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