Electricity, land, water, permits. Nothing above this exists without it.
Generation, grid capacity, interconnection queues, water and permits. The slowest layer to change and, since August, the one that decides how fast everything else can grow.
Carries the entire stack. When Texas froze its queue on 3 August, it set a ceiling on how many chips can be installed in 2027 that no amount of fab capacity can lift.
· 5 min
Michigan regulators approved a new 20-year contract structure for a Google data center, with Google funding up to 1,600 MW of new power.
· 5 min
JERA, Dell and RHAELM plan to build a data centre directly at an existing power plant, skipping the grid queue that is slowing AI buildouts everywhere else.
· 4 min
A joint declaration from both governments puts the data centres at about 1 gigawatt and records company agreements worth more than 9.356 billion euros, with no site, builder or timetable for the data centres.
· 3 min
Aligned Data Centers has broken ground in Shippingport on a campus it says will use a dedicated onsite power source, in a town of 154 people where a 2.49-gigawatt coal plant closed in 2019.
· 6 min
Two suppliers detailed their own share of a four-supplier deal a trade publication puts above 1.7 gigawatts. The part that matters is that none of it is new construction.
· 5 min
The Ratepayer Protection Act would make data centres, not ordinary households, cover the cost of new grid infrastructure built to serve them. It cleared committee 52 to 0 and the House almost unanimously.
· L1 Power and land · 1,600 MW · Confirmed
Michigan's state utility regulator approved a new kind of power contract between DTE Electric, the state's largest utility, and Google for a data center Google is building in Wayne County. The deal runs for 20 years, four times longer than the 5-year contracts regulators normally require, and commits Google to pay for DTE to build up to 1,600 megawatts of solar and wind power plus 480 megawatts of battery storage. DTE says the arrangement will save its other customers about $1.7 billion, though that number comes from DTE's own filing to regulators, not an independent check. The data center is expected to start drawing power in December 2027. For everyday DTE customers in Michigan, the point of the deal is that Google, not them, pays for the new power plants built for its data center.
· L1 Power and land · 450 MW · Confirmed
Enerflex, a company that builds power equipment, announced a contract to supply approximately 450 megawatts of natural-gas power generation directly at an undisclosed data center site in North America. The company said it will spend about $15 million this year and about $85 million more, mostly in 2027, to expand its ability to build this kind of equipment. The customer was not named. This is a reminder that much of the new power being built for AI data centers today is still gas, not renewables, because gas turbines can be installed faster than waiting for grid upgrades.
· L1 Power and land · ~$300 million · Confirmed
We Energies and Oracle agreed on a deal meant to save the utility's Wisconsin customers about $300 million in fuel costs tied to the Point Beach nuclear plant. The agreement is not yet final, it still needs to go to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission for review in the coming months. Oracle is building a large data center in the state as part of its 'Project Lighthouse' development. If regulators approve it, the deal means Oracle, rather than ordinary ratepayers, absorbs more of the cost increase tied to powering the grid the data center relies on.
· L1 Power and land · more than $15bn; up to 400MW · Confirmed
JERA, Japan's biggest power generator, has agreed with computer maker Dell and data-centre developer RHAELM to build a computing site worth more than $15 billion at JERA's existing Chiba power plant, instead of waiting for a new connection to Japan's electricity grid. The plan, still a non-binding agreement, would draw on up to 400 megawatts of power and aims to start operating around 2028. Building next to a power plant instead of waiting in a grid queue is a shortcut utilities and tech companies are increasingly using to get AI computing online faster. For anyone outside Japan, this doesn't change a bill today, but it's one more sign that the biggest constraint on building AI computers right now is finding power fast enough, not finding land or chips.
Read the story: A Japanese power company is turning its own plant into a $15 billion AI computer
· L1 Power and land · $1bn+ over 5 years · Confirmed
Amazon says it will spend more than $1 billion over the next five years on infrastructure upgrades and community projects in towns where it builds AWS data centres, as local pushback against new data centres grows across the US. The money is meant for things like road and utility upgrades near its sites. It's Amazon's answer to a complaint showing up in more places: that a data centre brings jobs and tax revenue to a local government, but also strains roads, water and the power grid for the people living next to it.
· L1 Power and land · ~$3.1bn · Confirmed
SoftBank has finished buying all the shares of DigitalBridge, a company that owns and manages data centres, phone towers and fibre-optic networks, for about $3.1 billion. DigitalBridge will keep running as its own unit, still led by its current chief, Marc Ganzi. The deal gives SoftBank more of the physical buildings and cables the internet and AI computing run on.
· L1 Power and land · 6,831 MW; to Feb 2027 · Reported
PJM, the grid operator for 13 US states and Washington DC, wanted power companies to build 6,831 megawatts of new backup electricity as data centres multiply. Per PJM's own account of the decision, federal regulators accepted the plan but pushed its start back five months to February 28, 2027, and gave any new plants built for it until June 2032 to start running. This desk read PJM's summary, not the regulator's order itself. If you live in one of those 13 states, this is one of the mechanisms meant to keep your power on as more data centres plug into the same grid.
· L1 Power and land · 100 MW, 20 years; option for 250 MW; public demo March 2027 · Confirmed
Virtus Solis, which is developing solar power collected in orbit and beamed to Earth, announced on 30 September a 20-year power purchase agreement with Brae Systems, a company building data centres under the sea. Virtus Solis will supply 100 megawatts of around-the-clock power, 876,000 megawatt-hours a year, through a receiving station to be built in Illinois, and Brae can expand that to 250 megawatts within three years of commercial operation. The same release says Virtus Solis's first public technical demonstration will be held in March 2027. This is a contract for power from a system that has not yet been shown working in public, so nothing reaches a grid or a data centre soon.
