Vantage says Stargate Wisconsin is fifteen billion, zero-emission, near a gigawatt — and today we're going to find out what 'zero-emission' means inside MISO's actual generation mix. This is The Data Center Daily. A named gigawatt campus lands in Wisconsin, a law review finally puts teeth on the cooling-water question, and FERC's large-load rulemaking gets the lawyer treatment. Matt, where do you want to bite first? The press release. Six hundred seventy-two acres, four buildings, and the word 'zero-emission' somehow weighing more than the substation. So here's what they disclosed, and what they didn't. Vantage gives us the acreage, the building count, the fifteen-billion-plus capex. What I don't see is a PPA term or a named counterparty. Right — 'zero-emission' off whose generation? MISO's marginal unit at 2 a.m. is not a wind turbine. If that claim rests on unbundled RECs instead of a signed offtake, it's aspiration with a font. And this is Alliant's footprint. Their whole baseline argument was that large loads pay their own way — back when their installed base was a quarter this size. So now we get the test case. A fifteen-billion-dollar load in the exact territory where 'they pay their way' was a smaller-grid promise. ATC has to actually deliver this thing — deliverability isn't a slide. That's the escalation. Last week, the buildout was a Texas queue story. Now there's a demand anchor in a second RTO, and 519 ERCOT requests against one 298-megawatt supply answer starts looking like a multi-RTO pattern. And finally — finally — somebody put the water disclosure problem in a journal with a volume number. Katherine Kim, UC Law Environmental Journal, on cooling water discharge transparency. Peer-reviewed legal framing. That's a different kind of source than a DEQ hearing or a state bill — it gives the Lake Anna and Ohio threads an academic record to cite. What I like is she maps the gaps. I've been calling the NDA thing operator behavior. Kim's saying the regulatory regime itself doesn't require the disclosure. A locality green-lights siting before it ever sees the million-gallons-a-day number. Which is exactly the question we'd been asking — does the permit language bind anything? Now there's a citation that says where it doesn't. Two more in the same cycle: Mayer Brown on FERC's large-load preliminary rulemaking, and RMI's PJM 'Speed to Power' piece. RMI names specific overlooked interconnection fixes. My question is whether those sit inside FERC's interstate lane, RM26-4-000, or hit the distribution wall NARUC already fenced off. That's the split to watch. Some of RMI's fixes live in the federal docket; some need state PUC action. Mayer Brown's read gives developers' counsel a cleaner line on where that boundary sits right now. And the geography gives the game away. PJM's grinding through interconnection process fixes while Texas is still arguing who holds the pen on the tariff. Abbott's letter to ERCOT is a fight over who gets to write the tariff. Both fronts got harder today — a gigawatt of demand in MISO, and the first legal record on the water. That's where we head into the close. Hit follow and you won't have to come looking for the next episode. UC Law Environmental Journal, with Katherine Kim:
As society’s demand for more network storage and advanced generative artificial intelligence systems increases, industries are rushing to deploy more data centers. This rapid growth of data centers has led to increased concern regarding the burden that dat a centers place on energy and water resources.
For weeks I've been calling the water draw an NDA problem — operators sign confidentiality, the locality approves the site, and ratepayer advocates never see how many million gallons a day this thing pulls. Now there's a name on it: Katherine Kim, 32 Hastings Environmental Law Journal 177. And it carries differently than a DEQ hearing or a state bill — peer-reviewed, volume and page number, the works. Kim frames it around transparency and information gaps in cooling water discharge, which gives you a legal record to cite instead of another consultant note. Right — the paper doesn't just gripe that operators hide the numbers. It maps where the disclosure regime actually fails. That's the part that gives the Lake Anna and Ohio threads teeth. Filed May 13th, abstract opens on generative AI demand and the burden on water and energy. The academic version of what we've been saying — except now somebody footnoted it. Here's Vantage Data Centers:
OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage Data Centers, a leading global provider of hyperscale data center campuses, today announced plans to develop a data center campus outside Milwaukee in Port Washington, Wisconsin. The new campus is part of OpenAI and Oracle’s previously announced partnership to invest up to 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate capacity and is the Midwest site that was recently announced as part of OpenAI’s Stargate expansion.
The Port Washington project from Vantage, Oracle, and OpenAI: four buildings, 672 acres, close to a gigawatt, targeting service in 2028. Fifteen billion plus, and it's part of OpenAI and Oracle's 4.5-gigawatt Stargate expansion. The press release leads with 'zero-emission energy resources' and 'minimum water usage.' This is a MISO campus. I'd like to see the PPA term and the counterparty before I let that phrase ride. Zero-emission. In MISO's current generation mix. Show me a signed offtake, or it's the same Rabbit's Foot dressing the RWE-Meta deal wore in ERCOT — an aspiration with a logo on it. And this lands in Alliant's backyard. After the cooling-water piece we just hit — the one mapping exactly how little operators have to disclose — I want the million-gallons-a-day number before Port Washington signs off on siting, not after. What's new here is the geography. The week's been an ERCOT queue story — this is the first named gigawatt-scale demand anchor outside Texas. The buildout's a multi-RTO problem now. From Mayer Brown:
In late October 2025, at the direction of the Secretary of the US Department of Energy (“DOE”), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC” or the “Commission”) opened a preliminary rulemaking proceeding with the potential to result in significant changes to how data centers, advanced manufacturing facilities, and other energy-intensive projects are interconnected to the US bulk electric transmission grid.
