Two $225 million deals closed, two moratoriums passed — same Tuesday, very different America. This is The Data Center Daily. I'm Cassidy. Today: I Squared closing on ten Cogent Fiber facilities, Iren locking in air-cooled Blackwell for Childress, and Nevada and Arkansas both voting to hit pause on data center permits in the same day. Matt here — and yeah, I want to know how long those bans last once a developer walks in holding a state-issued permit. Exactly. Let's get into it. From Crypto Briefing:
I Squared Capital just wrote a $225 million check for 10 data center facilities from Cogent Fiber, LLC. The acquisition gives the Miami-based infrastructure investment firm roughly 53 megawatts of installed power capacity and 259,000 square feet of colocation space spread across nine major US markets.
I Squared Capital, $225 million, ten facilities, 53 megawatts, 259,000 square feet — Cogent Fiber is the seller, and Cogent Communications is taking the cash straight to debt reduction. This closed yesterday, and that's the part that matters after we flagged the secondary-market thread Tuesday. The 'up to $1 billion' part is where I hit the brakes. $225 million is signed and done; the other $775 million is stated intent from an infrastructure fund. Those are different things, and I want to know what's actually committed capital versus platform-build marketing. The concrete part is Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, California, Texas — legacy purpose-built assets in dense urban markets, already energized, already in the queue. The $225 million is the floor. The billion is the thesis. Here's Telecompaper:
Australian-based global Neocloud provider Iren said it has entered into an agreement with Dell to supply air-cooled Nvidia Blackwell-based systems for deployment at its Childress, Texas campus as the company expands infrastructure supporting its AI cloud services business. The systems are intended to support a previously announced five-year managed services AI cloud contract valued at USD 3.4 billion.
Iren-Dell: air-cooled Nvidia Blackwell systems, Childress, Texas — hardware procurement tied to that previously announced five-year managed-services contract worth $3.4 billion. And that air-cooled spec is the detail to sit with, especially after yesterday's water-district vote in Pahrump. Childress is deep in ERCOT territory — west Texas, semi-arid, and now a neocloud is deliberately choosing air cooling over liquid. That doesn't read like a pure cost call; it reads like an operator telling you what they think the water picture is at that site. We've been on the water-disclosure gap all week — the Next10 report, Pahrump's board asking for a halt because they don't have usage data. Iren basically answered a version of that question at the hardware level before anybody had to ask. That's a very different posture from lobbying a water district for a permit and hoping for the best. Sure, but air-cooled Blackwell still brings real power-density tradeoffs — you're swapping water stress for higher per-rack wattage. So where does Childress sit in the interconnection queue, and what does ERCOT's backstop look like when an AI inference workload spikes on that campus? This one's from Hoodline:
Pahrump’s water watchdogs just drew a hard line. The Nye County Water District governing board voted Tuesday to ask county commissioners for a temporary halt on new data center projects in the Pahrump Valley, arguing that the region’s already strained groundwater supply cannot handle another major draw.
Pahrump, Nevada. The Nye County Water District governing board voted May 26 to ask county commissioners for a halt on new data center projects, citing groundwater stress in Basin 162. The draft ordinance would classify data centers as a non-permissive use of water in that basin. Here's the catch — this is a water district board asking commissioners for a moratorium. That's advisory. It's not an ordinance; it's a request. Pulaski County's Quorum Court actually passed a 12-month permit ban. Headlines call both moratoriums, but one has teeth and the other is waiting on a different body to act. And the Pahrump issue is specifically groundwater — Basin 162, evaporative-cooling limits, source-water protection. That's a different regulatory lever than Longmont's 5-percent-of-city-load demand threshold or Pulaski's blanket permit ban. So now we've got four distinct legal instruments in one week: a water-district advisory request, a demand-threshold ban, a county permit ordinance, and Arkansas's self-sufficiency mandate. Four instruments, one week — fine. But the harder problem for Pahrump is jurisdiction. The second a developer shows up with a state-issued water permit for Basin 162, what exactly does the county commission's moratorium — if they even pass it — actually stop? Nevada water rights run through the state engineer's office, not a county zoning board. Daniel McFadin, writing in Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:
Pulaski County became one of the latest government bodies in the country to impose a moratorium on data centers Tuesday night. The county Quorum Court passed an ordinance that imposes a 12-month ban on the county accepting, processing, reviewing and approving any zoning applications, site plans, building permits, special use permits or any variances for the development or construction of data centers.
Pulaski County Quorum Court, Tuesday night — twelve-month ban, full stop: no zoning applications, no site plans, no building permits, no special use permits, no variances for new data center construction or expansion. Sponsored by Justice of the Peace Rebekah Davis, passed through the Quorum Court. That's a legally enacted instrument, not an advisory request. And they carved AVAIO out immediately. Eight to six plus one on the amendment — the thinnest possible majority to grandfather in the one project already in the ground because JP Stowers was worried about financial-liability exposure. So the moratorium is real, but there's a named exception baked in before the ink is dry. The Google project in Little Rock is inside city limits, so the county ordinance was never going to touch it anyway. AVAIO is in unincorporated Wrightsville — that's the one that needed the carve-out. Two projects in the county: one already exempt by geography, one explicitly grandfathered. So the moratorium is really aimed at whatever comes next. Which is fine as a forward-looking instrument — but the real question is whether it survives the moment a developer walks in with a state-issued permit. County Quorum Court ordinance versus state-level approval: I want to know which Arkansas statute controls, because 'we passed an ordinance' and 'we can enforce an ordinance' are two different things. If you follow AI infrastructure, you may also like Anthropic Pentagon Watch, a daily briefing on Anthropic's fight with the DoD over Claude, military AI use, autonomous weapons, and procurement blacklisting. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
You'll find links to all of today's stories in the show notes if you want to dig deeper into anything we covered.
That's The Data Center Daily for this Thursday, May 28th. Thanks for listening. This is a Lantern Podcast.