The same grid scarcity that just stuck PJM ratepayers with billions is now a thousand-dollar retail pitch. Buy the moat, apparently. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: a REIT story putting a price on the scarcity we've watched build all week, and a step-back on PJM's large-load plan — twelve proposals went into the Board's call, and only one came out. Here's AOL:
Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have staged a comeback in 2026 after years of declining or moving sideways. And one category of REITs, data centers, is particularly hot right now.
So this is where the week lands. The same scarcity that's sticking PJM ratepayers with thirty billion in grid costs just got packaged as a personal-finance headline. Put your thousand bucks in, folks. Realty Income upping its data center exposure — that's the real signal under the retail framing. The moat is an energized interconnect, and capital markets are pricing it like vacancy is under one percent. Right. Virginia's trying to bill data centers for grid costs, Bastrop's handing a decade of tax abatements to an unnamed tenant, and AOL's telling grandma to buy in before the invoice clears. Somehow, the ratepayer is the one person no one's answering for. I'll give the asset logic one sentence: when the operators are selling majority stakes and the REITs are buying, the smart money has decided the scarcity is durable and someone else eats the cost shift. That's the tell, Sarah. Institutional and retail capital are flowing in at the exact moment the bill's being written. Somebody saw the timing and said — sell it now. Everybody's calling PJM's large-load integration plan a reliability milestone. But we've heard queue reform before, and the backlog kept growing. So what's different this time — and if it sticks, who gains leverage and who loses it? The design matters more than the headline. PJM's Board announced this in January — formally, CIFP-LLA — after an accelerated stakeholder process that produced twelve competing proposals. The Board didn't just pick one sponsor's plan. It borrowed from several, which at least tells you they're trying to build something broad enough to survive FERC review. RMI's May analysis put the pressure in plain numbers: the PJM region has roughly 30 gigawatts of new load trying to connect by 2030, one of the fastest-growing demand zones in the country. The new part is what PJM did at the same time. Utility Dive reported the day before the Board announcement that PJM had trimmed its near-term load forecast because of stricter data center vetting criteria. So they're already deciding what counts as firm demand, not just promising a cleaner queue. Then FERC turned up the heat in June with show-cause orders to PJM and five other grid operators, giving them 60 days to defend or rewrite their large-load tariff rules. The test is pretty simple: do the vetting rules come with financial teeth — deposits, milestone payments, curtailment obligations — and actually gate interconnection milestones? Or do they just reshuffle queue positions while cost allocation and study sequencing stay basically the same? So if PJM's vetting is already trimming the demand forecast, does that hand an advantage to hyperscalers with shovel-ready sites and creditworthy load profiles, or does everyone get squeezed the same way? Not equally. It almost certainly separates the field. If you're a hyperscaler and you can post the bigger financial commitments, show a firm operating load shape, and coordinate with the utility on behind-the-meter or co-located generation, you're the customer these stricter screens favor. PJM's market monitor said in June that the tight supply-demand balance, plus elevated capacity auction prices, is already pushing negotiating power toward customers who can de-risk interconnection for the utility. The wildcard is still at the state level. RMI flags that PJM's thirteen member states keep a lot of room on cost allocation and siting approvals. So states that move fast on permitting and cut direct infrastructure cost-sharing deals with large loads can still pull campuses away from states that don't, no matter what the queue reform says on paper. If The Data Center Daily helps you keep up with the week, take a second to subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you can leave a quick review, that helps other people find the show too.
We'll be watching the FERC show-cause response window for PJM and five other grid operators on large-load tariff rules.
If you want to dig further into anything we covered today, links to every story are in the show notes. Follow whichever ones caught your ear.
That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.