A three point two six billion dollar federal transmission loan closes for AEP Texas, the same week private capital is quietly walking AI infrastructure out the back door. If you're just joining us: local data center fights have moved past the broad moratoriums and land-use battles into project-level scraps over infrastructure, public notice, water, and community impact. We watched Prince William County's Digital Gateway appeal collapse, and Doña Ana County officials say Project Jupiter is out of compliance, with water-supply worries still hanging over it. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: a Carlyle flip, a Kansas project that doubled after the neighbors said yes, and who's holding this loan if the load forecast doesn't show up. Let's start with that DOE loan. Sonal C. Patel, writing in Power Magazine:
The U.S. Department of Energy has closed a loan of up to $3.26 billion to AEP Texas to finance a portfolio of nearly 100 transmission projects, the agency’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF) said on July 8.
DOE closed a loan of up to $3.26 billion to AEP Texas on July 8 — nearly 100 transmission projects, roughly 2,800 miles of rebuilds, reconductoring, and new build across south and west Texas. And it closed under the newly rebranded Office of Energy Dominance Financing. Same loan office, punchier letterhead. Yeah, that name change isn't cosmetic. This is $3.26 billion of federal debt, and the collateral behind it is a load forecast. AEP says letters of agreement for up to 41 gigawatts of new load through 2030. Letters. Of. Agreement. Not signed interconnection agreements, not energized — a stack of LOAs backstopping billions in transmission. Right, and that's the split worth pulling apart — how many of these 100 projects are really for data center and Permian load growth, versus legacy reliability work that was already on the books? And if that 41 gigawatts shows up as, say, twelve — who eats the stranded lines? The ratepayer in a deregulated Texas retail market. That's the implicit collateral nobody's naming. Bloomberg Law, with Aysha Diallo:
Carlyle is set to sell data center power and infrastructure platform Copia Power to EQT, Financial Times reports, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. - Deal values Copia Power at at $2.6b - Carlyle is set to make a more than fivefold return from the sale, one person briefed on the matter tells FT
Carlyle's selling Copia Power to EQT at $2.6 billion, per the FT — and the number to sit with is the exit multiple: a more than fivefold return. That's why we're talking about it. Fivefold. On a power platform. Not on new megawatts, not on transmission built — just the price tag went from X to 5X. EQT's a Swedish infrastructure long-hold buyer, so I'm less interested in whether $2.6 billion is rich than in what they think they bought: a platform to keep building, or a stabilized asset to clip coupons on. And put that fivefold next to the ISO-NE queue math coming up — under 5,000 of 14,541 megawatts actually built by 2029. The PE return and the real build rate are running in opposite directions. That appreciation is real, though — Bloomberg Law frames it as how fast these power platforms have run up since Carlyle got in. The asset class repriced in a few years. Sure, repriced. On the promise of load that mostly hasn't energized yet. Somebody's buying the forecast, not the plant. From Margaret Mellott at KCUR:
Work on Beale Infrastructure’s De Soto data center is officially underway, and much to many residents’ dismay, the project scope has nearly doubled in size since it was announced last August.
De Soto, Kansas. Beale Infrastructure sold the town a project last August, and by April, it was four buildings, 2.9 million square feet — nearly double the footprint the neighbors actually signed off on. One resident called it a breach of understanding with the community. Yeah, no kidding — you approve one thing, you get built something else. Same local-permitting backlash we keep hitting, just with a Kansas twist. The Planning Commission approved the scope change in April — the same month construction started. So the paperwork caught up to the shovels, which is the wrong order. $3 billion, 300 acres, right next to the Panasonic plant. When you double the load on a site like that, I'd like to know if anyone re-ran an interconnection study — or if the original numbers just got waved through at twice the size. That's exactly it. The approvals get written for one thing, and the build gets bigger. Who re-reviewed the power draw when it doubled? Because that's the ground-level version of every stranded-cost story we've been chewing on all week. Tia Pappas, writing in Modo Energy:
ISO-NE's interconnection queue holds 127 active generator projects totaling 14,541 MW. Less than 5,000 MW is likely to get built by 2029. Just 57 projects, 5,952 MW at nameplate, have executed interconnection agreements (IAs) and target commercial operation by 2029.
Modo Energy's got the ISO-NE queue numbers: 127 active projects, 14,541 megawatts on paper. Less than 5,000 of that likely built by 2029. And even the signed tier flatters the number. 57 projects with executed interconnection agreements, 5,952 megawatts nameplate — apply the build-through rates and you're down to 4,395. A quarter of the signed queue just evaporates on the way to steel in the ground. Sit with that spread for a second. Fourteen and a half thousand queued, forty-four hundred actually built. That's the number I keep coming back to after the Copia deal we just hit — Carlyle flips a power platform for a fivefold return while the actual build rate is running at what, thirty percent? The PE multiple doesn't care whether the megawatts show up. The ratepayer eventually does. One thing that jumps out — 97% of that expected build is wind, solar, storage, or hydro. AI load barely explains this queue. New England's building what Massachusetts and the RPS told it to build. Right, so when a hyperscaler waves a load-growth forecast at a queue like this, what matters is which of these 127 survive the cluster study, not how fast you process them. You can automate the paperwork all you want. Doesn't pour a foundation. Here's Morningstar:
The private capital giants that helped finance America’s artificial intelligence data center boom have spent the past eight days doing more selling, shelving, and refinancing. On June 29, Blackstone BK sold stakes in three fully leased Northern Virginia data centers to Digital Realty Trust DLR for $3.5 billion, taking $1.2 billion in cash off the table.
Morningstar's got the whole eight days in one line: selling, shelving, refinancing. Blackstone sells stakes to Digital Realty for $3.5 billion on June 29, pulls $1.2 billion in cash, then QTS walks from the Digital Gateway campus three days later. That's the answer to who eats it. You monetize the leased-up Virginia assets, you strand the 2,100-acre megaproject the neighbors fought for years, and the difference just... evaporates off the balance sheet. And the Brookfield piece is the tell. That $1.35 billion Csquare IPO — the proceeds aren't for growth. It's paying down a $734 million revolver and part of $4.3 billion in securitized debt. A company losing $66 million a quarter on $270 million in revenue is going public to service its debt. They're raising money so they can keep breathing, before they even talk about building. Set that next to the Copia exit we hit earlier — Carlyle clipping a fivefold return selling to EQT. Same week: one shop cashes out rich, another goes public just to feed the interest meter. And the public story is still build, build, build. The smart money's been trimming for eight straight days while the megawatt press releases keep flying. If you follow the infrastructure behind AI, check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch — 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.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, you can dig into the source after the episode. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.