· L1 Power and land · est. $500m in taxes over 10 years; up to 1,000 construction and 100 permanent jobs · Confirmed
Lambda, a company that rents out AI computing, announced on 27 September that it plans to build a data centre at MidAmerica Industrial Park in Mayes County, Oklahoma. It says it is expected to pay an estimated $500 million in taxes over the next ten years at current rates, and that the project is expected to create up to 1,000 construction jobs and up to 100 permanent ones. Citing Oklahoma's Data Center Customer Ratepayer Protection Act, Lambda says it will pay 100 percent of the site's energy costs, and it plans closed-loop cooling to limit water use. The announcement gives no figure for how much electricity the site will use.
· L1 Power and land · $5.25bn: $1.9bn federal, $3.35bn from recipients; 31 projects in 26 states; 23GW+ · Confirmed
The US Department of Energy has picked 31 projects in 26 states that it intends to help fund under its SPARK programme, which upgrades the grid people already have instead of building new lines. The projects total $5.25 billion: $1.9 billion from the department and $3.35 billion from the recipients. They will replace or rebuild more than 1,500 miles of transmission lines with higher-capacity ones and add grid-enhancing technologies across nearly 21,000 miles. The department says the work will make more than 23 gigawatts of additional electricity capacity available.
· L1 Power and land · 1.8GW, $20bn campus; $1 letter of credit · Reported
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on 22 September rejected Commonwealth Edison's notice cancelling a transmission security agreement for a 1.8 gigawatt, $20 billion data-centre campus that PowerHouse Hillwood is developing in Joliet, Illinois, Utility Dive reports. The fight is over credit support: PowerHouse Hillwood says it met the agreement's first requirement by posting a $1 letter of credit. FERC declined to decide that question and left it to a case already pending in federal court in northern Illinois. Commissioner David LaCerte called the $1 posting "an embarrassing legal fiction". This desk could not open FERC's order itself, so the item runs as Reported.
· L1 Power and land · $100m deposit; 2,000MW; price up to $600m · Confirmed
MARA Holdings says it has posted a $100 million security deposit with an electric utility for the power planned for a Texas data-centre site it bought in July, where the utility has agreed in a letter to provide 2,000 megawatts of capacity. MARA can withdraw the deposit at its own discretion, subject to a sale process set out in the deal. An amendment signed on 21 September ties part of the price to the project passing an audit by Texas regulators and to MARA choosing to go ahead after a study of the grid connection. If every milestone is met, the price stays at up to $600 million. If MARA does not go ahead, the two sides will market the project for sale.
· L1 Power and land · 835 MW to the PJM grid; final assessment published 25 Sep · Confirmed
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with the Department of Energy, has published a final environmental assessment that finds no significant impact from restarting the Christopher M. Crane Clean Energy Center, formerly Three Mile Island Unit 1, in Pennsylvania. The NRC is still considering the exemption and three licence changes that Constellation Energy asked for, and the Energy Department is deciding on federal loan-guarantee support. The notice says the restart would provide 835 megawatts to the grid of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, and that Constellation points to a 20-year agreement signed in 2024 to supply the plant's power to Microsoft's data centres on that grid. Nothing changes yet for people on that grid; the NRC's licence decisions still have to come.
· L1 Power and land · first of three 33 MW units; about 100 MW Phase I; commercial operation by 1 Oct · Confirmed
Fervo Energy says the first unit at Cape Station, its geothermal plant in Beaver County, Utah, has produced its first power, which it calls the first time a utility-scale enhanced geothermal development has reached that point anywhere in the world. Enhanced geothermal pumps water through hot rock deep underground and uses the heat to make electricity. Phase I is about 100 megawatts in three 33-megawatt units. The first is expected to reach commercial operation by 1 October 2026 and the other two by 1 January 2027. Fervo ties the need for it to electricity demand from data centres and AI; nothing changes for households yet.
· L1 Power and land · 283 MW extra generators; 328 MW more for 2027 delivery · Confirmed
Atlas Energy Solutions of Austin, Texas, says two of its subsidiaries signed cost-reimbursement agreements with an unnamed 'leading frontier AI lab' while ordering equipment for specific data-centre projects. One covers 283 megawatts of additional Caterpillar generators for the initial power ramp of a data-centre project. Separately, Atlas agreed to buy 328 megawatts of generating capacity for delivery in 2027. Nothing changes for ordinary people yet.
· L1 Power and land · $1.07m fine; 62 unpermitted gas generators · Confirmed
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said on 22 September that her administration had fined a data centre in Vineland $1.07 million, which her office called the largest enforcement action against a data centre in state history. Her statement names the operator as Data One and says state environmental inspectors found 62 large natural-gas generators 'installed and operating without required DEP permits' during a July inspection. For people living nearby, it is the state enforcing air-pollution permits on the power plants data centres run on site.
· L1 Power and land · 100 MW threshold proposed; rules expected by mid-October · Reported
Thailand's National Economic and Social Development Council is proposing that data centres using 100 megawatts of power or more be classed as 'hyperscale', according to The Nation, with new rules on size, electricity use and location expected to take effect by mid-October. The threshold is not final and still goes to a government policy committee. For people in Thailand, the planned rules include a requirement to avoid harming households.
· L1 Power and land · TCEQ permits halted; all state approvals paused; update due 19 Oct · Confirmed
Texas Governor Greg Abbott on 21 September directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to halt all permits sought by data centres until ERCOT, the state's grid operator, finishes its audit of the data centres waiting to connect to the grid. He said no state agency shall move forward with approvals for data-centre development until that information is in hand. Data centres, he said, must cover all their electrical infrastructure costs, must not use water that local communities need, and must report their electricity and water use. The regulator has to report back on how it is complying by 19 October, and Abbott said he will work with the legislature next session to end financial incentives for data centres. It follows his 14 September order telling the state water board to enforce data centres' water-use reporting.
