00:00In San Antonio, council members spend a special session deciding how far a data center should
00:06have to sit from a family's back fence, and whether any of them belong over the aquifer
00:12the city drinks from. 200 miles north, a judge stopped another town from even holding the vote,
00:19and in the California desert, a groundwater agency told state regulators that the basin
00:26in question is already pumping nearly three times what it can sustain.
00:32We begin in San Antonio, where city council members sat down in a special meeting to decide
00:38what a data center is allowed to. B. City staff walked them through a rewrite of the Unified
00:45Development Code that would confine large data centers to industrial and commercial zones,
00:51require them to sit at least 500 feet from homes and schools, and prohibit them outright over the
00:59Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone, the formation that supplies the city's drinking water.
01:05Councilman Rick Galvin had already asked for something stronger, a city-wide moratorium on
01:11new projects. Support for that pause is uneven, and the council will take it up separately next month.
01:18The zoning language itself would go to the Zoning Commission in September and could reach a council
01:24vote in October. That fight over where a data center may sit is now being settled by judges.
01:32In Tarrant County, Texas, District Judge Kimberly Fitzpatrick signed a temporary restraining order
01:40barring the town of Westlake from holding a vote on approving or taking any action to implement
01:47resolution 26-25. The agreement covering the Circle T Data Center. The order landed just before a special
01:56meeting where that vote was scheduled. The plaintiffs are not even Westlake residents. They are the lakes
02:03at Marshall Ridge Homeowners Association and two neighbors in adjacent Keller. Linda Bjorn and Sharon Sanden,
02:10who argue the town failed to give legally required public notice on the earlier zoning action.
02:17They posted a $5,000 bond. The proposed campus would rise roughly 500 feet from their back fences.
02:26The reason these fights keep escalating is showing up on utility bills.
02:31In Arizona, a state pew researchers count among the country's top hubs. With more than 180 data centers
02:40operating or in development, the utility has asked regulators to raise rates on extra-large energy
02:47users. Overwhelmingly data centers. By 45%, cities are answering with building codes. Phoenix still
02:56leans on data center standards published back in 2022. And Mayor Kate Gallego says that is no longer
03:04enough. She has signed on to a pact with roughly 40 cities worldwide pledging tougher rules on how close
03:11these buildings sit to residents, how much they pollute, and whether fossil fuels power them.
03:19The engineering body ASHRAE is now drafting an addendum covering total water and energy use.
03:26Codes and rate cases assume there is something left to allocate. In the eastern Kern County desert of
03:33California, there may not be. The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority has filed comments with the
03:40California Energy Commission on the proposed R.B. Inyokern data center. Laying out what the basin
03:47actually looks like. It is formally designated critically overdrafted. Pumping runs at roughly 20,840
03:55acre feet a year against a sustainable yield of 7,650. Nearly three times what the ground can give
04:04back. Around 38,000 residents depend on it. And some users are already paying more than $2,000 for a
04:12single
04:12acre foot. The project itself would draw up to 50 acre feet a year and run 44 diesel generators,
04:20producing 99 megawatts of backup power. If water is one constraint, the way electricity moves inside these
04:30buildings is another. And California has just funded an attempt to fix it. The San Diego Supercomputer Center
04:38at UC San Diego will become the testing ground for an $8.48 million California Energy Commission project,
04:46making it one of the first operational AI data centers in the country to run a fundamentally
04:52different power architecture. Instead of stepping voltage down through layer after layer of conversion,
05:00the design carries 12 kilovolts of alternating current straight to 800 volts of direct current,
05:07using a solid-state transformer built by Alderbuck Energy. Before any of it goes live,
05:13the university's $42 million DER Connect facility will simulate real AI workloads
05:20against the system in hardware-in-the-loop testing. Rewiring the building is one approach.
05:29Teaching it to back off is another. And investors just put a serious number behind that idea.
05:35Emerald AI closed an oversubscribed $150 million Series AA at a 1.0.
05:41$5 billion valuation, co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC, bringing its total raised past $220 million.
05:52The company's software makes AI data centers adjust their own power draw in response to grid
05:58conditions, treating them as flexible assets rather than fixed loads. Emerald claims that flexibility
06:06could unlock more than 100 gigawatts of capacity on the existing American grid without building new
06:13transmission. In Manassas, Virginia, it is working with Digital Realty and NVIDIA on a nearly 100-megawatt
06:21facility due online later this year. Sometimes the capacity is already there, just attached to
06:30something that closed. In Hancock County, Kentucky, state regulators approved a retail electric service
06:37agreement covering up to 482 megawatts for Tara Wolf's Justified Data Campus, a 790-acre site the
06:47company bought from Century Aluminum. Where a smelter once drew that same power, the commission found
06:54that Tara Wolf will bear the market, transmission and delivery costs attributable to its own load,
07:01along with customer-specific infrastructure costs and substantial credit support, so that other
07:07ratepayers are not subsidizing it. Negotiated demand adders send incremental revenue to Big Rivers Electric
07:15and Kennergy. The first facility is due online in 2027, with the AI Lab Anthropic signed on as a long
07:23-term
07:23tenant. And if the grid, the water and the zoning board are all constraints, one company's answer
07:32is to leave the planet entirely. Starcloud closed a $250 million Series A extension at a $2.3 billion
07:41valuation, led by Manhattan West, with NVIDIA and Cisco Investments joining as new backers.
07:49That brings the company's total raise to $450 million since it was founded. In 2024, Starcloud flew the
07:58first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit in November of 2025, and it is now building production lines for its
08:07next-generation spacecraft in a 100,000-square-foot facility in Woodinville, Washington. The long-range
08:16plan is an 88,000-satellite constellation delivering 20 gigawatts of compute in orbit.
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