Mayer Brown's read on FERC's large-load ANOPR is out, and for developers, the signal is pretty simple: their lawyers are writing client guidance on this now. That's the late-October DOE directive starting to show up in client memos. And note how it got here — the DOE Secretary reached for Section 403 of the DOE Organization Act to tell FERC what to prioritize. That's a rarely-dusted-off lever, and FERC's not moving on its own clock here. Right. The substance is standardized interconnection procedures for large loads on the bulk transmission system. The open issue is the one NARUC flagged — how much of this FERC can legally touch before it runs into state retail jurisdiction. That's the whole ballgame. FERC owns the interstate transmission piece. The second one of these campuses plugs into a distribution line, you're back in front of a state PUC, and the rulemaking can't follow it there. RMI writes:
The mid-Atlantic grid, operated by PJM, desperately needs to add electricity generation to meet surging demand. PJM is home to “data center alley” and thus its ability to serve the rapid rise in new large loads requested by data centers has great bearing on American economic competitiveness.
RMI's 'Speed to Power' piece zeroes in on PJM — and I like that they skip the new-generation moonshot and go straight at the overlooked interconnection fixes choking both cost and capacity. Right, and that's the part that actually moves a megawatt. New gas still has to get through the queue and the study process, and that's where the bottleneck is sitting. What I want to know is the jurisdictional split. The Mayer Brown read we just hit lays out FERC's large-load preliminary rulemaking — so which of RMI's PJM fixes sit inside RM26-4-000's lane, and which need a state PUC to act? And there's your wall. The second one of these fixes touches a distribution-level retail tie-in, FERC's pen runs out of ink and it bounces to the states. NARUC already fenced that line off. RMI naming the fix doesn't tell you who's allowed to pull the trigger. So here's the contrast — PJM is grinding on process improvements through interconnection, and Texas is still arguing over who holds the pen on the tariff. Two RTOs, two completely different stuck points. Okay, so OpenAI, Oracle, and Vantage drop a nearly one-gigawatt Stargate campus on Port Washington, Wisconsin — what actually made Wisconsin the pick here, and how much of what they're claiming holds up under scrutiny? Let's pull the signal out of the press release. The hard facts: per the October 2025 announcement from Vantage, OpenAI, and Oracle, it's a 672-acre campus outside Milwaukee, four hyperscale buildings, close to a gigawatt of AI capacity, north of $15 billion in total investment, with a 2028 completion target. So yes, this is a real asset. The scale is in the same tier as the Abilene flagship. On site selection, Port Washington sits on the western shore of Lake Michigan, and that matters. Freshwater access for cooling at that scale is genuinely scarce; most Sun Belt and mid-continent sites can't match it on the same terms. Vantage also leans on 'minimum water usage' and 'water-positive operations' in the press materials, which sounds like they're trying to get ahead of the scrutiny with closed-loop or air-side economization. The MISO deliverability piece gets messy fast. Per E&E News reporting, a developer tied to the project is already facing stiff opposition to a proposed $1.4 billion transmission line needed to actually feed the campus. So the interconnection queue and last-mile delivery are still live problems, and they're the central construction risk. And the Epoch AI tracker, as of April 2026, lists Wisconsin as under active development but not yet operational, which lines up with a project still working through its grid tie-in. That $1.4 billion transmission line fight is striking — if the 'extension cord' is that contested, how exposed is the whole campus timeline to that single chokepoint? Very exposed. A nearly one-gigawatt campus aiming for 2028 is a tight window even in clean conditions. Add a $1.4 billion transmission line with organized landowner opposition in Wisconsin, and you've got permitting and siting risk that won't compress just because the developer has the capital. Lake Michigan water access and the Midwest fiber spine are genuine locational advantages. But the grid interconnection path is still tied up in live litigation before anyone gets to the ribbon-cutting. If you follow the infrastructure behind AI, try Anthropic Pentagon Watch: a daily briefing on Anthropic’s fight with the DoD over Claude, military AI use, autonomous weapons, and AI procurement blacklisting. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
What we’re watching next: Vantage says its Port Washington campus is scheduled for completion in 2028.
If you want to dig further into any of today’s stories, we’ve put the source links in the show notes so you can follow the details from there. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.