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About 12 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity was scheduled to come online in 2026, but only about a third of it was under active construction in the spring, according to an analysis by Sightline Climate reported by Bloomberg in April. The analysis pointed to shortages of transformers, switchgear, and batteries as a main reason many projects were expected to slip, and the reporting put roughly half of the year's planned builds at risk of delay or cancellation. That equipment accounts for less than 10 percent of a data center's total cost, yet a building cannot be energized without it.

The mismatch is one of timing. Large power transformers took 24 to 30 months to deliver before 2020; Bloomberg reported that high-power units can now take up to five years, while AI data center deployment cycles run under 18 months. Wood Mackenzie's second-quarter 2025 supply chain survey, cited by POWER Magazine, put average lead times at 128 weeks for power transformers and 144 weeks for generator step-up transformers, the large units that connect power plants to the grid.

Wood Mackenzie's August 2025 analysis found that U.S. demand for power transformers had risen 116 percent since 2019 and demand for distribution transformers 41 percent, against projected supply deficits of 30 percent and 10 percent in 2025. Imports were expected to supply 80 percent of power transformers and 50 percent of distribution transformers. “Utilities are routinely turning to the import market to meet project timelines,” said Ben Boucher, a senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie, adding that this was escalating costs and lead times. Bloomberg reported that U.S. imports of high-power transformers from China rose from fewer than 1,500 units in 2022 to more than 8,000 in 2025. Data centers are one demand driver among several: POWER Magazine, summarizing Wood Mackenzie data, also cited roughly 40 million distribution transformers past their expected service life, about 55 percent of the U.S. fleet, along with renewable energy interconnections and a 77 percent rise in power transformer prices since 2019.

Manufacturers are building more capacity, but not quickly. Wood Mackenzie counted $1.8 billion in announced expansions by major equipment makers since 2023. Hitachi Energy said in September that it will build a $528 million transformer factory in Gallman, Mississippi, more than twice the size of its nearby Crystal Springs plant, with construction expected to begin late in 2026 and production scheduled to start in 2029. Siemens Energy announced a $150 million factory in Charlotte, North Carolina, its first U.S. large power transformer plant, citing $3.9 billion pledged to expand and update the U.S. grid within two years. A plant announced in 2026 that begins producing in 2029 does little for a campus being planned for 2027.

Washington has started to respond. On April 20, 2026, President Trump issued a determination under Section 303 of the Defense Production Act describing U.S. capacity to produce transformers, high-voltage transmission components, and other grid equipment as “dangerously limited,” opening the way for federal purchasing and financial support. Utility Dive reported that about $323 million remained available in fiscal 2026 DPA funds, a figure attributed to Jean Su of the Center for Biological Diversity that the White House did not immediately confirm. Spencer Pederson of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association called the move a “step in the right direction” while noting that funding and implementation details were unclear; Su said the funding is “just not that much.”

Not everyone agrees the shortage is a manufacturing problem. In POWER Magazine's reporting, Patrick Tarver of Bolt Electrical argued that “there is not a shortage,” claiming standard substation power transformers can be delivered in 12 to 14 months once engineering approval is complete, and that the real bottleneck is how utilities and engineering contractors structure procurement, with qualification rules and approved-vendor lists that keep alternative suppliers from reaching decision makers. He also said industry messaging was exaggerated to drive pricing. That view sits against the Wood Mackenzie survey data, and the two are not easy to reconcile from the outside.

Whichever account is closer to the truth, the gap that matters to data center developers is the one between schedules. AI data center deployment cycles run under 18 months, while the grid equipment that feeds them is ordered on a clock of two years or more, in a market where imports fill much of the shortfall and new domestic plants are years from output. For now, the pace of the AI buildout is being set less by chip deliveries than by how fast a handful of factories can wind copper around steel.

