Eight hundred and thirty billion dollars in capex — and the thing between AI and the grid might be a county planning commission in Kansas. Welcome to The Data Center Daily. I'm Cassidy, Devin's here, and we're following the point where hyperscaler spending runs straight into local permitting reality. TrendForce says the top nine cloud players are dropping $830 billion this year — and meanwhile Box Elder County, Sedgwick County, and a half-dozen planning commissions are asking the questions the press releases skip right over. Who pays for the wires, where the power comes from, and what a moratorium does to the timeline — that's what we're digging into. Here's PR Newswire:
TrendForce's latest findings on the AI industry highlight that several major North American CSPs have recently raised their 2026 capital expenditure (CapEx) guidance in response to strong AI demand. As a result, TrendForce has revised its forecast for the combined CapEx of the world's top nine CSPs—Google, AWS, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu—up to approximately US$830 billion in 2026, with the annual growth rate raised from 61% to 79%.
TrendForce has a revised 2026 capex aggregate for the top nine CSPs — Google, AWS, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and the four Chinese hyperscalers — and they're putting it at $830 billion, up from a prior forecast that implied 61% growth. Now they're calling it 79% year over year. Eight hundred thirty billion. That's not a capex number, that's a sovereign wealth fund. And this comes out of a PR Newswire drop from TrendForce, so I'd want to see the underlying methodology before I tattoo that figure anywhere. Fair. The company-by-company numbers matter more — Microsoft guiding to $190 billion means 130% year-over-year growth, AWS is north of $230 billion, and TrendForce says about $25 billion of Microsoft's increase is component cost inflation, not new capacity. That's a real distinction. Right — some of that 'investment' is just paying more for the same rack. Raising guidance and raising costs does not automatically mean proportionally more megawatts in the ground. Here's FOX 13 News:
The Stratos Project, backed by Kevin O'Leary, currently has applied for only 1,900 acre-feet of water use. That's equivalent to a farm's water use. However, with a facility that is being built on 40,000 acres of land and expected to consume as much as nine gigawatts of electricity, it is anticipated the data center would be filing more applications with the state in the future.
Following up on yesterday's Box Elder water fight: by Wednesday's deadline, the protest count was over 3,800 formal objections, plus another 2,000 letters of concern. That's three times the state's previous record for a water project. And the application on the table right now is only 1,900 acre-feet — basically a farm. They still haven't filed for what a nine-gigawatt campus would actually need. That number is a placeholder, not a disclosure. Nine gigawatts on 40,000 acres. Kevin O'Leary's branding is loud, but the water-rights paperwork is quiet — and now the State Engineer's office is basically all hands just to process the objections. That's the tell. You announce the gigawatts, you whisper the acre-feet. The Great Salt Lake basin is already over-appropriated, and they're filing for farm-sized water just to get a foot in the door before the real ask comes. Here's Eddie Celaya at KGUN 9 Tucson News:
Tucson officials are considering new zoning regulations for large data centers as residents and city leaders raise concerns about the industry’s potential impact on water and energy resources in the desert city. The Tucson Planning Commission held a special meeting Wednesday evening at City Hall to review proposed zoning rules for future data center developments.
Tucson's Planning Commission held a special session Wednesday on new data center zoning — noise limits, setbacks, water-consumption standards, energy-usage thresholds. That's Project Blue's legacy: one unnamed proposal hit enough nerves that the city is writing the rulebook from scratch. Tucson. Desert. Evaporative cooling. You can see why residents showed up mad. What I want to know is whether those proposed water standards have actual numbers attached, or if they're the kind of 'standards' that disappear the second a developer walks in with a term sheet. The draft regs do include setback requirements from residential areas and noise caps — that's sensible baseline stuff. But the energy and water pieces are still in the proposed column, and Tucson sits in APS and TEP territory, so the grid-headroom question is real before a single permit gets stamped. Here's KWCH:
Sedgwick County commissioners first implemented a moratorium on data center developments in January. In early March, the commission pushed the deadline to June 11. On Wednesday, they voted to extend that pause another 90 days, until September 11. There are currently no formal rules in Sedgwick County zoning codes for the massive computer server facilities.
Sedgwick County, Kansas just extended its data center moratorium another 90 days — now it's paused through September 11th. That's the third deadline they've set since January, and planning staff still hasn't finished writing the zoning rules from scratch. Farmers near Colwich raised traffic, water, and public safety concerns — and the county's response is basically, 'we don't have rules yet.' That's not a moratorium; that's a county admitting it got caught flat-footed by an industry that moves faster than municipal zoning cycles. To be fair to the staff, writing data center zoning from zero is genuinely hard work. Water draw, power interconnection, setbacks — none of that lives in a standard agricultural county code. Sure, but the developer didn't wait for the rules to exist before picking the site. That's the part that burns locals every time. If The Data Center Daily helps you keep up, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps other people find the show.
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That's The Data Center Daily for this Thursday, May 7th. This is a Lantern Podcast.