Three dated checkpoints follow: Empire State Development opens a Community Investment Framework for comment by 13 August, DPS must stand up a Data Center Interconnection Working Group by 12 September, and DPS must report to the Public Service Commission on transmission owners’ large-load study practices by 12 October. The Order’s own text could not be retrieved — governor.ny.gov returns HTTP 403 and no archived copy exists — so every account of it here is second-hand.

The Maine Legislature passed a first-in-the-nation bill, LD 307, to ban development of large-scale (>20 MW) data centers for 18 months, awaiting the governor’s signature. It capped a wave of local resistance: by this point at least 11 states had introduced legislation to limit or ban data-center construction, and the Data Center Tracker counted at least 100 local moratoria nationwide. Governor Janet Mills subsequently vetoed the bill, citing its effect on a $550 million redevelopment project — which is why the first statewide pause to take effect was New York’s executive order three months later. The veto is recorded here from a single legal analysis; the Maine legislature’s own record has not yet been checked.

Meta announced it is expanding the Richland Parish “Hyperion” project to 5 gigawatts of compute at a cost of more than $50 billion — a five-fold price escalation from the $10 billion announced 19 months earlier. Meta projects over 7,500 peak construction workers and 1,000 operational jobs, and points to more than $1.6 billion in local contracts, over $1 billion in infrastructure, and up-to-$50,000 teacher bonuses. A company spokesperson said the site should reach 2 GW by 2030 and the full 5 GW by around 2032.

Microsoft completed and brought its first Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin data center online (energized in April 2026, fully operational by late June), reporting nearly 550 on-site full-time staff — growing toward about 800 with a second facility — against roughly $4.7 billion in local spending planned for 2024-2028. The permanent-headcount figure, set beside thousands of construction jobs, again illustrated how few lasting jobs a hyperscale campus supports.

Reporting found hyperscalers generally do not disclose per-site water consumption, often negotiating under shell companies and NDAs. Google’s infrastructure-sustainability lead argued that a facility’s peak water-permit capacity overstates its real annual draw, and the company published five water-stewardship commitments — including replenishing more water than it consumes at its sites by 2030. The dispute — aggregate reassurance versus local, per-site reality — is the unresolved core of the water question.

West Virginia’s HB 2014 (enacted April 2025, effective July 2025) bars counties and municipalities from restricting certified high-impact data centers and microgrids — a state pre-emption of local zoning framed in national-security terms. It marks the opposite pole from the moratorium wave: where some jurisdictions raced to block the buildout, others moved to strip localities of the power to slow it.

Documents released under a public-records settlement showed Google roughly quintupled its water consumption at The Dalles, Oregon between 2012 and 2025, to about 40% of that city’s entire supply — a concrete local figure that cut against the industry’s reassuring aggregate framing and underscored why per-site disclosure matters.

BloombergNEF put 2026 capital spending by the 14 largest data-center operators near $750 billion (up from under $450 billion in 2025), with over 23 GW of capacity under construction globally across 831 sites at the end of September 2025 — about three-quarters in the U.S. Hyperscalers signed more than $100 billion of neocloud compute leases in six months. Dell’Oro separately projects global data-center capital spending to exceed $1 trillion in 2026.

Within a year of the price collapse, the compute market flipped back to shortage. On-demand rental capacity was effectively sold out across GPU types; H100 one-year contract pricing had rebounded to $2.35/GPU-hour (up ~40% from an October 2025 low of $1.70), and customers were paying up to $14/GPU-hour for AWS B200 spot instances. New Blackwell (GB200/GB300) deployments slipped into mid-year, with cloud capacity booked out through late 2026 — driven by surging inference and agentic workloads.

Google, Meta, Oracle, xAI and Amazon joined Microsoft and OpenAI in signing a White House pledge committing to protect ordinary utility customers from bearing data-center power costs — an implicit acknowledgment that the buildout’s cost-shifting onto ratepayers had become a political liability.

OpenAI and Oracle ended talks on a planned 600 MW expansion at the Abilene Stargate campus, cancelling the add-on while the existing site kept operating — a concrete instance of the announced-versus-built gap inside even the flagship program.