Crusoe has filed plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for two data center buildings in Jayton, Kent County, each spanning 759,260 square feet, with a combined site investment of $4.8 billion. The buildings are classified as 'spur buildings' of Project Hyper, linking them to Crusoe's larger development in Childress, where three buildings totaling 806,360 square feet represent a $2.4 billion investment each. Construction in Jayton is set to begin in January 2027, with the buildings expected to go live in May and July 2029. Combined with the Childress site, the full Project Hyper investment across both locations would reach $12 billion.

Taiwanese neocloud GMI Cloud has raised $668 million through a $223 million Series B equity round led by ARCHIV and a $445 million credit facility led by CTBC. Participants include Nvidia, Trend Micro, KT Corporation, Kyobo Life, KB Investment, and DSC Investment. GMI, founded in 2023, will use the funds to expand capacity in the US, Taiwan, and the wider APAC region, and to develop its inference services. The company previously announced a $500 million data center in Taoyuan, Taiwan, targeting roughly 7,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs and 16MW of power capacity housed within a Vantage Data Centers facility.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman announced the 'Built Together' program on Friday, committing more than $1 billion over five years to communities near Amazon data centers across the United States. The program focuses on three areas: funding community college and vocational training, providing grants for energy and water efficiency improvements in homes and public buildings, and supporting locally directed projects chosen in consultation with officials and nonprofit groups. The announcement followed a Tuesday White House meeting attended by President Donald Trump and technology executives including Amazon's Jeff Bezos. A September Pew Research report found 54 percent of Americans considered data centers mostly bad for the environment, up from 39 percent in January, while a May Gallup survey found seven in 10 opposed construction of AI data centers in their local area.

Tencent has signed a five-year contract to access 100,000 GPUs across multiple Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, according to the Financial Times, which cited two people familiar with the matter. The deal is valued at approximately $7 billion, with Tencent paying 30 percent upfront. The arrangement allows Tencent to access GPU hardware unavailable in China due to U.S. export controls, with compute intended primarily for training Hunyuan models, followed by inferencing workloads, and eventually for rental via Tencent Cloud. CFO John Lo and President Martin Lau both addressed the company's AI infrastructure spending, with Lau noting that infrastructure could be rented out at cost recovery prices via Tencent Cloud if other plans do not materialize.

U.S. electricity transmission capacity is falling far short of projected needs, with analysts at ICF forecasting residential rates could rise another 15 to 40 percent over the next five years and potentially double by 2050. The Department of Energy concluded in 2024 that the country would need to double or quadruple transmission capacity by 2050, requiring roughly 5,000 miles of new high-capacity regional lines per year; the U.S. built only 5,000 miles total over the nine years from 2017 through 2025, averaging just 600 miles per year since 2017. In August 2026, Energy Secretary Chris Wright canceled three proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors that the Department of Energy had advanced in December 2024. A bipartisan Senate bill to reform transmission permitting has been introduced, but the current congressional session is running short.

The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled that a citizen-proposed data center zoning ordinance cannot appear on the November 3 general election ballot in Wilmington, Ohio. The court found that the ordinance improperly included a private right of action allowing residents to sue data center operators for zoning violations, which is beyond a municipality's constitutional authority to enact. The proposed measure, submitted by Quintin Koger Kidd and Susan Croutwater, would have set enforceable standards for noise, lighting, water use, heat generation, and airborne emissions, with fines of $5,000 or $10,000 per day and potential suspension of a data center's certificate of occupancy. The Clinton County Board of Elections had unanimously voted not to certify the initiative after Wilmington Law Director Desmond Cullimore cited the court's 2018 ruling in State ex rel. Bolzenius v. Preisse.

Castrol launched Castrol CORE on September 29 in Singapore, a new service offering that integrates coolant products with design, system integration, testing, and maintenance for data centre liquid cooling. The service targets high-density AI infrastructure and is delivered through a network of hardware and service partners, with a dedicated team that includes specialists with backgrounds at firms such as Schneider, Vertiv, Eaton, IBM, and ABB. Castrol established its data centre and thermal management division three years ago in response to rising demand for cooling high-density servers. India is identified as a strategic growth market for Castrol CORE, with local stock available to support deployments.

