A $100 billion campus just died in Virginia, and somebody's still holding the bill for the engineering work. Nobody wants to say the number out loud. If you're just joining: North Carolina's in a fight over whether data centers and other giant customers should sign standardized minimum-bill commitments, instead of cutting one-off service deals. Duke Energy first said special data-center rules weren't needed — then came back with a tariff that locks large customers into a minimum bill for at least ten years. That reversal turns the state into the test case for who eats the risk when AI load shows up. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: Duke's tariff design, the dead Virginia gateway, and Brookfield's IPO. Same question under all of it: who's actually paying? Duke first. We're staying on North Carolina large-load tariff fight — follow the show and you won't miss what comes next. Latitude Media writes:
Starting in 2027, Duke’s tariff would apply to customers with loads of 50 megawatts or more with expected load factors of 80%, or any customer seeking 100 MW or more, regardless of load factor. The terms of the tariff would require customers to sign 10 or 15 year contracts, depending on load size, and pay for 75% of the demand they ask for, even if they don’t use it.
Duke's large-load tariff is now in the middle of this week's North Carolina rate-case hearings — the same docket where it's defending an 11.6% residential hike. Starting in 2027, it hits loads of 50 megawatts or more at an 80% load factor, or anyone asking for 100 megawatts and up. And here's the flaw Latitude nails: Duke lumps data centers in with ordinary large industrial customers. So a steel mill that's never touched an AI chip lands in the same rate class as a hyperscaler. Pretty rich, given Duke spent last year arguing special data-center rules weren't even necessary. Now it's drafting a minimum-bill floor that lasts a decade. A minimum bill for ten years, and the chemical plant next door eats the AI-driven rate pressure it never asked for. Who lobbied for that lump? Because that's where the cost gets buried. For scale — Oregon's PUC just approved a Portland General tariff hiking data-center rates roughly 29%. Duke goes the other way: don't isolate them, fold them in. Fold them into the industrial class. Great for hyperscaler optics, brutal for everybody else in the pool. The Tech Capital's João Marques Lima is tracking this. Okay, it's dead. Officially. Blackstone's QTS walked away from the Virginia Digital Gateway after years of legal opposition, so now we can name the corpse instead of pretending there might not be one. A campus that size doesn't collapse quietly. Years of planning, engineering, legal spend fighting the opposition — and the in-service date is now zero. And that's my question, Sarah — somebody ate that number. The site work, the outside counsel billing by the hour against the neighbors, the interconnection studies. Blackstone's going to have to book that somewhere, and I want to see where. It won't show up as a line item called 'Virginia Digital Gateway.' If it surfaces at all, it'll be an impairment buried in a segment number. The people who lost don't announce the loss. Right. Put that next to the Duke tariff we just hit: a project this big dies when the ground rules aren't there, and Duke's answer is to lump hyperscalers in with steel mills. The rulebook is the whole game. QTS just proved it. Here's Valerija I. at CRE Daily:
Brookfield Corp.-backed Csquare Inc. is preparing to tap public markets for growth capital, according to Bloomberg. The Dallas-based data center operator filed for a US initial public offering targeting up to $1.35B, aiming to leverage the ongoing surge in demand for AI-centric infrastructure. Amid a wave of tech-fueled capital markets activity, Brookfield intends to keep voting control post-IPO, signaling long-term commitment as Csquare grows its real estate footprint.
Finally, a document that has to tell the truth. An S-1 puts real capacity, real customers, real power contracts on paper — under penalty of securities law. It's the one filing that can't run on press-release shine. The target is $1.35 billion. Dallas-based, 60-plus sites across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. First-quarter revenue was $270.5 million — with a $66 million net loss, per Bloomberg. And watch where the money goes — the proceeds go to debt paydown, with no new-capacity build attached. AI demand sells the deal; the cash refinances the balance sheet. Comparable REITs are up over 30% this year, so Brookfield's timing the window. And they're keeping voting control post-IPO — public money, private steering wheel. After the QTS collapse we just walked through — a $100 billion campus dying because the ground rules weren't there — I want to see how honestly this S-1 books its own site risk. Start there. Here's Seongjun Jo at Aju Press:
AI semiconductor startup Furiosa AI is collaborating with global data center company Equinix to penetrate the European AI infrastructure market. Furiosa AI announced a strategic partnership with Equinix to build RNGD (Renegade)-based AI inference servers at the Equinix LS2 data center in Lisbon, Portugal. The newly established servers will operate as an evaluation environment where European companies can directly verify the performance, energy efficiency, and operational convenience of RNGD using their own AI models and workloads.
Furiosa AI and Equinix are putting RNGD inference servers into the LS2 site in Lisbon. They're framing it as an evaluation environment, rather than a full commercial deployment. An evaluation environment. European companies can walk in, run their own models, kick the tires. Basically a showroom before anyone commits to a buildout. Right — no megawatt figure, no server count. The pitch is HBM-based inference and energy efficiency, aimed straight at the AI sovereignty crowd that wants chips that aren't from the usual two vendors. And the smart read here is simple: Europe is writing indigenous-infrastructure checks so it doesn't have to depend on anyone, and a Korean startup parks a demo rack in Lisbon to catch that money. Fine. But it's still a test bench. Nobody's signed a power contract off a bake-off yet. After the morning we've had — a dead Virginia gateway and a Duke tariff that lumps hyperscalers in with steel mills — a modest little Lisbon test rack is almost refreshing. Nobody's stranding an asset here. If you're following the infrastructure behind AI, check out Musk v Altman Daily — daily court-watch on Elon Musk's trial against Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft, with testimony, exhibits, and the AGI governance fight. Find it wherever you listen.
Next up: the North Carolina Utilities Commission's rate-case hearings are expected to take up Duke Energy's large-load tariff this week, and Furiosa AI plans to showcase RNGD and its AI software stack at RAISE Summit 2026 in Paris.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, if one caught your ear. That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.