California can’t even tell you how many gallons its data centers are pulling. Pennsylvania, meanwhile, has a hearing set for July 7 on exactly 30,000 gallons a day. One number, zero numbers — that’s your Monday water ledger. This is The Data Center Daily. And today water is right there with transmission and permitting — because we’ve got a county moratorium, a live PUC docket, and a pretty glaring California accountability gap to get through. While regulators are still arguing about frameworks, Linn County, Kansas just skipped the debate and locked the door — data centers and battery storage, both of them, for twelve months. No applications. And while that’s happening, Digital Realty is pouring a slab in Dugny and NEXTDC is putting $720 million into Kuala Lumpur. Real groundbreaks, real capex — same week the domestic projects are running straight into moratoriums and water hearings. Rachel Becker, writing in CalMatters:
Data center builders don’t tell the public how much water they use, according to a new report— and the industry is encroaching into water-stressed and vulnerable communities. The report, by the think tank Next10 and researchers at Santa Clara University, finds that planned data centers — the ganglia of artificial intelligence — are spreading to regions reliant on overtapped groundwater and strained surface water, with potentially major effects in the Central and Imperial Valleys.
CalMatters, with Next10 out of Santa Clara University, says data centers are expanding into California’s Central and Imperial Valleys — both already leaning on overtapped groundwater. And the state still doesn’t have a mandatory disclosure rule. Newsom vetoed the water-use reporting bill last year, and now the Legislature is back on it. There’s a photo in this piece — an irrigation ditch between farmland and a proposed 950,000-square-foot facility in Imperial County. That’s the answer to the question we asked on May 13 about who decides when ‘feasible’ water protections get enforced: nobody, because nobody had to. Compare that with Pennsylvania, where the PUC just set July 7 hearings on a single campus in Luzerne County pulling 30,000 gallons a day. Named applicant, specific number, public docket. California can’t even give you the statewide total. That’s not a small gap; that’s the whole structure. Florida’s DeSantis signed reclaimed-water requirements for facilities over 50 megawatts. California has more acute water stress and a bigger buildout, but right now it’s living with a veto and a patchwork. Last week’s QTS underreporting story looked like an outlier; Next10 is saying that’s the baseline. PA Environment Digest writes:
[On April 11, The Shenandoah Sentinel reported CAN DO is requesting up to 30,000 gallons per day of potable water for domestic use. That water will not be used for data center cooling.
[Filings note that the Greater Hazleton Joint Sewer Authority will provide 350,000 gallons of recycled water per day for cooling.
Following up on Pennsylvania’s AI permitting queue — one Luzerne County campus just moved out of the pile and into a real docket. The PUC has July 7 on the calendar for CAN DO’s application to serve the Humboldt Industrial Park site: 30,000 gallons a day of potable water for domestic use, plus 350,000 gallons a day of recycled water from the Greater Hazleton Joint Sewer Authority for cooling. Named applicant, named parcel, published hearing date. That split — potable for domestic, recycled for cooling — is the right architecture. CAN DO is expanding a service territory and giving up pieces of two townships to make the geometry work. That’s a real land-and-water transaction, not a press release. And California still can’t tell you a single gallon figure for any facility in a drought basin. That contrast is doing a lot of work. A mid-size Pennsylvania development authority has more public process on 30,000 gallons a day than California has on aggregate data center water withdrawals from stressed basins. Florida’s reclaimed-water mandate is starting to look less like an exception and more like the floor. Linn County Journal, with Roger Sims:
MOUND CITY – The Linn County Commission has issued a temporary 12-month moratorium on filing any applications or issuing any permits for data processing centers, battery energy storage, and bitcoin or cryptocurrency mining facilities at its meeting on May 11. The moratorium only applies to unincorporated areas in the county.
Linn County, Kansas — Commissioner Alison Hamilton, unanimous vote, May 11 — 12-month moratorium, no applications, no permits, data centers, battery storage, crypto mining, all of it, in the unincorporated parts of the county. And the key thing here is the mechanism: the Planning and Zoning Commission had already spent two workshop sessions this spring drafting actual zoning language for these facilities. They didn’t finish, so the commission just closed the door while they keep working. What gets me is that the moratorium hits battery storage right alongside data centers. The storage utilities keep pointing to as the fix for large-load volatility? Blocked. Same order, same 12 months. And the trigger wasn’t some abstract grid model: an Osawatomie-area resident named Ian Day showed up at a city council meeting days earlier warning that a proposed data center would push contaminants down the Marais des Cygnes River and cut into La Cygne’s water supply. Community raises a water alarm, county commission stops the clock. The NERC SAR process has been moving toward formal large-load reliability standards — we flagged that last week. Linn County just made the gap visible at the county level: the standards framework hasn’t landed yet, so Commissioner Hamilton filled it with a moratorium. That’s a harder stop than anything a tariff proceeding or a PUC docket tends to produce. From Maison Edwards at B2Bdaily.com:
The PAR15 data center is designed as a massive three-story structure that will provide 66MW of power capacity across more than 23,000 square meters of IT space. This specific facility represents just the beginning of a much larger vision known as the Dugny Digital Hub. When the entire campus is finished, it will encompass three separate buildings, offering a staggering total of 176MW in capacity.
Digital Realty broke ground on PAR15 in Dugny this week — 66 megawatts, 23,000 square meters of IT space, three stories on a former French Air Force site. That’s phase one. When the full Dugny Digital Hub is finished, it’s supposed to be a three-building campus. Real slab, real site, real capex — and it’s outside Paris, not outside Phoenix, so they’re not fighting a county commission over water permits or waiting on a PUC hearing to see if the utility can take the load. Same week, NEXTDC drops $720 million on Kuala Lumpur. The international builds have more forward motion right now than half the U.S. pipeline we’ve been tracking. Put those two next to Linn County, Kansas — where a county commission just issued a 12-month moratorium, no applications, no permits, full stop — and the contrast writes itself. I’m not editorializing; I’m just stacking the numbers. Here's TechNode Global:
Purpose-built to support the next generation AI and high-performance computing, KL1 Kuala Lumpur has been designed to deliver 65MW of IT capacity and incorporates NEXTDC’s globally recognized Tier IV design principles, with KL1 Kuala Lumpur set to become the first Uptime Institute Tier IV-certified data center in Peninsular Malaysia.
NEXTDC’s KL1 in Kuala Lumpur: $720 million, 65 megawatts of IT capacity, Klang Valley, and the first Uptime Institute Tier IV-certified facility in Peninsular Malaysia. That’s a real groundbreak with real numbers attached. And while we’re tracking a county in Kansas that just locked the door on new data center permits, plus a California water-accountability gap that’s basically a void, an Australian company is dropping three-quarters of a billion dollars in Malaysia with a certified design and a published capacity figure. The disclosure is better on the international build than on anything coming out of the domestic pipeline right now. Worth putting alongside Digital Realty’s PAR15 groundbreak in Dugny this week — 66 megawatts, outside Paris. The international capex is moving, and it’s moving with specifics: named sites, named capacities, named certifications. Got a tip, a correction, or a data center story we should be watching? Send it our way at datacenterdaily at lantern podcasts dot com. We read what comes in, and it helps shape the show.
We’ve put links to every story from today’s briefing in the show notes, so if one deserves a closer read, you’ll find it there.
That’s The Data Center Daily for Monday, May 18th. Thanks for listening. This is a Lantern Podcast.