Sightline Climate estimated that 30-50% of large data centers scheduled to come online in 2026 would be delayed by power constraints, equipment shortages and financing — and that of at least 16 GW planned globally for 2026 (nearly triple the prior year), only about 5 GW was actually under construction. Developer QTS had announced a ~5 GW pipeline since 2024 with only about a quarter still under construction. The gap between announced and built capacity had become the industry’s defining measurement problem.

The largest U.S. grid operator, PJM, raised its 10-year summer-peak growth rate to 3.6% a year (to about 222 GW by 2036) — more than ten times its 2021 outlook — while simultaneously cutting its 2027 and 2028 peaks by roughly 4 GW on stricter vetting of speculative data-center requests. Its planning chief, Jason Connell, said data-center growth still exceeds anything seen in recent decades. The revision captures the core tension: enormous long-run demand, but a large share of near-term projects that never materialize on schedule.

The EIA’s data showed U.S. electricity demand grew about 1.7% a year from 2020 through 2025 — after growing just 0.1% a year from 2005 to 2019 — with data centers the primary driver. After a generation of flat load, the AI build-out had bent the national demand curve upward, the single clearest measured signal that the physical build-out is reshaping the grid.

By the end of 2025 the average U.S. residential electricity price had risen to about 19 cents/kWh — roughly 27% above 2019 — and climbed 11.5% in 2025 alone, outpacing inflation. In high-concentration Virginia, some bills rose up to 267% over five years. U.S. utilities requested more than $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2025 (double a year earlier), and outstanding household utility-bill debt reached $25 billion. Analysts attribute the increases mainly to transmission and distribution build-out and high capacity-auction prices, with data-center load a growing pressure.

OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage Data Centers broke ground on a Stargate campus in Port Washington, Wisconsin, which OpenAI said would create 4,000 construction jobs and be designed water-positive with closed-loop cooling and developer-funded power infrastructure. The site would later become a flashpoint over its roughly $450 million in tax benefits.

Grid Strategies’ National Load Growth Report put the U.S. five-year peak-demand forecast at 166 GW — more than six times the 24 GW forecast just three years earlier, with data centers driving the bulk. The same report cautioned that utility filings likely overstate 2030 data-center load by around 25 GW (~40%), and that the U.S. built only 888 miles of new high-voltage transmission last year against the ~5,000 miles a year the Department of Energy says is needed to connect it.

NVIDIA reported record quarterly revenue of $57 billion (up 62% year over year), with data-center revenue of $51.2 billion — nearly 90% of sales. CFO Colette Kress said the Blackwell Ultra platform had become the company’s leading architecture across all customer categories, and guided the next quarter to about $65 billion. The chip market’s glut in rentals coexisted with unprecedented demand for the newest silicon.

Ball State economist Michael J. Hicks, using a staggered difference-in-difference analysis of Texas data centers, found the net local employment effect of a new data center is statistically indistinguishable from zero — the only significant effect being roughly 195 temporary construction jobs. He concluded that tax incentives for data centers cannot be justified on job-creation grounds and recommended governments suspend them — a primary empirical rebuttal to the core promise host communities are sold.

Amazon unveiled Project Rainier, an $11 billion, 1,200-acre campus near New Carlisle, Indiana, dedicated to training Anthropic’s Claude models and running roughly 500,000 Amazon Trainium 2 chips — the largest known deployment not built on NVIDIA silicon, with a target of 1 million chips by year-end. Fully built out, the site is planned for 30 buildings and more than 2.2 gigawatts. At peak, over 4,000 construction workers a day were arriving in a town of about 1,900.

Meta and Blue Owl Capital formed a joint venture to build and manage the Richland Parish facility, now valued at $27 billion and planned as a 2 GW data center — the second step in a cost escalation that would nearly double again within a year.

OpenAI announced five additional U.S. Stargate locations — three Oracle-developed sites (Shackelford County TX; Doña Ana County NM; a Midwest site) and two SoftBank/SB Energy sites (Lordstown OH; Milam County TX) — saying that combined with Abilene and CoreWeave projects, Stargate now reached almost 7 gigawatts and over $400 billion. SoftBank had broken ground at Lordstown; the balance remained planned capacity drawn from a search over 300 proposals across 30-plus states.

