Eight hundred and thirty billion dollars in capex — and it might all be stuck waiting on a county planning commission. Welcome to The Data Center Daily. I'm Cassidy, with Devin. And today the gap between hyperscaler spending announcements and actual shovels in the ground gets very, very real. Box Elder County, Sedgwick County, local zoning boards — that’s where your 830 billion actually goes to die. We've got TrendForce's top-nine CSP capex number, two active local permitting fights, and a moratorium that just got a 90-day extension — starting with those. 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 bumped the combined 2026 CapEx forecast for the top nine CSPs up to $830 billion. That’s an annual growth rate move from 61% to 79%. AWS alone is expected to clear $230 billion. Microsoft is guiding $190 billion, which is roughly 130% year over year, though TrendForce says about $25 billion of that is component cost inflation, not new build. Eight hundred and thirty billion dollars and we're still getting press releases instead of interconnection queue updates. Where's the transmission? Where are the PPAs that are actually signed? Because 'strong AI demand' is not a grid delivery schedule. To be fair, TrendForce is just an analyst shop pulling together guidance from earnings calls. This is what the hyperscalers told investors — not a buildout tracker. The gap between guidance and energized capacity is the part nobody in this release is telling you. Right, and 'CapEx guidance' can mean anything from steel in the ground to a PowerPoint that says 'Phase 3.' When Microsoft's number is up 130% year over year, I want to know how much of that is land options and long-lead equipment deposits versus actual data halls taking load. 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 — the protest count is now past 3,800 formal objections, plus another 2,000 letters of concern to the Utah Division of Water Rights. That's more than three times the agency's previous record for a single water project. And here's the thing — they've only applied for 1,900 acre-feet so far. That's a farm's worth of water rights on a 40,000-acre, nine-gigawatt site. The first application is basically a placeholder. Nine gigawatts of anticipated load on a project that still hasn't secured the water, the power, or — apparently — the goodwill of the state engineer's office. The Utah State Engineer has everybody on all-hands just to process the inbox. Kevin O'Leary puts his name on a lot of things. I want to know who's actually on the hook when the next water application comes in and the Great Salt Lake Collaborative is already at the door. 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 to draft new data center zoning — noise buffers, setbacks, water and energy standards. The trigger was 'Project Blue,' a large-scale proposal that blew up publicly over resource transparency. Desert city, constrained aquifer, summer peak loads — and somebody greenlit a site study before the zoning framework existed. That's the part that should embarrass the planning department. They're writing the rules after the pitch deck landed. To be fair, that's not unusual. Half the Sun Belt buildout happened before municipalities figured out what questions to even ask. Water consumption standards and setback requirements showing up in the same proposal is a more serious framework than most cities start with. I'll believe the water standards mean something when I see a hard number — gallons per megawatt-hour, enforcement trigger, consequence for breach. 'Standards tied to water consumption' is a sentence, not a regulation. 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 pushed its data center moratorium to September 11th — that's the third extension since January, while planning staff tries to write zoning rules that don't exist yet. Farmers and landowners near Colwich flagged traffic, water, and public safety — and nobody had an answer because there are literally no zoning codes for these things in the county. That's not NIMBYism, that's a legitimate regulatory vacuum. Ninety more days to write the rules is reasonable. The real story is that a developer apparently tried to site a facility west of Wichita before the county had any framework to evaluate it. We've put links to all of today's stories in the show notes, so if there's a buildout, policy move, or market signal you want to dig into, that's the place to start.
That's The Data Center Daily for this Thursday, May 7th. This is a Lantern Podcast.