· L1 Power and land · 7 laws signed; water and power reporting; grid costs on data centres · Confirmed
Governor Gavin Newsom signed seven bills on 21 September that require data centres in California to report their water and electricity use. According to his office, the laws make data centres pay their fair share of grid upgrade costs while preventing costs being shifted to low-income customers, require proposed data centres to give local governments and water suppliers information on their water use and drought planning, and make data centres ineligible for blanket environmental exemptions: to get fast-tracked legal review, a project must show it will not shift costs to ratepayers and will meet state standards on energy, water and fuel use. The laws are AB 1577, AB 2383, AB 2469, AB 2619, SB 886, SB 887 and SB 1168. His office calls them the most comprehensive data-centre laws in the nation.
· L1 Power and land · sites above 500 kW; two-month scrutiny; first labels in 2027 · Confirmed
The European Commission put forward a common rating scheme for data centres on 21 September, covering sites with a capacity above 500 kilowatts. It rates their use of energy and water and their contribution to the grid, such as reusing waste heat, adding clean power and being flexible about when they draw electricity. The European Parliament and the Council have two months to object before it enters into force, and the Commission expects the first labels to be displayed in 2027. It says data centres used about 68 terawatt-hours of the EU's electricity in 2024 and, citing the International Energy Agency, that AI is expected to push this to 114 by 2030; the EU also wants to triple its data-centre capacity within five to seven years. A separate consultation on minimum energy performance standards runs until 14 December.
· L1 Power and land · $50,000 per MW security; loads of 75 MW or more · Confirmed
The Public Utility Commission of Texas adopted its large-load interconnection rule, 16 TAC §25.194, in an order filed on 18 September. It carries out Senate Bill 6, passed by the Texas legislature. Before a large power user such as a data centre can be included in an ERCOT study of how to connect it, it must now sign an intermediate agreement, make certain disclosures and post financial security of $50,000 per megawatt. The rule sets what happens to that security if a customer withdraws or gives false information, and the terms for returning it once the site is switched on. Loads below 75 megawatts are outside the rule. For a 1-gigawatt campus, that is $50 million up front, by our arithmetic.
· L1 Power and land · own renewables and storage; recycled water; 150 m from homes · Confirmed
The government of Victoria, Australia, published its Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan on 22 September. It says new data centres will have to bring their own renewable energy supply and storage, match new demand with new generation, and pay connection costs and network upgrades. They will have to cool with recycled or non-drinking water, or offset what they use; the government says data centres now use less than 1 percent of Victoria's drinking water for cooling, and that the right amount is zero. New data centres will be barred from residential zones, kept away from schools and childcare centres, and must be at least 150 metres from homes. The government calls these the strongest data-centre rules in the country.
· L1 Power and land · 5 GW portfolio; up to 1 GW nuclear; 2.88 GW and 1.2 GW gas · Confirmed
ONE Nuclear Energy closed its merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. VII, a company listed on the stock market in order to buy another, on 23 September, and its shares were expected to start trading on Nasdaq under the ticker ONEN on or about 24 September. It brings a Louisiana portfolio it puts at 5 gigawatts: Project Amberjack, a campus of small modular nuclear reactors targeting up to 1 gigawatt; Project Cayman, a 2.88-gigawatt gas plant with a large battery and a data-centre campus on the same site; and Project Barracuda, a 1.2-gigawatt gas plant with a battery and a 1-gigawatt data centre beside it. All three are in development. The company says going public gives it the money to move them forward, including for AI and data-centre customers, and it names none of those customers.
· L1 Power and land · 25 MW and up; one state review; monthly public dashboard; tax break repeal sought · Confirmed
Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed an executive order on 23 September that, in his office's words, creates one standard, one review process and one public record for every large data centre of 25 megawatts or more proposed in Maryland, as soon as it seeks any state action, including a permit, an incentive or a letter of support. The order sets up a Maryland Data Center Task Force, with members from the Maryland Energy Administration and six state departments. Each project is judged on five principles: ratepayer and grid protection, economic benefits for Marylanders, community voice, environmental protections, and transparency and accountability. It then gets a written, public determination from the task force: Aligned, Conditionally Aligned or Not Aligned. A public Data Center Dashboard, updated monthly, serves as the state's record of data-centre development. Moore also said he will work with the General Assembly in the upcoming legislative session to repeal the data-centre sales and use tax exemption, originally enacted in 2020.
· L1 Power and land · 3,300+ MW by end-2029, from ~950 MW; $1,000m of notes offered · Confirmed
Solaris Energy Infrastructure, a Houston company that runs power plants on data-centre sites and supplies them directly rather than through the public grid, set out its plans for investors in a $1,000 million bond offering. It says it has firm orders with equipment makers for enough generators to reach more than 3,300 megawatts by the end of 2029, up from about 950 megawatts it ran on average in the three months to 30 June. It says three long-term contracts with investment-grade technology customers already cover about 2,200 megawatts, and that the money from the notes will help pay for contracts it has signed and ones it expects to sign. It is one more power company borrowing to build generation for data centres.
· L1 Power and land · ~96 MW added; ~$900m projected customer benefits · Confirmed
Georgia Power and Google announced on 21 September that Google will support upgrades to Georgia Power's share of the Vogtle and Hatch nuclear plants, work that would let them add about 96 megawatts of new capacity to the grid. Google will subscribe to a new Nuclear Uprate tariff, a price plan filed with Georgia's Public Service Commission the same day, and receive the credits for the carbon-free power the upgrades produce. Georgia Power says Google's subscription should bring its customers about $900 million in projected benefits over the life of the units, and that the structure helps protect customers who do not take part from the extra cost of the work. The deal still needs the commission's approval. Georgia Power presents it as a case of a large new customer's demand bringing savings for everyone else rather than costs.
· L1 Power and land · 76 MW; 6 years; ~40 gas generators · Confirmed
Kodiak Gas Services, based in The Woodlands, Texas, said on 21 September that it will supply 76 megawatts of power directly to a West Texas data centre for six years, from about 40 natural-gas generators on the site rather than through the public grid. The data centre's operator has a contract with an investment-grade-rated hyperscaler, one of the giant cloud companies, and its lease is guaranteed by a designer of GPUs, the chips that run AI; neither is named. Kodiak expects to start installing the equipment in the last three months of 2026 and to begin earning revenue from it in early 2027. It is Kodiak's second long-term contract to be a data centre's main power supply, part of a push towards two gigawatts of generating capacity by 2030.
