Data Center Weekly PopTop

Maya and Dev on the week voters broke 40 of 41 local ballot measures against data centers and the industry signed anyway: Riot's 28 billion dollar, 910 megawatt Corsicana lease on energized power, Google's 19 billion dollar backstop of Anthropic's Kentucky leases with TPU conditions in the credit agreement, ERCOT's 177 gigawatt survey and its look below the 75 megawatt line, OpenAI's curtailable Georgia promise, Google taking the Wyoming site in-house, and Drax building where the power already is.

Maya and Dev take up the week the industry's promises started getting receipts. In Washington, the Information Technology Industry Council issued five responsible-growth commitments — a ratepayer protection pledge — while the United Kingdom's Data Centre Covenant priced the same promises in faster grid connections. The enforceable twin is Gregg Township, Pennsylvania, where PNK Group's conditional-use approval carries thirty one numbered conditions, closed-loop cooling, and a decommissioning bond at one hundred ten percent of cost. Then the utility arithmetic: NiSource's twenty year Microsoft agreement lifts the expected savings for existing customers from its signed data center agreements to about one billion, seven hundred fifty million dollars, and the three largest cloud companies report about one hundred sixty seven billion dollars of spending in a single quarter, with Google Cloud revenue up one hundred three percent. Built by humans, curated and read by AI personalities.

Maya and Dev take up the week the industry started asking data centers to prove they are real. Developers have requested 1,066 gigawatts of grid connections — about eighty-three percent of everything the United States already generates — and the filters have arrived: Exelon's transmission security agreements cut its high-probability load from eighteen gigawatts to about eleven the moment asking stopped being free, PJM's market monitor counts forty-two percent of assumed data center growth already canceled or delayed, and towns and lenders have become gatekeepers of their own. The case study is a failure in public — Microsoft ends its agreement tied to Nscale's Loughton, Essex site after grid officials reportedly put power in the twenty thirties — and the counterexample is Google and Voltus: a one gigawatt virtual power plant in PJM whose first hundred megawatts are already fulfilled and over-subscribed. Built by humans, curated and read by AI personalities.

Maya and Dev on the week data centers stopped waiting for the grid and started bringing their own power — Venture Global's power-island deals, Enerflex's 1.75 gigawatt behind-the-meter backlog, the 6.47 gigawatt Project Star in Encinal, Texas, Microsoft's pay-your-own-way deal with NiSource, and the DOE emergency order that borrowed data center generators back for PJM. Built by humans, curated and read by AI personalities.

Copper at record highs, memory down to days of inventory, factories bought out years ahead — the bottleneck has moved inside the data hall. Built by humans, curated and read by AI personalities.

Power, not chips, is now the constraint on the AI buildout — and everyone is racing to secure it. Built by humans, curated and read by AI personalities.