Two law firms billed hours on the same FERC draft this week — and a Nordic data center operator just drew a four-and-a-half-billion-euro auction. Connect those dots and you've got today's show. This is The Data Center Daily. We're starting with Gibson Dunn's client alert on the DOE-directed rulemaking, then the gross-load-versus-net-import accounting fight underneath it. And in Europe, a bidding war puts a real price on scarcity. And the question I've been chewing on all week — when the behind-the-meter supply trips, who eats the emergency dispatch bill? Let's get into it. So Gibson Dunn has a note out today, dated October 29th — the second AmLaw-100 infrastructure practice with print guidance on RM26-4-000. Mayer Brown ran Monday. Two firms, same ANOPR draft, same week. That's developer counsel telling you where they think this lands before the rule even drops. That's the shift: White and Case, Bradley, Mayer Brown, now Gibson Dunn. Four reads in four episodes. The legal scaffolding is going up before the rule does. And the DOE deadline was April 30th — that's passed now. So I'm not asking if FERC responds anymore. I'm asking whether what they delivered actually touches the methodology fight, or whether it's a procedural punt. Here's where Gibson Dunn lands — two co-location flavors: curtailable load, and supply-backed load. That distinction is the whole ballgame on who gets studied. Right, and that maps pretty cleanly onto the federal-versus-state boundary. Curtailable sits one place, supply-backed another. This is the first time we've got a named firm drawing that line in writing. But run the failure mode. If FERC studies only net import, the moment behind-the-meter gas trips, the grid absorbs the full gross load with no plan. Nobody studied that surprise. And the surprise shows up as a real-time dispatch cost. Which lands on ratepayers. Remember those 519 ERCOT requests — some of those may have come in on a net-import basis that understates what they actually pull. That gap is the mechanism. Now the supply story. Digital Realty on one side, Equinix plus CPPIB on the other, fighting over atNorth — four-and-a-half billion euros. Partners Group is the seller. And atNorth is Nordic — hydro, geothermal, cold-climate cooling. So whoever wins inherits the cleanest load profile on the market. I want to know whether they're buying the megawatts or buying the carbon story. You've got a real price, two disclosed bidders, and Partners Group on the sell side. Compare that to Vantage and Stargate in Wisconsin — still no disclosed PPA term, no named counterparty on the supply side. That's the contrast. The water-and-power profile that's been scarce here — river-draw cooling, transparent disclosure — institutional capital just put four-and-a-half billion on it. That premium tells you where the scarcity actually lives. And it's a European supply answer to a week of U.S. constraint stories. Capital votes with a price tag, even when the press releases won't. This one's from Gibson Dunn:
On October 23, 2025, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC or the Commission) to initiate rulemaking procedures to standardize the interconnection of large loads to the transmission system. Secretary Wright noted in the Direction that the ability of “large loads, including AI data centers, served by public utilities… to connect to the transmission system in a timely, orderly, and non-discriminatory manner” was an “urgent issue.”
Gibson Dunn's client alert is dated October 29 — it's the same DOE directive we've been citing all week, Secretary Wright's October 23 letter to FERC. The new thing is the count: that's the second AmLaw-100 infrastructure practice in print, after Mayer Brown ran Monday. When two major firms are billing hours on the same draft ANOPR in the same week, developer counsel is telling you where they think RM26-4-000 is heading. The legal scaffolding is going up before the rule does. And here's the part that matters — Section 403 lets the Secretary propose; it doesn't require FERC to implement. Wright handed them a draft and a deadline, and that deadline has already passed: April 30th. So what did FERC actually deliver? Because if a hard deadline only produces a procedural punt, it doesn't touch the fight that matters — gross load versus net import. That methodology decides who eats the emergency dispatch bill when behind-the-meter gas trips. We're saving the heart of that for the Step Back, Matt. But you're right: Gibson Dunn lands right there — the two co-location flavors, curtailable versus supply-backed. That's the fault line on the page. FERC is moving on large-load interconnection reform, but where's the technical fight, exactly — is it about whether the grid studies the gross load, the net import, or the failure mode when that behind-the-meter supply trips? Yes — that's the fault line, and there's real money on both sides of it. The DOE's October directive to FERC framed fast-track interconnection around two co-location models: data centers that can be curtailed, and data centers that bring dispatchable generation with them — what PA Consulting and others are now calling BYOG, Bring Your Own Generation. Davis Graham's BTM alert series gets at the structuring choice: do you put the on-site gas or batteries legally behind the customer's meter, mostly in state PUC territory and out of FERC wholesale jurisdiction, or does the physics of a trip drag you back in? Because if a gigawatt-class campus loses its behind-the-meter peakers, the grid either has to absorb a sudden net-import spike or shed load. That's why utilities like FirstEnergy are now at FERC explicitly arguing that data centers should be studied and charged on gross load, not net, because gross load is the worst-case transmission exposure they have to plan around. And as Energy Law Report framed it in June, you're stress-testing a 90-year-old federal-versus-state line with load shapes that didn't exist when the rules were written. So if utilities get FERC to study and charge on gross load, does that basically kill the economic case for behind-the-meter generation as a queue-bypass strategy? It doesn't kill it outright, but it seriously compresses the arbitrage. The whole BTM thesis is that you shrink the studied interconnection footprint and avoid some transmission-upgrade cost allocation. If you're paying for gross-load interconnection anyway, you've given up the main financial lever. So watch FERC's response to FirstEnergy's petition, and watch whether the coming rulemaking gives us a clear methodology for net versus gross. That one definition will reprice a lot of the hybrid campus deals now being negotiated. Techzine writes:
Digital Realty and a consortium of Equinix and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board are both trying to acquire the Scandinavian company atNorth. Partners Group, the owner of atNorth, is reportedly aiming for around €4.5 billion for the pan-Nordic data center operator.
atNorth — €4.5 billion target, per Bloomberg. Digital Realty is on one side, Equinix plus the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board on the other, and Partners Group is selling. The asset is pan-Nordic: Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland. Partners Group bought it in January 2022. So that's a roughly three-year hold turning into a €4.5 billion exit. Somebody decided the scarcity premium lives in cold-climate cooling and a low-carbon grid. And here's what's clean about this one — it's actual M&A. Named bidders, named seller, a price tag. All week we've been picking apart options dressed up as deals, and then a Nordic platform shows up with the cleanest load profile on the market and two strategics fighting over it with cash on the table. My question is what the buyer's actually buying. Are you acquiring those hydro-and-geothermal megawatts because you need the power — or because you need the carbon story to paper over the dirtier campuses back home? If you follow the infrastructure behind AI, try Musk v Altman Daily — daily court-watch on Elon Musk's trial against Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft, covering testimony, exhibits, and the AGI governance fight. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
You’ll find links to everything we covered today in the show notes. If any of these stories deserves a closer look, that’s where to go. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.