· L1 Power and land · 640MW campus; 120MW first phase, early 2027 · Reported
BDx Data Centers, a Singapore-based company, started construction on 22 September on a 640-megawatt AI data centre campus called CGK4 in Jatiluhur, West Java, Indonesia, according to The Jakarta Post. Its first 120-megawatt building is expected to enter service in early 2027. BDx says it has secured 845 megavolt-amperes of grid capacity from PLN, Indonesia's state electricity company, and the first building will use liquid cooling piped directly to the chips, for power densities of up to 500 kilowatts. For most people nothing changes yet; the first building is not due to run until early 2027.
· L1 Power and land · 200-207 MW; 20 years; $116m letter of credit · Confirmed
New Era Energy & Digital says its subsidiary TCDC PowerCo signed a power purchase agreement on 18 September with Luminant for a minimum of 200 and up to 207 megawatts, from a 1,180-megawatt gas-fired plant in Odessa, Texas, owned by Luminant's affiliate Vistra, or from other sources or the ERCOT grid. The power is for the company's Texas Critical Data Center project on land near the plant. The contract runs 20 years from first delivery, New Era must post a 116 million dollar letter of credit, and Vistra is to receive a 5 percent non-voting stake in the project company once power flows. For people in Odessa nothing changes yet: Luminant's obligations depend on conditions being met by the end of 2027.
· L1 Power and land · Most 2024 limits repealed; in force 16 Nov 2026 · Confirmed
The US Environmental Protection Agency published a final rule on 17 September repealing most of its 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. It removes the emission guidelines for existing fossil-fuel steam power plants, the carbon-capture standards for coal plants making a large modification, and the carbon-capture standards for new gas turbines that run most of the time. Explaining how the outlook for electricity demand has changed, the rule says large users, "particularly those related to data center demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications," are primarily driving a nearly 2.6-fold rise in projected growth of peak demand. The repeal takes effect on 16 November 2026, and in a separate proposal the EPA asks for comment on rescinding all greenhouse gas limits for these plants. For people living near these plants, fewer federal carbon controls will apply to them.
· L1 Power and land · €40bn package; ~1GW data centres · Confirmed
A joint declaration posted by the UAE's foreign ministry on 10 September 2026 says the UAE's President and Germany's Chancellor, during a state visit from 9 to 11 September, welcomed the announcement of a UAE investment package totaling 40 billion euros in Germany. The declaration says the package includes new state-of-the-art data centres with a capacity of approximately 1 GW, and records 29 memoranda and agreements between UAE and German companies with a total value exceeding 9.356 billion euros. It names no company, site or timetable for the data centres, and does not say over what period the 40 billion euros will be invested.
· L1 Power and land · 12.83% rise deferred; NT$71.1bn subsidy sought · Confirmed
Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs said on 18 September that its electricity price review committee decided not to apply an increase its own calculation put at 12.83 percent, and will instead seek a government budget subsidy of 71.1 billion New Taiwan dollars, a little over 2 billion US dollars, before deciding on any rate change. The committee's release names semiconductor and AI electricity consumption growing rapidly as part of the context, but does not say how much of the cost pressure comes from chip and AI demand as against fuel costs or anything else, so do not read the whole rise as an AI story. The next review is in December. Taiwan makes most of the world's advanced AI chips, and choosing a state subsidy over a rate rise is a choice to put that cost on taxpayers generally rather than on electricity bills.
· L1 Power and land · Executive Order 22, effective immediately · Confirmed
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 on 18 September. It immediately bars executive branch agencies, departments, boards, commissions, authorities and anyone else under the Governor's supervision from entering into or requiring non-disclosure agreements for data centre projects, a practice that has kept deals bringing large data centres to Virginia neighbourhoods out of public view. The order also creates a state AI Task Force, expedites work on data-centre noise regulations, directs a review of diesel use at these sites, and sets up a planning toolkit for local governments negotiating with developers. The bigger items sit outside it: ending by-right approval and requiring local sign-off for any data centre above 25 megawatts are part of the same framework but need the 2027 General Assembly to pass them. Virginia has more data centres than any other US state, so other states will be watching what its own agencies are now forbidden to keep quiet.
· L1 Power and land · up to 568 MW from ENGIE · Confirmed
ENGIE said on 17 September that, through a portfolio of wind energy resources serving the ERCOT market, it will help supply up to 568 megawatts of renewable electricity for Oracle's Texas operations. Other suppliers announced their own shares of Oracle's Texas wind buying separately, and this item's story brings those documents together. For people in Texas, it is one large buyer of computing locking in power from wind for its operations there.
Read the story: Oracle buys a gigawatt of Texas wind that is already built and already connected · Oracle
· L1 Power and land · 10 of 522 applications approved (1.9%); 279 ruled unsuppliable · Reported
Korean reporting on material South Korea's energy ministry gave the National Assembly says that of 522 applications to connect data centres to the grid in the Seoul metropolitan area between August 2024 and March 2026, 10 have final approval, worth 1,010 megawatts, a rate of 1.9 percent. The funnel is where the story is: 279 applications, 53.4 percent, were ruled unsuppliable at the first technical review, 243 passed it, only 24 reached the main review, and 10 came out the other end. The same report, citing the trade outlet EPNC, puts data centre power demand in the region at 7,343 megawatts by 2027 against 4,718 megawatts of available supply, a shortfall it puts at about 36 percent. This desk read the Korean reporting directly but could not reach the underlying government submission, so it runs as Reported. For anyone planning an AI data centre near Seoul, a grid this closed pushes projects to other parts of Korea or out of the country.