Governor Abigail Spanberger has signed an executive order creating the Data Center Accountability Framework, which her office describes as the most comprehensive and aggressive data center accountability effort in the United States. The order bans non-disclosure agreements for data center projects, calls for expedited development of noise regulations, and initiates a review of backup generators, particularly diesel-powered units, for their environmental impact on communities. The framework also directs creation of an AI task force to address workforce displacement, data privacy, and cybersecurity concerns, and establishes a planning and community engagement toolkit for local governments. Virginia joins New York and Texas, where governors have each separately moved to slow or pause data center development amid growing public concern over power and water consumption.

Investor Kevin O'Leary, known from the television show Shark Tank, announced a data center development called Wonder Valley on 40,000 acres north of Great Salt Lake in Box Elder County, Utah, backed by a dedicated gas power plant projected to generate 9 gigawatts of electricity. Box Elder County commissioners approved the project unanimously but were officially informed it was coming only five weeks before the vote, and neighboring landowners, including rancher Tim Munns, said they had received no formal notification at all. O'Leary publicly accused online critics of being funded by China, then later retracted the claim, and he and Fox News were subsequently sued for defamation by Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, and Joshua Kanter. O'Leary Digital CEO Paul Palandjian, after describing himself as transparent, responded to interview requests through a lawyer threatening legal action over false statements.

A study by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois Project for Middle Class Renewal projects that $57 billion in new data center investments through 2035 will create 121,000 jobs in Illinois, though only 2,800 of those would be direct, permanent positions. The report estimates data centers would generate nearly $300 million in annual property tax revenue once operational, while adding an average of $12 per month to Illinois residents' utility bills, a figure utility watchdogs call too low. In 2024, Meta paid $31 million in property taxes on its data center in DeKalb County, though the city reduced the assessed taxes, limiting the benefit to local homeowners. The report puts forward 10 policy proposals, including a ban on local property tax abatements, after lawmakers failed to pass data center regulations in the spring session and Governor JB Pritzker paused the state's data center tax incentive program.

According to an IndexBox report, the global liquid cooling manifolds market is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12 to 18 percent from 2026 to 2035, driven by rising rack power densities in data centers, high-performance computing, and semiconductor manufacturing. Data centers are the largest end-use segment, accounting for an estimated 45 percent of global demand, with rack power densities exceeding 30 kW making traditional air cooling inadequate. Asia-Pacific and North America together represent 70 to 75 percent of global consumption, while the Americas source 60 to 70 percent of manifold requirements through imports. Standard-grade manifolds trade in a USD 80 to 200 unit price range, while premium specifications command two to three times that figure, and replacement cycles of three to five years generate recurring aftermarket revenue. Named market participants include Vertiv Holdings, Schneider Electric, CoolIT Systems, Asetek, and Boyd Corporation.

On September 21, 2026, Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to halt issuance of all permits related to data center projects until ERCOT completes an audit of impacts on the state's electric grid and water resources. The pause covers permits for power generation, water rights, and wastewater infrastructure, and extends to projects outside ERCOT's footprint and below any megawatt threshold. Abbott also directed that no other state agency move forward with regulatory approvals for data centers until ERCOT receives requested information. ERCOT expects to publish findings from its State and Community Impact review no later than December 10, 2026, but no firm end date for the permitting pause has been set.

Pennsylvania's House Energy Committee advanced three bills on Wednesday aimed at preventing electricity customers from absorbing infrastructure costs tied to data center growth, after bills have risen by up to 20% two years in a row. House Bill 2828, introduced by Chairperson Elizabeth Fiedler (D-Philadelphia), would codify in state law that data center developers must pay for utility infrastructure upgrades needed to serve them, aligning with a Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission rate model issued in May. House Bill 2755, sponsored by Rep. Chris Pielli (D-Chester), would mandate investor-owned transmission companies join PJM Interconnection, eliminating a 0.5% profit bonus paid by customers; a similar move saved New Jersey ratepayers about $20 million a year. House Bill 2775, co-sponsored by Rep. Kyle Donahue (D-Lackawanna) and Fiedler, would require data center developers to apply for electric service and pay associated fees before seeking zoning approval, to filter out speculative projects.

Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Delaware) introduced two federal bills to increase transparency around large data center development and give communities independent information on potential impacts. The Data Center Community Empowerment Act would create a program at the U.S. Department of Energy to provide expert advice to state, local, and tribal governments on electricity demand, water use, economic impacts, and projected tax revenues, while explicitly barring the department from recommending project approvals. The Data Center Transparency Act would require the Environmental Protection Agency to report every three months on nationwide water consumption, reuse, water availability impacts, pollutant discharges, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the Energy Information Administration would report at least every six months on energy use and effects on household electricity bills. The bills were assigned to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, respectively.

LG Electronics has joined the NVIDIA Partner Network as a Power and Cooling Solution Preferred Partner, gaining qualification for its 2.6-megawatt Coolant Distribution Unit as an NVIDIA DSX Ready CDU, which LG says is the largest cooling capacity among current DSX Ready CDU partners. The company has also completed NVIDIA infrastructure qualification for its 600 kW and 1 MW CDUs, covering cooling performance, failover capabilities, and reliability. The CDUs use direct-to-chip liquid cooling and are designed to work alongside existing air-cooling infrastructure. LG plans to display the qualified units at Data Centre World Asia 2026 on September 29 and 30 in Singapore, and aims to complete NVIDIA qualification for a 4.0 MW CDU by the end of 2026.

SoftBank Group has completed its acquisition of all outstanding common stock of DigitalBridge Group for approximately $3.1 billion, making DigitalBridge a controlled subsidiary. DigitalBridge will continue to operate as a separately managed platform under current CEO Marc Ganzi, and the deal does not involve any of its portfolio companies. As a result of the transaction, DigitalBridge is no longer listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

CoreWeave announced at its Fully Connected conference in San Francisco that the Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 system is now available on its cloud platform, with Cognition as the first customer, having begun using the systems in early September. Cognition reported up to a 4.8x increase in total token throughput for its SWE-2 inference workloads on the new hardware. CoreWeave also announced plans to offer the Vera CPU as a standalone bare-metal product, with some customers expected to begin testing it in coming weeks.

Crusoe officially confirmed on September 28 that it is developing the Goodnight Campus in Claude, Armstrong County, Texas, for Google, with ground broken in June 2025. According to Aterio Research, the campus will feature seven buildings offering more than 1GW of capacity across two phases, with a total expected investment of $29 billion. Separately, Crusoe's cloud business has secured a $65 million annual agreement with Thinking Machines Lab and an undisclosed contract with Perplexity, pushing Crusoe Managed Inference's ARR above $100 million.

Buckinghamshire Council has approved Amazon Web Services' plans for a data center project in Iver, Buckinghamshire, UK, replacing 17 existing industrial and warehouse units with a single two-story data center building spanning 30,525 sqm. As part of the approval, Amazon must contribute £600,382 toward air pollution offset projects, invest £73,000 in improving nearby public rights of way, and monitor generator emissions. Amazon Data Services originally filed for the project in October 2025, having purchased the site for £132.5 million in 2022.

An Coimisiún Pleanála has granted Google permission to build a third data center building at its Grange Castle Business Park campus in Dublin, Ireland, reversing a refusal issued by South Dublin County Council in August 2024. The council had originally denied permission over insufficient electricity grid capacity, a lack of significant on-site renewable energy, and unresolved Power Purchase Agreements. The approval is subject to conditions, including that Google show evidence of active power purchase agreements and use renewable fuel for backup generators.

