00:00San Francisco just froze new data centers, and the vote was unanimous.
00:05In Illinois, neighbors are suing over a hyperscale campus approved by a 17-10 vote,
00:12and a utility settlement could decide who pays for the power.
00:18San Francisco just hit the brakes on its own data center boom.
00:22On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously for a 45-day halt on new data centers and on
00:30expansions of existing ones.
00:33Effective immediately, District 10 Supervisor Shaman Walton, who introduced the measure,
00:40pointed to environmental effects and a lack of community input,
00:44noting that the Bayview neighborhood already carries a disproportionate share of the city's
00:49industrial pollution.
00:52The pause covers a proposed expansion of NOVVA's facility on Paul Avenue,
00:58which would grow from 9 to 36 megawatts by 2028.
01:03Planning staff will study water use, energy demand, air quality, and land use,
01:10and if they find significant impacts, the moratorium could stretch as long as 22 months
01:16while the city weighs permanent controls.
01:18Or even a city-wide ban.
01:22That opposition is now making its way into courtrooms.
01:26And in Illinois, it is a fight over paperwork.
01:30Residents living about a mile from a proposed Cyrus-1 hyperscale data center in Sangamon County,
01:37southwest of Springfield, sued in July,
01:40arguing the county board's approval was procedurally flawed.
01:44The board approved a conditional use permit in April by a vote of 17 to 10.
01:50With one abstention, for a project on 280 acres of farmland,
01:55the county's first plaintiffs say the electric co-ops will serve letter names a differently named
02:01project at a materially lower load,
02:05and that the water cooperative is still reviewing the application.
02:08The county wants the case dismissed, calling the approval conditional with a rational basis.
02:15An October 9 hearing was postponed because an attorney fell ill,
02:20and no new date has been set.
02:23And the reason these fights keep escalating comes down to one thing.
02:28Who pays for the power?
02:30Duke Energy has reached a settlement on a new large load tariff in North Carolina,
02:35giving the biggest electricity customers their own rate schedule.
02:40It would apply to customers that use at least 50 megawatts,
02:4480% of the time,
02:46which describes the hyperscale data centers built for cloud storage and artificial intelligence.
02:52The terms are strict by design,
02:55meant to fund the infrastructure upgrades those customers require and to protect other rate payers.
03:01If a company building one of these facilities fails,
03:05specific rates and contract lengths were not part of the initial reporting,
03:10and the North Carolina Utilities Commission still has to approve the settlement before it takes
03:16effect for households watching their monthly bills.
03:21That review is where this gets real.
03:24The pressure on the grid is only half the story,
03:28because water tells the other half.
03:30In Allen Township, Ohio,
03:33trustees adopted data center rules on Tuesday that read like a wall of limits.
03:39Facilities are allowed only in one industrial zoning district,
03:43and only if they are air-cooled and sit at least 1,250 feet from a residential lot.
03:48Water use is capped at 10,000 gallons per day,
03:53far below what many large campuses request,
03:56along with a 40 decibel sound limit and a 10 megawatt cap on total load.
04:01A decommissioning bond is also required.
04:05The vote was 2-0,
04:07with one trustee abstaining.
04:09A developer with a speculative project there said the rules were too restrictive,
04:14and projected up to $400 million in tax revenue.
04:19Residents clearly decided that certainty on water matters more.
04:24Local lawmakers elsewhere are choosing rules over bans.
04:28In Arkansas,
04:30the Fort Smith Board of Directors approved a data center ordinance on Monday by a vote of 6-2-0.
04:38Data centers in industrial districts now need a development plan review by the Planning Commission.
04:44And then full board approval.
04:46They must be surrounded by an 8-foot opaque wall,
04:49sit 500 feet from every property line,
04:53and submit letters from public utilities on capacity and proposed load.
04:58Even so,
04:59Directors Andre Good and Christina Katzevas wanted a stricter version.
05:04With Good saying he'd like to put more teeth in it,
05:07Director Kevin Settle pushed for legal options in water contracts.
05:11Arkansas law bars cities from banning data centers outright,
05:16so amendments are expected to be discussed in December.
05:20Yet despite that regulatory wave,
05:23construction is pressing forward in Texas.
05:27A $366 million filing with the State Licensing Department describes
05:32Project Longhorn,
05:35Building 1,
05:36a nearly 500,000-square-foot data center in Cedar Creek.
05:41Outside Austin,
05:43construction is targeted to begin November 30,
05:46with completion by the end of January 2028.
05:50At full build-out,
05:52the project is expected to draw 710 megawatts from simple cycle natural gas turbines.
05:59Supporting 490 megawatts of IT capacity,
06:03tied to a 2,800-acre generation site,
06:06Black Chamber,
06:08Pacifico Energy,
06:09and Anthropic were named in the filing.
06:12And Anthropic is reportedly in talks to lease the site,
06:16though none of the parties commented.
06:18It lands even as the governor has paused new state environmental permits pending a grid audit.
06:26Elsewhere in Texas,
06:28long-term leases are rewriting the economics.
06:31Cypher Digital has extended its contracted commitments at the Barber Lake campus in Colorado City.
06:38From 10 years to 20,
06:40FluidStack amended its existing lease,
06:43and an unnamed AI lab signed a separate 10-year lease that begins when FluidStack's term ends.
06:49The added commitment is expected to generate about $5.2 billion.
06:55Lifting total contracted revenue at Barber Lake from $3.8 billion to more than $9 billion.
07:04Individual data hauls are now due between the fourth quarter of this year and the first quarter of
07:09Next,
07:10with rent starting as each haul is delivered,
07:14Cypher says it will absorb the first $359 million of costs above the
07:19original budget,
07:21and the tenant will share further overruns.
07:25And the financial commitment behind all of this construction is staggering.
07:30The Wall Street Journal reports that Broadcom is seeking more than $50 billion to fund
07:35development of a custom AI chip built with OpenAI,
07:40a deal that could close before the end of the year.
07:43SpaceX is reportedly seeking $40 billion to buy NVIDIA hardware,
07:48$10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt,
07:53with Apollo expected to lead and a close expected in 2027.
07:58Oracle is also in talks with Apollo and Goldman Sachs to bridge the gap between paying for hardware.
08:04And when its cloud revenue arrives,
08:08though amounts were not disclosed,
08:10it shows how much of the AI build-out now rides on private credit,
08:15long before the revenue arrives.
08:35the price has been 70% of the source of the information and the financial commitment.
08:37The price of the AI is roughly $50 billion to expand the net.
08:37And the loss of the AI does not necessarily find the animator,
08:37but the price of the AI can be $30 billion to manage the amount of fees.
08:37But the sort of price is $50 billion to manage the amount of fees.
08:38And the price of the AI can store in the amount of fees and
08:38The price of the AI doesn't provide the goods for the AI.
