Nearly 200 proposed large loads hit ERCOT's queue in Q1 alone — and today the grid operator votes on whether any of them are actually real. This is The Data Center Daily — ERCOT's feasibility screen, OpenAI breaking ground in Saline, what's in Virginia's wastewater, and a Louisiana ratepayer report that puts a number on who actually pays for the buildout. The grid reality check and the household bill reality check dropped on the same Tuesday. Not subtle. Let's start in Texas. Here's Michael Minasi at Houston Public Media:
Currently, data centers and other high energy users, such as cryptocurrency miners and industrial facilities, are seeking a combined 438 gigawatts of power in Texas. That's more than five times the amount of electricity used to power the entire state during record-breaking demand.
ERCOT votes Tuesday on a feasibility-screening process for large load interconnection requests. In the first quarter alone, nearly 200 proposed data centers and other heavy users filed to join the grid. The combined ask in the queue is 438 gigawatts — more than five times Texas's all-time peak demand. Joshua Rhodes at UT has a line worth clocking: he says he hasn't believed those numbers for two years. 438 gigawatts in a state that peaks around 85 — that's not a queue, that's a wish list with filing fees attached. The real question for Tuesday's vote is whether ERCOT's new process can actually reject a speculative entry or just flag it and move it to a different spreadsheet. ERCOT is trying to separate real data center projects from speculative queue noise at the grid-operator level. That's a different venue than the federal docket path, but it's pointed at the same backlog problem. What matters now is whether this feasibility screen can actually kick projects out, or whether it just gives you a nicer-looking queue with the same 438 gigawatts sitting in it. This one's from OpenAI:
Today, alongside Governor Gretchen Whitmer, local community and labor leaders, and our partners at Oracle, Related Digital, and Walbridge, we broke ground on The Barn, a 1GW data center campus in Saline, Michigan.
June 1st in Saline, Michigan — OpenAI broke ground on a campus they're calling The Barn, one gigawatt, with Oracle and Related Digital as partners and Walbridge on construction. Governor Whitmer was on stage too. This is the clearest sign of the week that something moved from announced to actual dirt: named developer, named site, named builder, physical event. They put the ratepayer commitment in the press release — costs will not be passed on to local ratepayers, full stop. That's exactly the language the Louisiana report is screaming into the void about, except OpenAI actually wrote it down at groundbreaking. Now I want to see the utility agreement that backs that sentence up, because a press release isn't a tariff rider. Also worth flagging: the closed-loop cooling claim — 'about as much water as a typical office building' at one gigawatt — is either a genuinely novel system design or the most aggressively framed comparison in data center PR this quarter. Virginia Mercury's municipal-wastewater discharge story is still fresh, so water pathway transparency is now a live question at every new groundbreaking, not just an advocacy ask. This one's from HPCwire:
PARIS, June 1, 2026 — SoftBank Group Corp. has announced its commitment to develop and operate 5 GW of AI data center capacity in France, representing an investment of up to €75 billion. The first phase, comprising an initial €45 billion investment to deliver 3.1 GW of AI data center capacity in the Hauts-de-France region, is part of the 2026 Choose France summit hosted by President Emmanuel Macron.
SoftBank's France number out of the Choose France summit is 5 GW total, up to €75 billion, with the first phase at 3.1 GW and €45 billion in Hauts-de-France, plus a Dunkirk manufacturing anchor with Schneider Electric. It came out in a press release tied to a Macron-hosted summit, though, and that's not the same thing as a signed interconnection agreement or a financed project. Seventy-five billion euros is a Choose France summit number — Masayoshi Son said 'commitment,' not 'contracted.' I want to know what's permitted, what's grid-queued, and whether RTE has seen a single interconnection filing, because 5 GW on the French grid is not a press conference outcome. The European sovereignty framing is doing real work in that release — 'technological sovereignty' is right there in the headline, and it's clearly the political hook for the Macron summit. Whether that changes the capital structure or just the backdrop is the question. €45 billion for phase one still needs a financing close date attached to it before it moves out of the announced column. From Shannon Heckt at Virginia Mercury:
Data centers require a massive amount of water to cool their systems, which heat up as they process digital information through numerous computers and network servers. Systems that aren’t “closed loop” have to cycle out water that doesn’t evaporate.
Virginia Mercury's Shannon Heckt has a piece out this morning on data center water discharge — specifically the pathway that isn't evaporative cooling: facilities permitted to send discharge water into municipal wastewater systems, the same infrastructure that treats household water for consumption, with limited chemical tracking along the way. So it's not just how much water they're pulling — it's what's in the water going back out, and it's going into the pipes your tap water comes from, and nobody's really tracking the chemistry. That's a different kind of gap than evaporation volume. All week we've been watching the disclosure question from the intake side — Next10's groundwater report, the Pahrump aquifer story. This is the same underlying question about what's actually leaving the facility, just through a completely different physical pathway, and it lands in a jurisdiction that has more data centers per square mile than anywhere else in the country. Virginia's the stress test. If the disclosure regime has holes there, it has holes everywhere that matters. From Sofiah Nichole Salivio at IT Brief Canada:
The Alliance for Affordable Energy and Sierra Club Delta Chapter have published a report on the cost of supplying electricity to large data centres in Louisiana, warning that households and existing businesses could bear a significant share.
Alliance for Affordable Energy and Sierra Club Delta Chapter, with research support from Empower, just put five Louisiana projects under a microscope: Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, three Amazon facilities in northwest Louisiana, and Hut 8's West Feliciana site. The headline number is 7.2 gigawatts across just two of those projects, Meta and Hut 8, which the report benchmarks against 5.7 million homes worth of annual consumption. And the cost question isn't hypothetical — there's an actual Louisiana PSC rule from December 2025 that splits new infrastructure costs 50-50, developer and ratepayer. So the developer gets the gigawatts, the household gets the transmission line, the gas plant, the pipeline, and the substation — at fifty cents on the dollar. And the PSC already voted that in. This isn't a warning about what could happen; the cost-shift mechanism is already law in Louisiana. This is also where the PPA instrument question from earlier this week bites back. If Meta or Amazon has a clean-energy PPA on paper but the physical grid serving that site runs on new gas infrastructure financed partly by ratepayers, the instrument isn't obligating local clean power — it's just laundering the accounting. If The Data Center Daily helps you keep up, take a moment to subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you can leave a quick review, it really helps other people find the show.
We’ve linked every story from today’s briefing in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, you can dig in from there. That’s The Data Center Daily for this Tuesday, June 2nd. This is a Lantern Podcast.