Troy, Michigan-based Virtus Solis Technologies and Chicago-based Brae Systems have signed a 20-year power purchase agreement under which Virtus Solis will supply 100MW of orbital solar power, delivering 876,000 MWh annually to Brae's underwater data center concept. Neither company has yet deployed the infrastructure required to fulfill the deal; Virtus Solis plans a 100kW pilot solar plant in low-Earth orbit within approximately 24 months and a public microwave transmission demonstration in March 2027. The contract includes an option for Brae to take up to 250MW within three years of initial commercial operations.

As utility interconnection timelines lengthen and large-load tariffs grow more demanding, data center operators are increasingly pursuing dedicated behind-the-meter generation through gas, batteries, fuel cells, renewables, or co-located power plants. Even facilities that supply most of their own power typically remain connected to the public grid for transmission, emergency imports, reserve capacity, and black-start capability, creating unresolved questions about cost responsibility. Cases involving Amazon and Talen Energy, along with regulatory proceedings in Ohio and Michigan, are shaping an emerging hybrid-grid model that distributes costs between self-supplying operators and the broader grid.

A report by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois Project for Middle Class Renewal projects that $57 billion in new data center investments through 2035 will generate 121,000 jobs in Illinois, but only 2,800 of those would be direct permanent positions, amounting to $20.2 million in investment per permanent job. The report also estimates data centers will add an average of $12 per month to Illinois residents' utility bills and could generate nearly $300 million in annual property tax revenue if no abatements are offered. The study also put forward 10 policy proposals, following Gov. JB Pritzker's pause of the state's data center tax incentive program, which had delivered an estimated $660 million in tax breaks as of 2025.

Trane Technologies, working with Eaton Corporation and Danfoss, has completed a laboratory demonstration of an 800-volt direct current cooling architecture, modifying an existing high-efficiency chiller to operate from an 800 VDC feed and delivering more than 1,000 tons, or 3.5MW, of cooling capacity. The company says the approach could yield up to a 2% improvement in system efficiency by reducing power conversion losses in compressor drives, pumps, and fans. In a 200MW data center, Trane estimates that efficiency gain could free up to 1.8MW of additional compute capacity, enough to support up to fifteen 120kW racks or up to three 600kW racks.

The Grady County Board of Commissioners voted against pursuing either a county planning commission or a public vote on zoning authority that could have regulated data center development near Amber, Oklahoma. The decision followed the Amber Town Council's earlier rejection of annexation of nearly 3,000 acres, including land purchased by Aligned Data Centers (OK) Propco LLC on July 29 for over $17 million. Commissioner Ruth Bingham said several landowners near Amber had already voiced opposition to zoning laws, and Commissioner Zachary Davis cited private property rights as his rationale for opposing the measures.

Public Citizen has published a Texas Data Center Policy Guide aimed at helping community members identify, challenge, and regulate proposed data center projects in their area. The guide covers zoning authority, state environmental permitting, water rights allocations through groundwater conservation districts, and tax incentive programs including the Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation Act and Tax Code Chapter 312 abatements. Public Citizen is also a founding member of the Texas Data Center Rebellion, a coalition of community activists organizing across the state.

The House passed H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, by a vote of 417-3 on September 16, sending the measure to the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 684. The bill, introduced by Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) with Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) as original cosponsor, would amend the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 to establish a federal standard requiring large-load customers, defined as data center operators with an aggregate peak demand of at least 100 megawatts at a single site or campus, to bear the full incremental cost of grid upgrades needed to serve them. State utility regulators would generally have one year to begin considering the standard and two years to complete that review; the bill does not mandate adoption. The Congressional Budget Office estimated no federal budget impact, though it classified state compliance costs as an intergovernmental mandate it expects to be small.

