Sarah: Vera Rubin hits full production the same week FERC nails a December 31 deadline to the wall — so the capex curve and the compliance clock
Sarah: just started running against each other.
Sarah: If you're just joining us: local data center fights have moved past generalized backlash and into the permitting machinery.
Sarah: Communities are using moratoria
Sarah: special-permit rules
Sarah: and environmental conditions to manage power
Sarah: water wastewater noise
Sarah: lighting and ecological impact.
Sarah: The recent marker was El Paso adopting its first hyperscale framework — putting large campuses through a more explicit local review process.
Matt: This is The Data Center Daily.
Matt: We’ve got a $57 billion capital week.
Matt: We’ve got a FERC order with actual dates on it.
Matt: And Ohio EPA says it won't rubber-stamp the water. Buckle up.
Sarah: Ana Maria Constantin, writing in The Next Web:
Quote: Nvidia confirmed on Monday that its Vera Rubin platform has reached full production
Quote: with Ian Buck the company’s vice president of accelerated computing
Quote: telling reporters at Nvidia headquarters that systems are now shipping to customers including OpenAI
Quote: CoreWeave Google Cloud
Quote: Microsoft Azure Meta
Quote: and Dell. OpenAI plans to adopt Vera Rubin at scale during the third quarter, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the briefing.
Sarah: Nvidia confirmed it Monday: Vera Rubin's in full production.
Sarah: Ian Buck told reporters at headquarters that systems are shipping to OpenAI
Sarah: CoreWeave Google Cloud
Sarah: Microsoft Azure Meta
Sarah: and Dell — and per Bloomberg
Sarah: OpenAI is set to deploy at scale in Q3.
Sarah: The CoreWeave number is the one to sit with: ten times the token output on the NVL72 racks versus the prior generation.
Sarah: In inference-density terms, that's a generational jump, way beyond a routine refresh.
Matt: Ten times the tokens means ten times the load, Sarah.
Matt: Those NVL72 racks are liquid-cooled for a reason: you can't pack that much silicon in and get the heat out any other way.
Matt: That's water and power, on a meter, somewhere.
Matt: And OpenAI's scale-up in Q3 lands right as FERC's registration clock starts ticking.
Matt: The capex ramp and the compliance calendar are about to collide.
Sarah: The Vera CPU's the quiet piece here — Nvidia built its own to stop buying processors
Sarah: then spent the briefing benchmarking it against AMD's Turin.
Sarah: Twice as fast on Python, they say.
Sarah: Vendor math, sure, but they said it in the room.
Sarah: This one's from Bisnow:
Quote: The investment giant executed roughly $57B in data center transactions by financing Meta’s massive Texas campus and closing its acquisition
Quote: of Aligned Data Centers.
Quote: BlackRock is leading a $12B debt sale to fund its data center project for Meta in El Paso, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Sarah: BlackRock pushed roughly $57 billion in data center financing through in a single week.
Sarah: The headline number is a $12 billion debt sale to fund the Meta campus in El Paso, with JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley leading the deal.
Matt: And read the ownership split before you clap — it's an 80/20 joint venture, and BlackRock holds the 80.
Matt: Meta keeps 20 percent and a light balance sheet; BlackRock owns the asset.
Sarah: El Paso is close to a gigawatt of capacity.
Sarah: This is the same El Paso that put ratepayer language into its framework — so the city wrote the ratepayer in
Sarah: and now the capital structure's an 80/20 with a $12 billion debt stack on top.
Matt: There's the tension right there.
Matt: The city puts the ratepayer in the document; the financing writes them back out.
Matt: And this is debt — not equity, not Meta's cash — so somebody's holding bonds against a gigawatt of load that still has to clear a grid.
Sarah: It mirrors the Blue Owl structure in Richland Parish.
Sarah: That one was $27 billion in debt; BlackRock took more than $3 billion of the bonds.
Sarah: Same playbook, El Paso edition.
Matt: So BlackRock's on both sides — financing the load through GIP, and with the Aligned close, owning the infrastructure the load runs on.
Matt: Who eats it if part of this pipeline doesn't energize?
Matt: Not the guy with 20 percent.
Sarah: KEIRSTEN BRAGER, writing in AMPYX CYBER:
Quote: FERC did not accelerate NERC's timeline, it made the calendar a directive and moved registration onto the critical path.
Quote: The order creates the computational load entity
Quote: sets the December 31 and March 1 deadlines
Quote: and leaves the AI Reliability Boundary
Quote: the line between what the grid must command and what it leaves to private contract
Quote: for Phase II to draw.
Sarah: FERC Order RD26-7-000 was issued on the Commission's own motion.
