One company files a power path. One county drafts a stop sign. Same day, same beat — welcome to the buildout. If you're catching up, Digital Realty's Kansas City story started as a site-control signal: its operating partnership disclosed roughly 1,440 acres at Astra Enterprise Park near Kansas City. For a campus-scale prospect, acreage was only the first question. Could the site line up power, permitting, and eventual hyperscale buildout capacity? This is The Data Center Daily. Today, an SEC filing answers the power question we've been chasing — while DeSoto County reaches for the legal stop sign. Let's start with the one that passed the test. Digital Realty Kansas City land position isn't over. Follow us wherever you're listening, and the next chapter comes to you. Digital Realty's latest 8-K puts hard numbers on the Astra Enterprise Park land position near Kansas City — here's the filing language:
On April 30, 2026, the operating partnership acquired approximately 1,440 acres of land for development at Astra Enterprise Park, located near Kansas City for approximately $377.6 million in cash and 517,475 common units of partnership interest in the operating partnership.
Six hundred megawatts committed by early 2028, with a two-gigawatt ceiling at full build-out — that turns the land position into a utility-backed campus roadmap. In this market, the power path is what separates optionality from actual deliverable capacity. Now watch how fast Digital Realty moves interconnection queue positions and construction timelines against that 2028 power commitment. The acreage and the utility agreement are on record, so the signal now is execution pace. That same 8-K also has the joint-venture buyout, consolidating control over a significant slice of Northern Virginia hyperscale capacity — here's the exact language from the filing.
On June 29, 2026, the company entered into an agreement to purchase from affiliates of Blackstone Inc. (collectively, "Blackstone") all of Blackstone's blended 64% interests in the Digital Carver Dulles 9 and Digital Carver Brickyard joint ventures (the "joint ventures")
What jumps out to me: 288 megawatts, already 100% leased to three separate investment-grade hyperscale names, in the world's largest data center market. Demand is already locked in; Digital Realty is paying to own the upside. Watch whether Digital Realty can get the development over the finish line on its own balance sheet. The filing is explicit: construction, supply chain, permitting, and labor risks are still live. The deal is signed; now they have to deliver. TMC Insight writes:
A packed public meeting in DeSoto County set the stage for a shift in how rural communities approach hyperscale and AI-optimized data center proposals. Commissioners asked their county attorney to draft a one-year moratorium on new data center applications after more than three hours of discussion on June 23. The timing reflects a wider shift happening across Florida, where several counties are reassessing whether they can support the electricity and water demands of next-generation digital infrastructure.
Three hours of discussion on June 23, and the commissioners hand it to the county attorney to draft a one-year moratorium. DeSoto County, Florida — same blowback we've been hearing all week. But here's the wrinkle: on-site gas turbines. DCIP's campus has its own generation baked into a retired power plant site. So a county commission is being asked to zone in a power station that no state utility commission has reviewed. That's the part residents smelled. And notice the playbook — back to the county attorney's drafting queue. Lexington paused at the Lexmark site; DeSoto tells counsel to draft. Same legal instrument, two states, inside a week. The draft doesn't touch applications already in process, so DCIP's rezoning survives. 800 acres; earlier iterations were near 1,300. The moratorium is for the next guy in line, not this one. Which is the tell. They build the stop sign after the cars are already in the intersection. The water draw on a hyperscale campus triggered it — same scale as a city utility, treated like one resident's lawn permit until somebody at the mic did the math. Alison Wenzel, writing in Environmental Defense Fund:
Environmental Defense Fund is an intervenor, having filed expert witness testimony from experts Daymark Energy Advisors to make the case for how customers can be protected from the costs of the data center boom, how North Carolina can enable data centers to bring and pay for their own clean electricity, and how the utility can take advantage of the growth of electric vehicles to lower power bills for customers.
Duke Energy Carolinas walks in asking for 18.1% on residential — a top-five return-on-equity demand in the whole country — and then, weeks before hearings, suddenly cuts it to 11%. You don't anchor that high by accident. The mid-case pullback is the unusual part — Daymark testimony is in, EDF is intervening, and Duke pulls back the ROE before a witness even takes the stand. That's a number that didn't survive contact with the room. And Attorney General Jackson's response is basically: yeah, 11% is a step, still too high. Hearings run July and August at the North Carolina commission. This is where the large-load cost question actually gets litigated, not up at the FERC tariff level. Two Duke filings, actually — Carolinas first, then Progress. Federal orders push the buildout cost down to the utility, and this state-level seam is where it can land on the residential bill. Compare that with what we just hit: Kansas City gets a 600-megawatt power agreement on paper, and North Carolina ratepayers get a rate case where the consumer advocate is fighting a number Duke already had to walk back seven points. If you follow the infrastructure behind AI, give Musk v Altman Daily a try — daily court-watch on Elon Musk’s trial against Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft, from testimony to exhibits to the AGI governance fight. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Next up, we’ll track the North Carolina Utilities Commission expert-witness hearings in July and August for the Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress rate cases. We’ll also watch Astra Enterprise Park’s 600-megawatt utility-power milestone, expected by early 2028, plus DeSoto County’s draft one-year data center moratorium language — especially whether already-filed applications stay carved out.
Links to every story we touched today are in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, that’s the place to go deeper. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.