· L1 Power and land · three founding members; no partner count or capacity target given · Confirmed
Emerald AI, a grid-software startup, together with Google and Nvidia announced on 16 September the AI Energy Management Alliance, an effort to get AI data centres to flex their power use when the electricity grid is under strain rather than drawing at a constant rate. The three are founding members and say launch partners will follow from across computing and power, including data centre operators, power producers, utilities and regional grid operators. Nvidia's announcement gives no number for how many partners have joined and no figure for how much grid capacity the alliance expects to free up, so for now it is a statement of intent with named backers rather than a measurable commitment. If data centres can be made to ease off during grid stress instead of running flat out, new sites could connect faster without a new power plant built for each one.
· L1 Power and land · 417-3 in the House, after 52-0 in committee · Confirmed
The US House of Representatives passed the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act 417 to 3 on 16 September. The bill would require large energy-load data centres to bear the cost of all new infrastructure built to serve them, rather than that cost being shifted onto existing customers, and directs states with no data-centre-specific standards to begin hearings and set their own. It had already cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee 52 to 0 in July. It now goes to the Senate, where Senator Husted is leading the companion bill, and it needs to pass there and be signed before any of it takes effect. If it becomes law it would settle at federal level a fight already running state by state over whether households or the data centres pay when the grid has to grow to serve them.
Read the story: The US House voted 417 to 3 on who should pay when a data centre needs a bigger grid
· L1 Power and land · UAE zone mec1-az2 and the whole Bahrain region me-south-1 · Reported
DataCenterDynamics reports that Amazon Web Services says it cannot restore customer access to one of its UAE availability zones, mec1-az2 inside the me-central-1 region, or to its entire Bahrain region, me-south-1, both damaged by strikes earlier in 2026 tied to the conflict involving Iran. DataCenterDynamics quotes AWS saying it has determined it is unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 availability zone, and on Bahrain that the damage spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what its regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand. This desk could not find an AWS-owned page carrying those statements, and the article does not say where AWS made them, so the item runs as Reported. For any business running in the Gulf, this is AWS itself saying some data placed in those zones is gone, not delayed.
· L1 Power and land · $8bn ceiling, $2.4bn firm; warrant 1,693,745 sh at $200.9266 · Confirmed
Generac, a Wisconsin company best known for home backup generators, has signed a long-term supply agreement with Amazon for generators that keep data centres running when the power grid fails. The headline number is 8 billion dollars, but the filing is careful about what that number is: it is the ceiling on Amazon payments that a stock warrant vests against, not a sum Amazon has committed to spend. What Amazon has firmly scheduled is 2.4 billion dollars of deliveries in 2027 and 2028, which is about 30 percent of the ceiling. In exchange, Generac handed an Amazon subsidiary the right to buy up to 1,693,745 of its shares at 200.93 dollars each, about 340 million dollars of stock at that price, and roughly a fifth of it vested the moment the deal was signed. The rest only vests as Amazon actually pays. AI data centres cannot go dark during a grid outage, so backup power has become one of the most fought-over pieces of equipment in the industry. If you notice new generator pads or fuel storage tanks near a data centre in your area over the next two years, this kind of deal is why.
Read the story: Amazon ties up to $8 billion of generator orders to a stock warrant in Generac · Amazon Web Services
· L1 Power and land · A$31.9bn, up to 2.16GW; first stage only · Reported
Anthropic has signed lease documentation for the first stage of its first data centre in Australia, a campus on Queensland's Western Downs being built by Singapore based developer Zerra DC, with Dexus taking a 25 percent interest in the consortium and Macquarie Capital also involved, according to Australian property trade press. The full project is reported at up to 31.9 billion Australian dollars and a peak capacity of 2.16 gigawatts, which the same report puts at roughly the average power draw of 1.5 million Australian homes. Only the first stage is signed, deliveries are planned in stages from 2027, and the project still needs clearance from Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board and local planners. The site is a 725.5 hectare cattle feedlot today. The report says the campus will run Claude for answering user queries rather than training new versions of it, so if you use Claude, some of your questions may eventually be answered by computers standing where 24,000 head of cattle stand now.
· L1 Power and land · nearly $960m over two years, against a 15% rate request · Confirmed
North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson asked state utility regulators on 14 September to create a separate electricity rate class for data centres and other very large power users. His office says Duke Energy Progress's pending request, a 15 percent increase, would otherwise put nearly 960 million dollars of what he calls unnecessary rate rises onto ordinary customers over two years, and that a separate Duke Energy Carolinas settlement would still lift average residential bills about 9.5 percent. Duke Energy is onboarding an unprecedented number of data centers without a clear plan on how to protect ratepayers from higher rates and unacceptable risk, Jackson said in his office's release. He also wants Duke to publish its template contracts with data centres and large users, report load forecasts every 90 days instead of every six months, and pause new gas plant construction. Nothing is decided; this is a request to a regulator. If adopted, this is the kind of rule that decides whether your bill rises because a data centre moved in, or whether the data centre pays for itself.
· L1 Power and land · up to 900 MW more, path to 1.2 GW · Confirmed
Bell Canada and the government of Saskatchewan announced plans to expand Bell's AI Fabric data centre campus near Regina by up to 900 megawatts on top of the 300 megawatts already running, a path to 1.2 gigawatts if every phase is built. The two sides describe it differently, and the difference matters. Bell's own release calls it a non-binding memorandum of understanding, says total capital investment including buildings, the computers inside them and new power generation could exceed 50 billion dollars, and states that development would proceed in phases as customer commitments are secured and subject to commercial agreements, permits and approvals, with no assurance the expansion happens at all. Saskatchewan's government release calls it a historic 52 billion dollar expansion and one of the largest private-sector investments in the province's history, and does not use the words non-binding. If it goes ahead the concrete change for Saskatchewan is construction and operating jobs. For everyone else nothing changes unless the plan becomes a signed, funded project.
