00:00A university's $1.25 billion computing center is now facing a revolt, and one of its own regents has joined
00:08the opposition.
00:09Two more cities weighed one-year pauses on data centers Monday night, and a Pennsylvania lawsuit is testing whether a
00:17township can be forced to approve one.
00:21A public university's research computing center has turned into a revolt, and one of the people who governs that university
00:29has joined it.
00:30The University of Michigan wants to build a $1.25 billion high-performance computing facility with Los Alamos National Laboratory
00:40on a 144-acre site on textile road in Ypsilanti Township.
00:46Along the Huron River, Regent Paul Brown has now sided with residents and labor representatives against the plan ahead of
00:55a second town hall, saying the university has failed to engage in inadequate conversation.
01:01The township board unanimously opposed the facility in March, and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell accused the university of ignoring residents' pleas.
01:12Neighbors also point out that the university pays no property taxes.
01:17That kind of local pushback is now spreading city by city, and Monday night put two more communities on the
01:25clock.
01:25In Kalamazoo, Michigan, city commissioners were scheduled to hold a final vote on a one-year moratorium covering data centers
01:35and large battery energy storage systems, giving planners time to rewrite the zoning code.
01:41Assistant city planner Bobby Durkee said the goal is to develop standards before proposals arrive.
01:48In North Carolina, Beaufort County commissioners held a public hearing at 5.30 in Washington on a one-year
01:56pause on large artificial intelligence data centers.
02:00A hearing postponed from September so residents could weigh in.
02:05Neighbors cited noise, emissions and electricity costs, and some asked for a pause longer than a year.
02:12National polling shows 65 to 70 percent opposition to data centers in people's own communities.
02:21That opposition is now making its way into courtrooms, and Pennsylvania offers a striking example.
02:28In Muncie Township, Lycoming County, a group of property owners and the environmental organization Green Amendments for the Generations
02:38have sued over a state planning code provision that deems development applications approved if a
02:44municipality does not hold hearings within 60 days.
02:49Developer Daniel Klingerman filed an application on April 28 for a three-building
02:55artificial intelligence data center campus on 100 acres
03:00and the township passed a moratorium the very same day.
03:04The plaintiffs argue the automatic approval rule strips residents of the environmental rights
03:09guaranteed by Article 1, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution
03:16and violates due process by preventing the hearing and vote the township would otherwise hold.
03:23And the reason these fights keep intensifying comes down to one thing.
03:29Who pays to power the boom?
03:30On September 29, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission partially rejected PJM Interconnection's plan
03:39for a reliability backstop procurement meant to secure about 6.8 gigawatts of capacity for
03:46data center demand, and PJM delayed the auction that was due to begin September 30.
03:54FERC cited concerns about cost allocation, transmission owner exit rules,
04:00and collateral requirements, and said it would not be forced into accepting a deeply flawed
04:0511th-hour mechanism.
04:08One cooperative, Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative, faced roughly $2 billion in collateral alone.
04:16The offer cap was $555 per megawatt day.
04:21And PJM has yet to set a new timeline.
04:25The pressure on the grid is only half the story, because water tells the other half.
04:31Around the Great Lakes, a Fox 32 investigation looked at Joliet, Illinois, where a 795-acre data center campus is
04:42expected to draw about 100.
04:4326,000 gallons a day, roughly 1% of the city's 15.6 million-gallon-gallon daily allotment.
04:52Joliet is switching from its aquifer to Lake Michigan water by 2030.
04:58A move tied to a 62-mile, $1.5 billion pipeline.
05:03And Illinois is allowed to divert just over 2 billion gallons daily from the lake.
05:10But advocates warn that many regional users still rely on groundwater.
05:14That data centers face no mandatory water use reporting.
05:19And that cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis are already sinking about 2 millimeters a year.
05:27State and local officials are taking notice.
05:30And Michigan shows how quickly rules are being written.
05:34In Saginaw, the city council voted 8-0 for a new data center zoning ordinance that requires
05:41developers to submit good neighbor policies, water consumption and thermal management reports,
05:49electric and natural gas service reports, and citizen participation measures.
05:54At the state level, Representative Reggie Miller of Van Buren Township introduced House Bills 6426 and
06:046427, which would strengthen local government protections and require developers to disclose energy and
06:11water usage, infrastructure needs, environmental impacts, ownership and expansion plans.
06:19Both bills have been referred to the House Government Operations Committee as the state's largest energy
06:26companies explore new natural gas power plants.
06:30Yet despite that regulatory wave, construction is pressing forward, and Texas is where the scale
06:37gets enormous.
06:39Crusoe has filed plans for two data center buildings in Jayden, in Kent County, each spanning about
06:46759,000 square feet, with a combined investment estimate of $4.8 billion.
06:53The Jayden campus is a spur of Project Hyper, the larger Crusoe development in Childress, where three
07:01buildings of roughly 806,000 square feet each are already under construction and targeting completion in the
07:09first half of the first half of 2028. Together the two sites represent about $12 billion.
07:16Construction at Jayden is slated to begin at the end of January 2027.
07:21With completion between May and July of 2029, the Childress campus pairs grid power with behind the
07:29meter solar and storage.
07:32And the financial commitment behind that construction is staggering, which is why the industry is now
07:38trying to buy goodwill.
07:40On Monday, Amazon Web Services Chief Executive Matt Garman announced a $1 billion
07:47five-year investment in communities that host its data centers, covering job training, community
07:54college programs and energy upgrades, on top of $1 billion spent over the previous three years.
08:01Garman compared the build-out to the interstate highway system and said data centers use water more
08:08efficiently than the industry average. Critics call some of those arguments misleading.
08:14And a Gallup poll finds 70% of Americans oppose local data center construction.
08:21Amazon alone is spending about $220 billion annually on data centers and chips.
08:27While more than 100 moratoriums are under consideration nationwide.
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