FERC punts its large-load rule, Stargate adds four and a half gigawatts, and gas just leapfrogs wind in the Texas interconnection queue. The grid is not keeping up, and it is a Friday. Welcome to The Data Center Daily. I'm Cassidy, Devin's here, and today we've got a full stack: federal rulemaking delays, a ten-billion-dollar Texas lease, and a Utah campus that actually got permitted. The Texas queue story alone should be the headline. When gas is outrunning wind for grid connection slots, that is a reversal, not an energy transition. All right, let's get into it. From HyperSinc:
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission just announced it will make a final decision on the most consequential grid policy in decades, and it is going to miss the deadline by two months. On the RM26-4 docket, which will determine how data centers, AI manufacturing facilities, and industrial loads larger than 20 MW connect to the U.S. power grid, FERC said it will act by June 2026, not April 30.
FERC missed its April 30th deadline on Docket RM26-4, the rulemaking that sets interconnection rules for large loads like data centers, and pushed it to June. That leaves 86 gigawatts of queued generation, including 24 GW of battery storage, sitting there waiting for rules that do not exist yet. Two months sounds like a bureaucratic footnote until you're a developer who just lost your financing window. And the hundred-percent participant funding proposal — hyperscalers pay for their own grid upgrades — is the real story. That's billions in costs that used to be hiding on ratepayer bills. If participant funding sticks, it rewrites the economics of every large-load interconnection request in a congested region. Those cheap queue positions go away. That is a restructuring, not a delay. Here's Brand Vision:
OpenAI and Oracle on Tuesday unveiled the next phase of their sprawling Stargate initiative: a 4.5‑gigawatt expansion that will deploy hyperscale data‑center campuses across at least four states and house two million AI accelerators. The announcement lifts Stargate’s total committed capacity to just over 5 GW—already the world’s largest single AI infrastructure program—and strengthens Oracle’s bid to catch Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud‑services race.
OpenAI and Oracle dropped the next Stargate chapter Tuesday: 4.5 gigawatts of new AI campus capacity across at least four states, two million accelerators, and a headline number that takes total committed capacity just over five gigawatts. Texas and Michigan get 800-megawatt campuses first, with construction starting early next year. Wisconsin and Wyoming are still "under negotiation," which is Brand Vision's way of saying not signed. Four and a half gigawatts. That's not a data center, that's a small country's grid demand. And the power story is long-term clean-energy contracts, including SMR — small-modular nuclear that does not commercially exist at scale yet — so the 24/7 carbon-free by 2030 math leans hard on technology that's still in the "trust us" column. Evercore ISI puts eventual Oracle cloud revenue from this at thirty billion annually. The economic impact figures — seventy thousand construction jobs, eighty-five billion in local GDP over fifteen years — those are the kind of round numbers that come from the press release, not the filing. And "tens of billions over a decade" is not a capex commitment; that's a vibes range. Oracle catching Amazon and Microsoft in cloud is the subplot here. They need this compute to matter as a hyperscaler. So the question is how much of that five gigawatts is contracted customer demand versus Oracle betting on itself and hoping OpenAI's revenue trajectory holds. Akash Sriram, writing in The Star:
The agreement covers 352 megawatts (MW) capacity in the first phase of the project with an undisclosed tenant. Hut 8 said the client would install computing equipment at the site to support large-scale AI training and operations.
Hut 8 just signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas — 352 megawatts in phase one, part of a planned one-gigawatt build. Take-or-pay, triple-net, investment-grade counterparty, annual escalators. That is the actual contract structure, not a letter of intent. The tenant is still undisclosed, and that is doing a lot of work in that press release. Triple-net take-or-pay sounds airtight until you ask who's on the hook for the transmission infrastructure in Nueces County, because that is not a solved problem. Stock popped 25% on the news. To be fair, a signed lease with that payment structure is materially different from a capacity reservation. Genoot's quote was unusually specific about the no-termination-for-convenience clause, which tells me somebody asked that question. One gigawatt planned, 352 MW signed. The other 648 megawatts are a campus vision right now. I'll get excited about those when there is paper behind them. Here's Chain Tech Daily:
Box Elder County commissioners in Utah voted unanimously on May 4 to approve the Stratos AI campus backed by Kevin O’Leary Digital, the infrastructure arm of O’Leary Ventures. The approval came over the objections of hundreds of residents who chanted “Shame!” as the vote was announced and who said they had been given too little time to raise concerns before the decision.
Following up on the Box Elder scrutiny we flagged last edition, commissioners have now voted unanimously to approve O'Leary's Stratos campus. Nine gigawatts at full buildout, phase one at three gigawatts, forty thousand acres, natural gas pipeline on-site. That's more than twice Utah's entire current electricity consumption. Hundreds of residents were chanting "Shame" in the room and the vote was still unanimous. That is not a close call. That is commissioners telling locals their water and grid concerns are a national security problem to be managed, not a planning problem to be solved. O'Leary's framing is straight "China built four hundred gigawatts, we have to move fast," which is a real argument. It still does not answer where the water comes from in a Utah desert or who backstops the transmission build. And "approved by county commissioners" is not the same as energized, contracted, or financed. Nine gigawatts of natural gas in Box Elder County still needs pipe, wire, and somebody on the other end of a PPA. Let's see the signed paper. AOL, with Brandon Mulder:
For the last six months, the volume of gas generation in the Texas grid’s interconnection queue — the yearslong waiting list for electric generators wanting to connect to the grid — has surpassed wind. It’s the first time since January 2016 that gas has overtaken wind in the queue, a shift that reflects the policy and economic headwinds facing the wind industry and data centers favoring gas power as they seek to cash in on the artificial intelligence boom.
First time since January 2016: gas generation has surpassed wind in ERCOT's interconnection queue, six months running. The driver, per the reporting, is data centers chasing 24/7 firm power for AI workloads. Queue is not built. Lawrence Berkeley says only 22% of ERCOT queue projects ever reach completion. So we're talking about a surge in gas ambition, not gas megawatts. Fair — announced and queued are not energized. But the directional signal still matters: the policy and cost headwinds on wind are real, and developers are reading the room. And Texas ratepayers are going to be living inside whatever actually gets built. Gas that serves a hyperscaler campus at 2 AM does not magically disappear from the dispatch stack when the AI hype cycle turns. If you want to dig deeper, we've put links to every story from today's briefing in the show notes. Take a look there for the pieces that caught your ear.
That's The Data Center Daily for today. Thanks for listening, and have a good Friday. This is a Lantern Podcast.