Read the story: Bell and Saskatchewan describe the same data centre deal in two different ways
· L1 Power and land · about 30% responded in 2025 · Confirmed
Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state's water agency, the Texas Water Development Board, to start enforcing a water-use reporting requirement against large water users including AI data centres. The governor's own release says the Texas Water Code requires recipients of a survey to complete and return it, that a data centre which fails to do so commits an offence punishable as a crime, that the board must refer non-compliant facilities to the appropriate county or district attorney, and that a facility which misses the deadline becomes ineligible for state environmental permits, amendments or renewals. The board itself cannot prosecute anyone, so it must report its enforcement progress to the governor's office by 14 October 2026. According to Texas Tribune reporting, compliance has been low for years: 32 percent of 22 data centres surveyed responded in 2023, 28 percent of 67 in 2024, and roughly 30 percent of 329 in 2025. By our count this is the governor's third directive on AI data centres since August.
Read the story: Texas moves to enforce a water-reporting law most data centres have been skipping
· L1 Power and land · $3bn cumulative, 150 MW battery · Confirmed
Meta's data centre campus in Eagle Mountain, Utah has now drawn more than 3 billion dollars of the company's capital investment in Utah in total, the city government says. That is a cumulative figure built up since Meta arrived, not new money announced this week. Alongside it, a separate company, Lydian Energy, owns and operates a new 150 megawatt battery storage facility called Faraday that supports the site and the local grid. The city says Meta has contributed more than 6.2 million dollars to local schools and organisations to date. For Eagle Mountain residents this means continued local jobs and community funding tied to the campus. For everyone else, nothing changes.
· L1 Power and land · $10 a month, two years to four · Confirmed
NextEra and Dominion filed new paperwork with Virginia's utility regulator on 14 September, offering residential customers four years of 10 dollar monthly bill credits instead of two. The companies say the extension is funded mainly by redirecting credits that would have gone to large data centres, plus about 90 million dollars from shareholders, a figure reported by the Virginia outlet Cardinal News rather than stated in the filing. The package also raises Dominion's low income assistance programme by 100 million dollars through 2038, adds a 100 million dollar workforce fund, a Virginia supplier programme of up to 1 billion dollars a year for five years, and 1,000 direct jobs. Virginia regulators hold hearings in November and are expected to rule in January 2027, with the 67 billion dollar merger still targeted to close in the second half of 2027. If you are a Dominion Virginia customer this means a longer bill credit if it is approved. Anywhere else, it changes nothing for you.
Read the story: NextEra and Dominion double the length of promised Virginia bill credits to help win merger approval · NextEra Energy
· L1 Power and land · 400,000 sq ft added, 1M sq ft total · Confirmed
Crusoe, a company that builds AI computing facilities, opened a second factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma that makes electrical equipment such as switchboards, adding 400,000 square feet and bringing its national manufacturing footprint to roughly 1 million square feet. This grows Crusoe's own capacity to build components for data centres; it is not new electricity or computing capacity coming online. The company says it has hired more than 300 local craft workers across its two Tulsa sites, and that its factories have supplied more than 2,500 switchboards to its Stargate Project site in Abilene, Texas. For an ordinary person the concrete change is local: manufacturing jobs in Tulsa, not a change to anyone's electricity bill.
· L1 Power and land · LOLE 0.59 (reference) to 13.20 (worst case) by 2030, vs 0.1 target · Confirmed
A study commissioned by Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission and written by Synapse Energy Economics with two other firms models how reliable PJM, the grid operator serving thirteen states and the District of Columbia, will be in 2030. It measures loss of load expectation, the expected number of days a year when supply falls short, against PJM's planning target of 0.1, or one day in ten years. On PJM's own 2026 load forecast the study gets 0.59, nearly six times worse. In its worst case, with higher demand and slower new supply, it gets 13.20, which it describes as more than 13 days a year with loss of load events. It says most of the load growth through 2040 in Pennsylvania and PJM comes from data centres. For people in the region this is a warning from a model, not an outage; whether it comes true depends on how much gets built and how fast new power follows.
· L1 Power and land · 5 GW project under revision · Reported
Reuters, citing six people it did not name, reported that the United Arab Emirates is redesigning a planned 5 gigawatt AI data centre project, one of the biggest outside the United States, after last year's Iran war prompted a rethink of how and where critical infrastructure should be built. No UAE government body or company has confirmed this account on the record, so it runs here as reporting rather than a confirmed fact. If accurate, it points to AI data centres increasingly being treated as strategic, security-sensitive infrastructure in the Gulf, which could slow down or reshape how quickly that capacity gets built. Nothing changes today for anything already running.
· L1 Power and land · 3.38 GW across 27 projects · Reported
Australia's public broadcaster ABC reported that 27 data centre projects already approved but not yet built, with a combined capacity of at least 3.38 gigawatts, will not have to meet new water and power standards the government introduced earlier this year, because the rules only apply to projects approved from now on. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told ABC Radio Sydney, "You can't retrofit. But as well, many of the centres which are under construction tend to be smaller ones," explaining why existing approvals would not be held to the new requirements. As of March 2026 Australia had 162 data centres running with a combined 1.5 gigawatts of capacity, so the exempted projects alone are more than double what the country already operates. For Australians living near one of these 27 sites, the facility being built nearby will not be held to the newer environmental standards that future projects will have to meet.
· L1 Power and land · $150M, 51 MW running of a 121 MW pipeline · Confirmed
Aperture AC, a blank-cheque company already listed on Nasdaq, agreed to acquire Atlantic HPC Group, a high-performance computing operator, in a deal that values Atlantic at 150 million dollars before the merger. Atlantic has 51 megawatts of computing capacity running across facilities in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Ohio, out of a development pipeline of 121 megawatts across six sites. This is a small deal by the standards of the AI data centre boom, well under the billion-dollar mark of the largest ones, and the merger still has to close. For anyone tracking how smaller computing operators raise money, this is one more example of a company using a blank-cheque merger rather than a traditional listing or a private round.
