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