PG&E CEO Patti Poppe told CNBC that the company is seeing a sharp increase in data center electricity requests, with a reported pipeline of 12.7 gigawatts, as AI and cloud infrastructure expansion drives new demand on California's grid. At the same time, Poppe warned that the failure of California lawmakers to pass meaningful wildfire liability reform under Senate Bill 492 has elevated borrowing costs, adding an incremental $600 million to customer costs over the past two years. In response to the unresolved liability framework, PG&E reduced its planned full-year 2027 capital investment by approximately $2 billion to $11.4 billion. Fitch reportedly maintained PG&E's BBB- rating but lowered its outlook to Negative from Stable, citing wildfire liability risks.

CoreWeave unveiled CoreWeave Forge, an integrated software platform for training, inference, evaluation, observability, and agent development, at its Fully Connected event in San Francisco on September 30. Available in Free, Pro, and Enterprise editions, Forge includes new tools such as CoreWeave Notebooks, CoreWeave Agent Lens, and RL Rollouts, alongside the generally available CoreWeave Aria AI research assistant. On the hardware side, the Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 is now available on CoreWeave's cloud platform, with AI startup Cognition the first customer to run workloads on it, going live in two days. CoreWeave also launched a partner network with early integrations from VAST Data, CrowdStrike, and ClickHouse.

Infineon Technologies will supply silicon carbide power devices for integration into Eaton's medium-voltage solid-state transformer 2.0 platform, targeting 800VDC data center power distribution architectures. Eaton says its MVSST 2.0 reduces conversion stages compared with conventional AC-to-DC architectures, improving efficiency, power density, and deployment flexibility, with SiC's superior thermal conductivity and higher switching speeds further improving performance. David Zheng, VP of R&D for power quality in APAC at Eaton, and Andreas Weisl, EVP and chief sales officer of industrial and infrastructure at Infineon, both cited rapidly growing AI data center power demands as the driver for the collaboration. The two companies said they plan to explore next-generation platforms based on 2.3kV and 3.3kV SiC power modules to support higher system voltages in future facilities.

Meta has signed an agreement to lease AI compute capacity from Australian neocloud Firmus across its upcoming Southeast Asia data centers, building on an existing deal in which Meta leases Nvidia GB300 NVL72 compute from Firmus' Melbourne facility. Firmus is co-developing AI factories in the region with operator DayOne, including a Batam, Indonesia site expected to house 170,000 GPUs, and additional facilities in Malaysia where OpenAI is also a customer. The Southeast Asia capacity delivered to Meta will run on Nvidia's full-stack DSX platform, with Firmus' HyperCube modular data center solution integrated into the facilities. Firmus co-founder and co-CEO Tim Rosenfield said the build-out has the scale to support Meta's AI research and model development workloads, and the company's total contracted capacity now exceeds 900MW.

Digital Realty announced on September 22 a plan to build a cable landing station inside its LAX12 data center in El Segundo, California, developed in partnership with subsea infrastructure specialist Assured Communications. The station is designed as a turnkey solution for subsea cable operators and is targeted at Asia-Pacific to North America routes, with operations expected to begin in 2028. Craig Waldrop, Digital Realty's vice president of strategy and business development, described the project as the company's first turnkey cable landing solution and said the goal is to create a more direct connection between arriving subsea capacity and terrestrial networks, clouds, and carriers. The carrier-neutral design means cable operators will not be tied to a single network or cloud provider.

LG Electronics has been listed as a Power and Cooling partner in the Nvidia Partner Network, qualifying its 600-kilowatt and 1-megawatt coolant distribution units under Nvidia's standard requirements, and its 2.5-megawatt CDU as an Nvidia DSX Ready CDU under AI factory specifications. The designation gives LG greater access to customers building AI data centers on Nvidia technology, including earlier engagement at the design and planning stage. Lee Jae-sung, president of LG Electronics' ES Company, said the listing demonstrates that the company's thermal-management technology meets the requirements for next-generation AI data center infrastructure. LG entered the data center cooling market in 2011 and has since built a portfolio it describes as spanning chip-level cold plates, coolant distribution units, and chillers.