· L1 Power and land · unanimous vote; two motions · Reported
Pennsylvania's utility regulator voted unanimously on 11 September to approve two motions, Utility Dive reports. One directs its staff to propose updates to the state's rules for emergency curtailment of electricity use and to organise a technical conference on how costs for data centres are allocated. The other starts a working group on improving how the commission sets rates, with a focus on transparency and affordability. The commission cited PJM's July 2026 capacity auction, which it said identified a system-wide reliability shortfall of 6,831 megawatts for 2028 to 2029, and an August report projecting 18.56 percent industrial load growth in the state over five years. For Pennsylvania electricity customers, this starts a process that could decide who pays for grid upgrades that very large users need.
· L1 Power and land · up to $1bn authorised · Confirmed
Oklo, a startup building small nuclear reactors partly aimed at powering AI data centres, filed paperwork authorising itself to sell up to 1 billion dollars of its own stock over time, in a program run through a group of ten banks. This is a ceiling on how much Oklo could sell, not money it has raised yet; how much it actually sells, and when, is up to the company. For anyone who owns Oklo stock, this is a tool the company can use to raise cash as needed, which can dilute existing shareholders when shares are actually sold.
· L1 Power and land · about 4,000 MW tripped on 22 July · Confirmed
PJM, the power grid that serves 13 states and Washington DC, said it will propose a new rule requiring data centres and other very large electricity users to keep running through brief grid disturbances instead of automatically disconnecting. The proposal follows an event on 22 July in which PJM says nearly 4,000 megawatts of data centre load in northern Virginia unexpectedly dropped off the grid at once, forcing PJM and the utility Dominion Energy to manage a sudden imbalance between how much power was being generated and how much was being used. PJM plans to file the rule with federal regulators in November; nothing is binding yet. If it takes effect, large data centres in PJM's territory would face a legal requirement to stay connected during disturbances, meant to reduce the chance that one data centre's own safety trip becomes a wider power problem for everyone else on the grid.
Read the story: PJM wants data centres to stop disconnecting when the grid wobbles · PJM
· L1 Power and land · 1,031 MW across Pecos and Hunt, conditional · Confirmed
Core Scientific said on 10 September that ERCOT, Texas's grid operator, has conditionally classified three blocks of its load in Batch Zero, the process ERCOT uses to sort large new users. At Pecos, the existing 300 megawatts was approved as Base Load and a further 300 megawatts as Studied Load, a weaker category still subject to allocation. At Hunt, the planned 431 megawatts was approved as Base Load. That is 1,031 megawatts in all. The company's 297 megawatts at Denton, energised before March 2022, and a further 74 megawatts there are not part of Batch Zero. Every classification is conditional, and the final allocation and ramp come only when Batch Zero ends, so none of this says when new power arrives.
Read the story: ERCOT puts a label on about 1.5 gigawatts of Texas data centre load in a single week · ERCOT
· L1 Power and land · 5 to 0 vote, permit USR26-0019 · Confirmed
Weld County, Colorado's board of commissioners voted 5 to 0 to approve a permit letting Global AI, a data centre operator, convert a vacant industrial building near Windsor into a data centre using a closed-loop, air-cooled cooling system. The first phase is expected to create about 20 jobs, and the county's own approval notice gives no figure for how much electricity the site will eventually use. Local governments across the country are increasingly asked to approve rezonings and permits like this one as AI computing facilities look for existing buildings and land. For residents near the site, the immediate change is a new industrial tenant in an already industrial area, though the vote itself does not set how much power the facility will draw from the local grid.
· L1 Power and land · 2GW campus; ~$10bn regional investment · Confirmed
Aligned Data Centers broke ground on 10 September on Project Phoenix, a campus in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, that its own release says will reach 2 gigawatts and use a dedicated onsite power source rather than the local grid. It sits next to the Shippingport Power Station, a former coal plant the release says is being redeveloped into a natural gas energy campus, and Aligned expects the campus to send excess power capacity back to the grid once it is complete. The company estimates the project anchors 10 billion dollars of regional economic investment, an estimated 3,000 construction jobs and an estimated 640 full-time jobs running the campus. The release does not say who will supply the onsite power or when the first data hall opens. For people in Pennsylvania, if the own-power plan works as described, the campus adds power to the grid rather than drawing on it; until that power runs, it is a plan.
· L1 Power and land · 4,368 billion kilowatthours, +2.2% · Confirmed
The US Energy Information Administration says it expects the country's electricity generation to grow 2.2 percent to a record 4,368 billion kilowatthours this year, with a further 1.7 percent growth expected next year. The agency names data centre development, alongside factory activity, as a driver of the growth, and says the region that includes Texas remains the largest contributor to electricity sales growth despite a pause in new data centre projects there. For anyone paying an electricity bill, this is the national statistics agency's own account of what is driving record demand for power.
· L1 Power and land · at least €13bn · Confirmed
Google says it plans to invest at least 13 billion euros in Finland over 2027 and 2028, which it calls its largest single investment in Europe. Part of the package is a 22-year power purchase agreement with the Finnish utility Fortum for the Loviisa nuclear plant, near Google's data centre at Hamina. A power purchase agreement is a long-term promise to buy electricity on agreed terms, and Google says it gives Fortum the revenue certainty needed to extend the plant's life; without that programme, Google's release says, the plant that provides 10 percent of Finland's electricity could not continue operations beyond 2030. For people in Finland the practical effect is that a plant supplying a tenth of the country's power is set to keep running, and Google says it expects the construction phase to support more than 37,000 jobs.
· L1 Power and land · $1.29bn, deal not yet closed · Confirmed
HGP Intelligent Energy, a startup that builds AI-based control systems for retrofitting former Navy nuclear reactors to power data centres, agreed to go public by merging with a blank-cheque company called Meshflow Acquisition Corp. The deal values the combined company at approximately 1.29 billion dollars, according to the companies' own filing, though the merger has not yet closed and depends on shareholder votes and other conditions. HGP says its technology lets nuclear reactors ramp their output up and down to follow the power an AI data centre actually needs, rather than running at constant output and drawing extra electricity from the public grid. For anyone near a nuclear plant being considered for this kind of retrofit, this deal is one example of that idea being pitched directly to investors, though it will not affect anyone's electricity until well after the merger closes, if it closes at all.
