00:00Charlotte residents packed City Hall to fight for a data center ban while union workers pushed back.
00:06In Maryland, a developer is suing the county executive over a deal worth more than $500 million.
00:14And in Colorado, a mayor says a proposed data center must be stopped.
00:20Charlotte, North Carolina, became the latest flashpoint on Monday night,
00:26when residents packed the government center holding yellow signs that read Charlotte says.
00:32No data centers in our city.
00:34The city council heard public comment on extending its data center moratorium by up to 11 months.
00:41With the current pause set to expire November 5th,
00:45the ban has already halted permitting for the American Towers expansion in East Charlotte,
00:50a facility much smaller than a hyperscale campus but close to Holmes and the Reedy Creek nature.
00:58Preserve, raising concerns about noise, water, and air pollution.
01:04Union electricians, including organizer Melissa Reyes,
01:08whose local represents about a thousand data center workers,
01:13urged the council to lift the pause for jobs.
01:15Most council members acknowledged those concerns,
01:19yet signaled they would still vote to extend the moratorium.
01:24That opposition is now making its way into courtrooms.
01:28And in Maryland, a developer is suing the county executive personally.
01:33Quantum Maryland, managed by Catelus,
01:36filed a 67-page complaint on October 8th in Frederick County Circuit Court
01:42over the former East Alco industrial property,
01:46where a land transaction worth more than $500 million was pending.
01:51The suit alleges county executive Jessica Fitzwater
01:54froze data center applications on July 1st and
01:58after praising a proposed $110 million community benefits agreement on September 1st,
02:06rejected it 13 days later and extended the moratorium through July 1st.
02:122027.
02:14Quantum argues zoning authority belongs to the county council and claims the freezes were
02:19politically motivated.
02:22Fitzwater calls the lawsuit rife with factual errors and outright lies
02:26and says she will fight it.
02:29Political pressure is also mounting in Aurora, Colorado,
02:34where Mayor Mike Kaufman wrote on Facebook that a proposed data center called Trident
02:39off 48th Avenue must be stopped.
02:43The city council was set to consider on first reading an ordinance barring data centers from
02:49certain mixed-use zones, which include schools and assisted living facilities.
02:55But the change would not apply to projects already in the process,
03:00including Trident, covering only future proposals.
03:04Kaufman says he plans to call for a council vote on Trident regardless of litigation risk.
03:10The twist is that a few months ago, council member Amy Wiles proposed a six-month moratorium,
03:17and it failed after Kaufman himself cast the tie-breaking vote.
03:22Now the mayor who helped defeat the pause is pushing hard to block one specific project,
03:27and the legal stakes are rising.
03:31And the reason these fights keep escalating comes down to one thing.
03:35Power.
03:37On October 9th, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission split its ruling on a proposal from
03:43PJM Interconnection.
03:45The grid operator for 13 states and Washington, DCFERC approved a large load registry,
03:53which took effect October 12th and requires facilities of at least 50 megawatts to report
03:59their location, ramp schedule, and supply arrangements, but it rejected the Interim Resource
04:07Adequacy Service, which would have let big loads connect without matching new generation in
04:13exchange for agreeing to curtail demand before grid emergencies.
04:18FERC found key parts reached into state jurisdiction over retail rates.
04:24PJM filings project data centers could account for roughly 30% of peak demand and about
04:3167 gigawatts by 2036.
04:35So the fight over who pays and who waits is far from settled.
04:40The pressure on the grid is only half the story, because water tells the other half.
04:45In St. Cloud, Minnesota, city staff are recommending that the Planning Commission keep its first-ever
04:53data center rules as drafted, with no cap on water use.
04:58Community Development Director Matt Glazeman argues that each project is already checked against
05:05capacity.
05:06The city's treatment plant can produce 24 million gallons a day, while average demand is about
05:138 million and summer peaks reach roughly 15 and a half million.
05:18Staff also oppose widening the buffer from homes from a quarter mile to a half mile,
05:24saying it would remove much of the usable land.
05:27Hyperscale would start at 2,000 servers, and applicants would file a public impact study covering
05:34water, noise, air, traffic, and electricity.
05:39The commission takes it up Tuesday evening, and the city council holds its own hearing before
05:45anything takes effect.
05:48State and local lawmakers are taking notice, and in Florida the list of counties hitting
05:54pause keeps growing.
05:55On October 8, Manatee County commissioners voted unanimously for a 12-month moratorium on new
06:02large-scale data center development in the unincorporated county.
06:08After the Planning Commission recommended approval on September 17, under a Florida law that took
06:15effect July 1, a large-scale data center is one with an anticipated monthly peak load of at least 50
06:22megawatts. During the pause, county staff will study electricity and water use, facility size and
06:30location, noise, and buffering, with Commissioner Amanda Ballard leading the effort to set rules.
06:37The county says no planned projects will be halted.
06:41Manatee now joins Sarasota, Pasco, Northport, Lakeland, and Hernando in enacting data center
06:49moratoriums, a pattern that is spreading across the state.
06:54Yet despite that regulatory wave, construction plans keep coming in places that welcome them.
07:01This way Global, an Austin-based sovereign AI and high-performance computing provider,
07:07plans a 73-megawatt facility called the Research and AI Compute Center in Bryan, Texas.
07:15It would sit on 25 acres at the Texas A&M Rally's campus, pending approvals, and be developed in
07:23phases to offer compute to eligible researchers, the public sector, and industry users.
07:30The design calls for closed-loop, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and the company's orchestration
07:36software layer.
07:38Founder and executive chairman Angela Hood describes it as an accountable, governed institutional
07:44capability.
07:45This way, founded in 2016, previously supplied a GB300NVL72 cluster to Texas Tech University,
07:55No project cost or schedule has been disclosed, but the campus setting marks a different model
08:02from the giant private builds drawing the loudest protests, and the financial commitment behind that
08:10construction is staggering.
08:12Brookfield affiliates are taking a minority interest in American real estate partners and
08:17its powerhouse data center's platform.
08:20A deal announced September 14 and expected to close in the fourth quarter, with the price
08:27and stake undisclosed.
08:29Powerhouse reports 140 data centers underway are in planning, representing nearly 10 gigawatts
08:36across nine major U.S. markets.
08:39Projects include 1,800 megawatts in Joliet, Illinois, 1,350 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and 1,800
08:49in Grand Prairie, Texas, plus hundreds of megawatts in Ashburn and Spotsylvania, Virginia.
08:56Brookfield real estate co-president Ben Brown said the world is in the early stages of a
09:02multi-decade build-out of physical infrastructure required for AI.
09:07Brookfield is already running a $100 billion AI infrastructure program, and this deal extends
09:14it deeper into powered land.
09:17Thanks for watching, if you found this useful, subscribe, leave a like, and drop a comment,
09:25it helps us cover more of these stories.
