Six hundred thirty billion dollars in planned capex — and FERC still doesn’t have a rule on the books for how to hook it to the grid. This is The Data Center Daily — I’m Cassidy, Matt’s here — and today we’re naming the statute under the large-load interconnection fight, pulling on Synergy’s 1,297 hyperscale sites to see what they say about demand, and taking another look at a Stargate guide that got revised in February and hasn’t really been pressed on since. Four months after that revision, and nobody’s asked what actually changed — even though the land filings we’ve been watching all week in Pennsylvania should already be telling us. Right — Section 403 of the DOE Organization Act, the Synergy capacity numbers, and the question of whether Stargate’s guide is a construction schedule or just a narrative document. From Rich Miller at Datacenter Richness:
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft say they will dramatically boost their data center spending in 2026. This emphatic reinforcement of the AI boom was capped by Thursday’s revelation that Amazon plans for $200 billion in annual capital expenditures (CapEx), most of which goes to digital infrastructure. All told, the Big Four plan to invest up to $630 BILLION in capital expenditures for 2026, about a 62 percent increase from the record $388 billion in 2025 spending.
The $630 billion breaks out like this: Amazon at $200 billion, Google up to $185 billion, Meta up to $135 billion, Microsoft up to $120 billion — all from Q1 earnings calls, all projected, none of it energized rack. Rich Miller at Datacenter Richness laid out the math in February, and the 62% year-over-year jump off a $388 billion 2025 base is the part that matters. Amazon went from $125 billion to $200 billion in one year. That’s not a rounding error — that’s a $75 billion jump on one earnings call. What I want to know is how much of that is new steel breaking ground in 2026, and how much is just option payments on land and queue positions that may never get interconnected. And this is where the FERC thread lands. We’ve been circling the jurisdiction question since May 15, and today the step-back segment finally names Section 403 of the DOE Organization Act and the October 23 Secretary Wright letter as the federal hook for a large-load interconnection rulemaking. The authority is there. The rulemaking is still in early SAR phase. The capital is already moving at 62% above last year. So the regulatory infrastructure is years behind the capital. That’s not some forecast issue — that’s the condition right now. Google doubled CapEx in a year; FERC’s clock doesn’t move that fast, and ratepayers in PJM territory are the ones sitting with the cost assignment while the agencies catch up. Load has always been the utilities’ and state PUCs’ lane — so what’s the actual legal hook that lets FERC step in and write rules for how a data center plugs into the grid? The hook is Section 403 of the DOE Organization Act, which lets the Energy Secretary direct FERC to start a rulemaking — and on October 23, 2025, Secretary Chris Wright pulled that trigger, per the primary DOE letter. It’s a rarely used authority, which is why Davis Wright Tremaine called this a “major expansion of FERC jurisdiction.” The federal framing runs through transmission: FERC already owns interconnection rules for generation tying into the interstate bulk electric system, and the argument is that a load above 20 MW connecting at transmission voltage crosses the same jurisdictional threshold. NERC data, cited by Orrick, shows demand growth in several grid operator footprints exceeding 120% by 2027 — the fastest pace in two decades — which gives FERC a reliability rationale to act. That said, FERC Chair Laura Swett has described this as operating at “the absolute edge of precedent,” per E&E News, and the commission got nearly 200 diverging comments before committing to act by the end of June 2026, roughly two months past DOE’s April 30 deadline. If FERC standardizes the interconnection process for loads over 20 MW, does that actually cut queue times, or does it just stack a federal process on top of the state-level gauntlet? That’s the fault line in the comment record — state regulators, lawmakers, and ratepayer advocates all pushed back hard on federal preemption of territory that’s historically been state utility turf, per Utility Dive’s reporting on the docket. The bull case for developers is a uniform federal study process that replaces the patchwork of state-by-state interconnection agreements and clears one of the utility-level chokepoints. The thing to watch is whether FERC’s June rule has enough legal durability to survive a challenge — Snell and Wilmer noted the commission is taking extra time to produce something that holds up in court, which tells you the jurisdictional exposure is real and the precedent here could reshape site selection for every project above that 20 MW threshold. Here's Synergy Research Group:
New Q3 data from Synergy Research Group shows that the number of large data centers operated by hyperscale providers has climbed to 1,297 worldwide, nearly tripling since early 2018. Over the same period, total operational capacity has increased more than fourfold as average data center size continues to rise. While strong growth has long characterized the hyperscale market, it is particularly notable that since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, some of the key metrics have skyrocketed, driven by aggressive AI initiatives.
Synergy’s Q3 2025 data shows 1,297 hyperscale facilities worldwide, nearly triple the count from early 2018. But the site count is the less interesting number — total operational capacity is up more than fourfold over the same period, because average facility size keeps climbing. That’s the compounding that never fits in a headline count. Quarterly capex hit $142 billion in Q3, up 180% in three years. Synergy says that supported a 170% increase in capacity added per quarter. So yes, the spend and the steel are tracking, and that’s worth saying plainly. But “operational capacity” is the past; what matters now is what’s still in the queue and still needs transmission, water, and a FERC interconnection process that’s running years behind this spend rate. One jurisdictional note that’s been hanging over all of this: the May 15 episode’s open question about what legal hook FERC actually has for a large-load interconnection rulemaking — today’s step-back segment finally puts a name to it. Section 403 of the DOE Organization Act, triggered by Secretary Wright’s October 23 letter. That’s the statutory architecture underneath everything Synergy is measuring here. So we’ve got 1,297 built facilities, fourfold capacity growth, $142 billion per quarter in capex — and the federal rulemaking that’s supposed to govern how that load connects to the grid is still in its early SAR phase. The infrastructure already landed. The rules haven’t. Here's IntuitionLabs:
In January 2025 OpenAI unveiled “The Stargate Project,” a massive AI infrastructure venture to build world-scale data centers. The new entity (funded by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX) will invest an initial $100 billion, ramping up to $500 billion over the next four years to deploy AI compute in the U.S.
The IntuitionLabs Stargate guide is dated February 21, 2026 — four months after the original January 2025 announcement — and it still doesn’t say what moved. On a commitment that scales from $100 billion to $500 billion, “revised” is doing a lot of work. The revision is the story. We’ve been in Pennsylvania permit bulletins all week watching what Stargate-adjacent land is actually doing. A project guide revised in February and still framing this as “$500 billion over four years” — I want to know whether the construction schedule in that document has already been overtaken by what we’re seeing in county filings, because a guide is not a schedule. The structure is SoftBank financing, OpenAI operating, Oracle and MGX as co-investors. That’s four entities with different balance sheets and different definitions of “committed.” The gap between announced and signed was the question in May 2025, and it’s still the question now. And the FERC jurisdiction piece we walked through today — Section 403, the Secretary Wright letter from October — sits right underneath all of it. Hyperscalers are deploying capital at 62% above last year’s record pace while the federal rulemaking on large-load interconnection is still in its SAR phase. That’s not some far-off problem. The capital is already in the ground faster than the regulatory infrastructure can track it, and Stargate is the biggest single name on that list. If you’re tracking the infrastructure behind AI, you might also like Musk v Altman Daily, a daily court-watch on Elon Musk’s trial against Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can dig into the source material there. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.