· L1 Power and land · 166 MW conditionally Base Load · Confirmed
Soluna Holdings, a company that builds computing sites for Bitcoin mining and AI, said Texas grid operator ERCOT has conditionally classified its full 166 megawatt Kati campus, including a planned AI expansion, as Base Load in the state's Batch Zero process for sorting a backlog of large power requests. Soluna also finished the last 14 megawatts of the first phase of that campus, taking its total operating capacity across all sites to about 206 megawatts. Getting sorted into a workable category in ERCOT's queue is a necessary step before a project can actually get built and connected to the grid. For Texans, this is one more data point in a large and ongoing backlog of computing projects waiting on the state's grid, and a Base Load classification is a procedural step, not a guarantee of when power will actually flow.
· L1 Power and land · approx 4.2 GW · Confirmed
After the Texas governor's directive of 3 August, the state utility commission on 20 August let the grid operator ERCOT hand out conditional classifications to large power connection requests while it audits the data centre projects in its queue, Galaxy says. The results are now arriving through the companies themselves. Galaxy says five of its Texas data centre projects, covering approximately 4.2 gigawatts of gross power capacity, received conditional classifications: 800 megawatts and 830 megawatts at its Helios campus as "Base Load", capacity Galaxy says ERCOT had approved in January 2026, and 700, 900 and 1,000 megawatts as "Studied Load", including one project it had submitted as Base Load. Galaxy's release says Base Load projects are not subject to further capacity allocation in ERCOT's study, while Studied Load projects are. Galaxy says ERCOT expects its audit to take several months, so nothing is final. For people in Texas, this is the process that decides how much new data centre demand gets a place on their grid, and the labels handed out this week are its first visible output.
Read the story: The Texas queue is moving again, one company filing at a time · ERCOT
· L1 Power and land · up to $1.9bn · Confirmed
A nuclear plant in Iowa stopped generating in 2020. The US government has now completed a loan of up to 1.9 billion dollars to help pay for restarting it. The Energy Department says the plant is 615 megawatts, enough to power nearly 500,000 homes.
· L1 Power and land · 2.6M homes · Reported
Ireland's energy regulator worked out that seventeen planned data centres would burn as much gas as 2.6 million households. Its answer is to sell them cheaper gas on the condition that supply can be cut off in a cold snap. No regulator has tried that before.
· L1 Power and land · about 300MW IT load; at least 50% green energy; PUE cap 1.20 · Reported
Key ASIC Bhd, a Malaysian company, told the stock exchange it has signed a memorandum of understanding with CT Vision, a Hong Kong listed firm, to build a data centre in Malaysia targeting about 300 megawatts of IT load within five years of starting operations, with at least 50 percent of its energy from green sources and a power usage effectiveness of no more than 1.20. The MOU runs an initial ten years. Key ASIC cautioned that there is no assurance all aspects of the project will be implemented as contemplated, because the detailed commercial and technical terms sit in separate agreements still to come. This desk could not reach Bursa Malaysia's own filing page, which returned an access error, so the item runs as Reported on The Star's reproduction of the filing. Malaysia now sits alongside Johor's existing cluster as a place where Singapore-adjacent AI capacity keeps landing, and this one is being pitched on green power rather than price alone.
· L1 Power and land · $4.4B · Confirmed
Electricity arrives from the grid in a form computers cannot use directly, so it has to be converted. Flex has paid $4.4 billion for a company that builds those converters. Even the plumbing between the grid and the machines is now worth billions.
· L1 Power and land · Performance objective not delivered · Confirmed
Ofgem, the regulator for Great Britain's electricity system, published its own assessment of NESO, the company that runs the national grid, and found that NESO did not deliver its main promise to speed up how quickly new users, including data centres, can connect to the grid. Ofgem's report says NESO made some structural changes but did not finish carrying them out, citing missed deadlines and inconsistent handling of applications. Long queues to connect to the grid are one of the biggest brakes on how fast new AI data centres can be built in any country. For anyone in Great Britain waiting on a new grid connection, whether for a data centre, a factory, or a home solar and battery system, this is the regulator's own account of why that wait probably is not getting shorter yet.
· L1 Power and land · 396 MW · Confirmed
Geothermal power taps heat from deep underground and runs day and night, unlike solar or wind. Google signed the largest such deal yet, at 396 megawatts. The project is not expected to start producing until 2028, and Google has not yet committed to building the data centre it would serve.
· L1 Power and land · Up to 1.5 GW · Confirmed
A data centre planned for Selangor may build its own power station rather than wait for the grid. DayOne, based in Singapore, and an arm of Malaysia's state utility signed a memorandum of understanding on 7 August. The 1.5 gigawatts is a ceiling on a study, not a commitment, and the final capacity still needs feasibility work and approval.
· L1 Power and land · Batch Zero paused · Confirmed
Texas had begun sorting its queue of very large electricity users into study batches. The governor ordered a verification step first, so ERCOT stopped telling utilities how the first batch had been classified. Nothing was cancelled. The clock simply stopped.
· L1 Power and land · 474 GW · Confirmed
Texas has requests to connect 474 gigawatts of very large electricity users, and nine in ten of them are data centres. For scale, the whole Texas grid has never had to serve more than about 86 gigawatts at once. Almost none of this will be built, but the queue is what the grid has to plan around.
· L1 Power and land · $325.00/MW-day · Confirmed
PJM runs the power market for 13 states and buys future supply at a yearly auction. Every price hit the legal maximum and it still bought less spare capacity than its own safety target requires. Hitting the cap means the market could not balance at any price it is allowed to charge.
· L1 Power and land · 6 RTOs · Confirmed
America's energy regulator gave all six regional grid operators 60 days to either defend their existing rules for very large electricity customers or change them. Data centres are the reason. Those rules were written when nothing on the network drew this much power.
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