Microsoft detailed Fairwater, a 315-acre, three-building (1.2 million sq ft) AI data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin running a single cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 GPUs. Microsoft said the facility uses closed-loop liquid cooling that is filled once and recirculated with near-zero evaporative loss — a design pitched directly against the water criticism dogging the industry.

A UK Government report concluded there is no reliable industry data on data-center resource use — only about 40% of operators even track their water consumption. Its figures set the scale of what is unmeasured: a single 100 MW hyperscale facility can consume around 2.5 billion litres of water a year (the household use of ~80,000 people), with roughly 80% of evaporative-cooling water lost for good, plus up to 2.4 gallons per kWh embedded in the power it draws.

The flagship Stargate site in Abilene, Texas came online on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with Oracle beginning delivery of the first NVIDIA GB200 racks. Against a landscape of announcements, Abilene was the proof point that at least part of the $500 billion pledge had become operating hardware.

AWS sharply cut prices on its H100 (P5) instances in June 2025, triggering a broad hyperscaler reset. The Silicon Data H100 rental index had already fallen to $2.36 from $3.06 the prior September, and a low-cost marketplace tier had opened a 3-to-4x gap beneath hyperscaler on-demand rates. NVIDIA’s supply ramp, a wave of 300-plus new rental providers, and the shift from training to inference were turning scarce silicon into a commoditized rental good.

The U.S. government imposed indefinite export-licensing requirements on NVIDIA’s China-market H20 accelerator (and AMD’s MI308), effectively barring sales. NVIDIA took a $5.5 billion charge for unsellable inventory and commitments; China had been about $17 billion, or 13%, of its revenue. The Commerce Department said it was executing the president’s national-security directive — the first time compute access itself became an instrument of state power at this scale.

A Harvard Electricity Law Initiative paper by Eliza Martin and Ari Peskoe, reviewing nearly 50 utility rate proceedings, found utilities using rate structures and secret contracts to shift the cost of new infrastructure built for data centers onto ordinary ratepayers. It provided the primary-record mechanism behind the rising bills — the cost-shift happens through regulatory proceedings, largely out of public view.

OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announced the Stargate Project at the White House — a stated commitment of up to $500 billion and 10 gigawatts of new U.S. AI data-center capacity. Announced as the single largest private compute build-out ever proposed, its headline figure was a commitment, not money spent; the rest of the year would test how much of it turned into energized concrete.

Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a 20-year sales-tax exemption for data centers built before 2029 — a central inducement in courting Meta to the state, and an early template for the aggressive tax packages that host communities would later contest.

Meta announced its then-largest AI data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana — priced at $10 billion across 4 million square feet, projecting 500 permanent jobs and 5,000 construction jobs. To serve it, the regulated utility Entergy planned three new natural-gas plants totaling 2,262 MW over a 15-year term — a fossil build-out attached to a single customer that would become the project’s central controversy.

Constellation Energy signed its largest-ever power-purchase agreement — a 20-year deal to sell 100% of a restarted Three Mile Island Unit 1 (renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, ~835 MW) to Microsoft, targeting a 2028 return and a license extended to 2054. Constellation later put the restart cost at about $1.6 billion. A reactor shut in 2019 on economics was being revived specifically to feed data-center demand — the starkest sign yet that AI’s appetite was reshaping the power system.

Elon Musk's xAI, working with NVIDIA, Dell and Supermicro, brought its Colossus supercomputer online in Memphis, Tennessee: 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper (H100) GPUs wired on a single NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet fabric, built in 122 days with 19 days from first rack to training. It was the era's proof that a frontier-scale cluster could be assembled in months, and xAI immediately began doubling it toward 200,000 GPUs.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in the analysis later cited by the Congressional Research Service, put U.S. data-center electricity use at roughly 176 terawatt-hours in 2023 — about 4.4% of all U.S. consumption. It is the pre-AI-build-out baseline against which every later load-growth forecast is measured.

As demand for generative-AI training exploded, the market for NVIDIA's H100 accelerator seized up: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud were effectively out of capacity for buyers wanting hundreds to thousands of chips, and delivery lead times peaked near 11 months. On-demand cloud rental for a single H100 routinely ran $7–$12 per GPU-hour, and an 8-GPU HGX H100 server sold for roughly $300,000–$380,000. Compute scarcity — not model design — was the binding constraint on the field.