DG Matrix and TerraFlow Energy have announced a commercial agreement to deploy a solid-state transformer paired with a vanadium redox flow battery to power a 1,200-core GPU cluster of Dell servers, in what would be one of the first SST architectures to power a high-performance computing cluster in the United States. DG Matrix CEO Haroon Inam said the system will replicate Nvidia's 800 VDC power architecture and replace between 11 and 18 separate pieces of equipment with a single unit. Jefferies analysts wrote in an equity research note that the SST market for U.S. data centers could reach $4.3 billion in 2030, up from $37 million today, with analysts identifying a qualification window between now and 2028 when vendors must demonstrate field results. TerraFlow CEO Jon Parrella also plans to deploy the combined SST and battery system at his company's 25-megawatt Center of Excellence.

A commentary published by KVOE examines a proposed hyper-scale data center in Emporia, Kansas, addressing community concerns about electricity rates, water use, and noise by citing a March 2026 Institute for Energy Research study and state regulatory actions. The IER study found no statistically significant relationship between data center concentration and higher electricity rates or faster rate increases across U.S. states. Kansas utility Evergy has a $21.6 billion capital spending plan over five years, including 4,000 MW of new generation over seven years, and the Kansas Corporation Commission in 2025 approved a Large Load Power Service tariff requiring customers above 75 MW to sign long-term agreements, pay minimum demand charges, and provide financial guarantees. Kansas Senate Bill 98 also established data center sales tax exemptions tied to commitments on power, water stewardship, and employment.

HyperDC Pty Ltd has filed a planning permit application with the Victorian government for a 400MW IT capacity data center campus in Moorabool, located at 715 Ballan Road roughly 75 kilometers west of Melbourne. The proposed MBL1 site spans 39 hectares of largely vacant land near Geelong. Gerard Adamsons, listed as a company director on LinkedIn and previously with residential developer Villawood Properties, is connected to the project. The site sits close to the 300MW Victorian Big Battery facility and AusNet Services' Moorabool Terminal Station.

Ben Green, assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and Public Policy, argues in a Harvard Gazette interview that community concerns about data centers are legitimate, citing rising electricity rates, high water use, and limited local economic benefit. Green says data centers typically employ only 20 to 50 staff once operational, and that Virginia and Georgia have collectively surrendered more than a billion dollars in tax revenue through industry breaks. A Pew Research Center poll cited in the piece reflects broad public opposition to data center expansion. Green also references a planned OpenAI Stargate Project site in Saline Township, Michigan, projected to exceed 2 million square feet and consume 1.4 gigawatts of energy.

National Grid Partners' third annual Utility Innovation Survey, drawn from 134 U.S. utility innovation leaders surveyed between May 20 and July 7, found that 74 percent say AI-driven data center load growth is impacting grid reliability, and 78 percent are deploying at least one AI application to manage interconnection demand. Grid reliability has overtaken net-zero goals as the top industry priority, with 73 percent placing reliability in their top three concerns, up from 43 percent in 2025, while net-zero priority dropped from 54 percent to 16 percent. The survey also found that 83 percent of respondents said infrastructure costs for AI data centers are being passed on to residential customers. National Grid recently joined the AI Energy Management Alliance alongside Google, NVIDIA, Anthropic, and Emerald AI to develop policies for flexible, demand-responsive data centers.

Daniel Cohan, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, told Newsweek that the environmental impact of data centers depends on three factors: total electricity demand, the type of generation used, and the speed of construction. Cohan said the largest facilities now being built are unprecedented in their grid demand, and that concentrated, rapid construction, before infrastructure has time to adapt, risks raising costs and jeopardizing power reliability. Yu-Feng F. Lin, a principal research hydrogeologist at the Illinois State Geological Survey and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, added that water use is more complex than direct consumption figures suggest, noting that electricity-intensive cooling can shift water demand to power generation rather than eliminate it. Both experts cautioned that outcomes depend heavily on planning and policy choices.