TeraWulf's stock pops on a nineteen billion dollar headline — and I still can't find a single megawatt in the paperwork. Wild what a big number does to people. If you're just joining, the federal fight over large loads comes down to who pays, who waits, and who decides when data-center-scale demand connects to the grid. FERC and DOE have been trying to standardize how grid operators treat these giant loads without trampling state authority — while PJM tariff and cost-allocation disputes stay live. That jurisdictional line is why this was never going to stay a simple engineering-queue problem. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: a stock that moved on a deal that hasn't shown its terms, law firms reading FERC's show-cause orders as binding, and a Milan story where the heat is the product. Let's start with the nineteen billion. The Economic Times writes:
TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for AI data center infrastructure, securing about $19 billion in contracted revenue. The deal supports its shift from bitcoin mining to AI services. The company will also sell its Abernathy stake, freeing capital, while shares surged over 10% on the announcement.
TeraWulf pops more than 10% on a $19 billion headline, and I've read the whole thing twice. Twenty-year lease, big number, and not a single megawatt in it. $19 billion in contracted revenue over twenty years, Reuters via Economic Times. And they're dumping the Abernathy stake to fund the pivot — bitcoin miner turning into an AI landlord. Right, but the equity market just priced in certainty the contract language may not contain. Where's the capacity breakdown? What part is committed lease, and what part is an option they can walk away from? The stock answered a question the filing didn't. There's the gap: market confidence at ten percent, disclosed megawatts at zero. Orrick is tracking this. So, on that federal large-load fight: FERC's June show-cause orders now have a formal Orrick briefing, dated July 6. When a law firm puts out a client memo, they're reading these as binding reform directives to the RTOs, with real consequences. Right — practitioners are treating them as enforceable interconnection reform. If this were a comment-and-forget proceeding, you wouldn't see that kind of memo. And here's my question with a legal frame behind it now — do the orders reach all six RTOs and ISOs, or does Georgia Power's vertically integrated structure stay outside FERC's grip? Because if the carve-out holds, that's a regulatory liability sitting in the Southeast. FERC's jurisdiction runs to the wholesale market. Georgia Power is state-regulated, vertically integrated — the memo can flag it, but it doesn't magically pull it in. That's exactly the gap I want people saying out loud. The reform lands hard on the organized markets and stops at the state line. From pv magazine USA:
But as for using automation for the “actual analysis, where you feed the information in and have it tell you what the correct upgrades are, what the correct impacts are, what the cost allocation should be, I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” he said.
So FERC hands down show-cause orders, Orrick reads them as binding reform — we hit that earlier — and now the practitioners walk in with a bucket of cold water. SPP's Steve Purdy says full automation of interconnection studies is "probably farther away than more immediate." And notice what he actually credits automation with — intake and validation. The clerical layer. The actual analysis, the upgrades, the cost allocation? He said flat out: we're not there yet. Then the Invenergy exec on MISO's phase-one studies — barely saved time because the clusters were so big. You can automate the front door all you want; if you're studying two hundred projects in one lump, the math doesn't care how fast you typed it in. Meanwhile GridUnity's CEO is promising progress announcements later this year. Announcements. Not energized megawatts. There it is. FERC mandates the reform, the law firms treat it as enforceable, and the people who run the queues are telling you the timeline lives in a vendor press release. Here's Mark Tarre at IT Brief UK:
The arrangement centres on Equinix's campus in Settimo Milanese, where heat generated by servers will be captured and transferred to a new energy centre A2A is building nearby. A2A will then use large heat pumps, thermal storage systems and transport infrastructure to feed that energy into the wider urban network.
Okay — this is the one story this week where I don't have to reach for a caveat. Equinix's Settimo Milanese campus, A2A building the energy centre next door, heat pumps and thermal storage feeding Milan's actual district network. You can point to the operator and the grid. And they put a number on it — 225 gigawatt-hours of heat a year when it's fully up and running. That's roughly a 20% bump to what A2A already pushes through the Milan network. See, this is the useful version of waste heat. The servers create the byproduct, and A2A has a real customer for it: 21,000 homes, 345,000 tonnes of CO2 avoided. The phrase to watch is 'up to.' Up to 225 gigawatt-hours, when fully operational. So yes, the ambition is thermal — but I want the commissioned megawatts-thermal, not the design ceiling. If The Data Center Daily helps you stay ahead, consider subscribing wherever you're listening. And if you have a moment, leave a quick review — it really helps other people find the show.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if one caught your attention, you can go straight to the source from there. That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.