FERC finally put it in writing, a Virginia mega-campus just died, and Cheyenne's tap water got weird — all on the same Monday. If you're just joining, local pushback on data centers has moved past blanket bans and into site-by-site fights over power, water, notice, and community impact. The sharpest case is Prince William County — QTS pulled its Virginia Supreme Court challenge, which effectively ends the enormous PW Digital Gateway proposal near Manassas National Battlefield Park. This is The Data Center Daily. Today — a real project kill, a county calling a project out of compliance, and rare bacteria in a city's water. Sarah, start us on FERC. If Local data center bans and ballot backlash matters to you, hit follow — we'll be back on it soon. Here's what April Bonner at Energy-Storage.News is reporting. This is the one I've been circling all week. FERC's show-cause process just became actual orders — directives to the RTOs and ISOs on how large loads get integrated. The structural response is finally on paper. The 60-day clock ended in an issued order. Every operator in the show-cause got the paperwork; FERC has moved from warning to formal directive. And here's what jumps out — it hits all six. That makes the Georgia carve-out stand out even more. Georgia Power's vertically integrated buildout is running outside RTO oversight while everybody else gets a federal directive. Right — the map of who FERC can reach and who it can't just got sharper. The gigawatts landing inside a vertically integrated utility don't answer to the same order. Here's The Economic Times:
Blackstone's QTS said on Thursday it had terminated its planned Digital Gateway data center project in Virginia and withdrawn the associated filings after years of planning and regulatory review.The data center operator has faced years of local opposition and litigation over the project, despite it being approved by the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.
QTS made it official Thursday: Digital Gateway is terminated, and all filings are withdrawn. This was billed as the largest proposed campus in the world. After years of planning, it's dead. And here's the part that should keep underwriters up at night — the Prince William Board of Supervisors approved this thing. QTS won at the local government level and still couldn't get it built. Litigation and sustained opposition did what the vote didn't. Years. Years of planning costs, legal fees, engineering work, and in the end, nothing gets built. Somebody ate that number, and it wasn't small. Put it next to that DLR trade Wednesday — three and a half billion in premium to buy something already built, already powered. This is exactly the gauntlet they were paying to skip. Blackstone just showed everybody why. That's the split I keep coming back to this week. Capital markets look confident — money keeps flowing in. Execution keeps getting stuck at the county level. QTS is the hard cancellation that makes the gap undeniable. Chris Martin, writing in ECIKS.org:
Cheyenne’s Board of Public Utilities suspended all wastewater discharges from data center fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling systems after a contractor for Meta contaminated the city’s water system with rare bacteria, according to an announcement Thursday, July 2, 2026. The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities identified Goat Systems LLC, the corporate entity Meta uses for construction of its sprawling data center campus in the High Plains Business Park, as the source of the contamination.
A Meta contractor's discharge put rare bacteria into Cheyenne's municipal system. Forget arguing over gallons — rare bacteria got into the public supply, and now the Board of Public Utilities is suspending data center wastewater over it. And Cheyenne is going further — they're writing data-center-specific discharge rules. The water fight is moving from protest signs into enforceable code. Right, and I want to know — who's liable? The contractor? Meta? Does the city eat the cleanup? Because I guarantee you that liability language isn't in whatever contract got signed. The local backlash checklist keeps growing — power, water volume, blasting, road impacts. Nobody had 'biological contamination of the municipal system' on the list until this week. Here's Daisy Maldonado at Albuquerque Journal:
Economic Development Director Denisse Carter reported that Project Jupiter has failed to submit quarterly job reports and has yet to provide the environmental assessments she requested. These are not optional. They are contractual obligations attached to an unprecedented public incentive package. The county approved $165 billion in industrial revenue bonds for this project in September 2025, offering tax exemptions in exchange for enforceable commitments.
There it is. Denisse Carter, the county's own economic development director, on the record June 23: Project Jupiter is out of compliance. No quarterly job reports, no environmental assessments she asked for. That's a pretty specific reversal. When Oracle filed the fuel-cell swap, the framing was that they were getting ahead of the permitting process. The county's now saying the opposite. These are contractual conditions bolted to a $165 billion incentive package. You fail the paperwork, you don't get to keep drilling the aquifer while everybody shrugs. The column is really about enforcement. The commission chair acknowledges the county is a regulatory body. Saying it out loud doesn't enforce it. Nothing's actually happened to the project. So I want to know — does the Bloom Energy microgrid approval hinge on the water condition being met first? Because if the fuel cells sail through while they're out of compliance on water, the compliance finding is decoration. Here's David Weston at Sustainability Magazine:
A data centre in Milan might soon provide heat to some of the city’s busiest buildings. Equinix and A2A have created a system that collects waste heat from servers and sends it into Milan’s district heating network. Equinix and A2A are using waste heat from a Milan data centre campus to heat 21,000 homes through one of Europe's largest heat recovery projects
Equinix and A2A in Milan — waste heat from a data center campus piped into the city's district heating network. The number is 21,000 homes, plus landmarks like the Duomo and Palazzo Reale. Okay, this one I actually like. After a week of contractors poisoning Cheyenne's water and Project Jupiter blowing its water condition, here's a campus where the waste stream is the product. The caveat is in the wording: they say it could be one of Europe's biggest heat export projects outside the Nordics — once it's running. I'd want an actual date for when announced becomes energized. Right — the Duomo's already on the A2A network. The server heat is the new input. I want the megawatts-thermal: how much is Equinix actually committing, and how much is press-release shine? Nordic operators have done this for years — Stockholm's been recovering data center heat into district systems for a while. Milan at 21,000 homes is what makes this a notable scale-up for southern Europe. And notice — nobody's fighting this one. No local veto, no discharge-permit war. Turns out when the side effect is something the city can use, the permitting path gets a lot friendlier. If you're tracking the infrastructure behind AI, check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch. It's 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.
Links to all of today's stories are in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can dig into the source material there. That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.