Sarah: It creates a new registration category — the computational load entity — and hangs two dates on it: December 31 for the standards and
Sarah: registry criteria March 1 for the Phase II workplan.
Sarah: All week, we've watched regulators name the problem.
Sarah: Today, FERC put it on a clock.
Sarah: The escalation is the docket number and the calendar, not another memo about urgent need.
Matt: Good. December 31, March 1 — those are dates you can miss, and missing them costs something.
Matt: That's what I've wanted since this beat was still county zoning fights.
Matt: But here's what I'm chewing on.
Matt: Registration is a category.
Matt: Does it actually touch the 12 gigawatts stuck in PJM's queue, or does it just run alongside it — everybody fills out a form, nobody clears?
Sarah: The order punts that part.
Sarah: Brager at AMPYX flags the AI Reliability Boundary — the line between what the grid can command and what stays in private contract — and that
Sarah: line doesn't get drawn until Phase II.
Sarah: So you register in December, and your actual obligation is still undefined.
Matt: So the exposure survives the deadline.
Matt: You're on the registry, you're on the hook — for what, we find out later.
Matt: And this is landing in the same quarter Vera Rubin hits full production, per the Nvidia piece we just ran.
Sarah: Keep two separate dockets straight: RD26-7-000 is not the RM26-4 show-cause proceeding.
Sarah: Different orders, overlapping timelines.
Sarah: Don't conflate them.
Sarah: This one's from The Vindicator:
Quote: Citing public opposition
Quote: the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency rejected a request for a blanket permit for data centers to discharge wastewater and decided to
Quote: consider each project individually. In a Tuesday ruling
Quote: the state EPA wrote: “After carefully reviewing the significant volume of public comments received on the draft National Pollutant Discharge
Quote: Elimination System general permit for data centers
Quote: Ohio EPA has decided not to move forward with finalizing the general permit”
Matt: Ohio EPA had a blanket wastewater permit teed up — dump-and-go for every data center in the state.
Matt: Seven thousand public comments later, they killed it.
Matt: Project-by-project review instead.
Sarah: So the local backlash just took a wastewater turn: regulators dropped the one-size-fits-all path.
Sarah: In Tuesday's ruling, it's individual NPDES permits, with the same standards applied one site at a time.
Matt: And this is exactly the accountability the Thane residents were screaming for and never got.
Matt: A regulator here actually said, no rubber stamp; each project gets a real look.
Sarah: The catch buried in that decision: individual review under the same rigorous standards means every project now eats its own timeline.
Sarah: Nobody's discharging cooling water on a general permit anymore.
Sarah: Daily Maverick, with Lindsey Schutters:
Quote: This doesn’t completely absolve Equinix and the City of Cape Town of blame for the intricate square dance they did when unlocking the former
Quote: golf course grounds for the current industrial revolution
Quote: but we can give them a break on some of the environmental fronts.
Matt: A golf course that drinks three million litres a day — the King David club in Cape Town — is getting turned into two hyperscale data
Matt: centers. And the Daily Maverick's whole pitch is: relax, the data centers use less water than the fairways did.
Sarah: Which, if you just do the arithmetic, might actually be true.
Sarah: Three million litres a day is 60,000 people under Cape Town's Level 6B Day Zero restrictions.
Matt: Sure, but 'better than a golf course' is a low bar in a city that literally counted down to zero water.
Matt: Compare it with that same water going to Parow and Bellville, not with a fairway.
Sarah: And notice what's missing from the excerpt — no megawatt figure, no in-service date, no named operator for the two facilities.
Sarah: The phrase is 'poised to welcome,' which is a lot softer than a signed filing.
Matt: Right after the Ohio EPA piece we just cued up, where a regulator said it'll look at each data center's wastewater one by one.
Matt: Cape Town's got Day Zero in its recent memory — I'd want that same project-by-project stare here
Matt: not a golf-course comparison in a business column.
Host: If you track the infrastructure behind the AI boom
Host: try AI IPO Watch: daily coverage of OpenAI
Host: Anthropic Databricks
Host: and SpaceX going public
Host: with every filing valuation
Host: and first trade sourced
Host: not rumored. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Host: Next we're watching NERC's computational-load reliability standards
Host: glossary definitions
Host: and registry criteria; they're due to FERC by December 31
Host: 2026. The Phase II workplan for computational-load integration is due March 1, 2027.
Host: And OpenAI plans to adopt Nvidia Vera Rubin at scale during the third quarter.
Host: Links to every story we covered today are in the show notes, if you want to dig into anything that stood out.
Host: That's The Data Center Daily for today.
Host: This is a Lantern Podcast.