FERC just gave PJM a September deadline — adopt the reforms, or FERC writes them for you. New to this story? Here's where things stand. PJM's large-load fight has moved beyond abstract worries about load growth — the market monitor pinned 6.3 billion dollars, or 38 percent of the latest capacity-auction charges, on data centers. And FERC's been digging into whether PJM's stakeholder process leaves its board too boxed in to handle reliability and cost allocation as AI campuses pile into the queue. This is The Data Center Daily. Today — a federal deadline with actual teeth, Virginia finally putting groundwater on paper, and a GB300 fab in Fort Worth. Guess which one nobody wants to talk about the power bill for. Here's what Ethan Howland at Utility Dive is reporting. On the PJM large-load fight, FERC's chair isn't asking questions anymore. He's set a September deadline. If PJM doesn't adopt reforms, Washington writes them instead. September. An actual date. All week, it was letters and hearings. Now the chairman's basically told PJM: fix the large-load queue, or we'll impose the reforms ourselves. Utility Dive frames it as FERC losing patience with PJM's stakeholder governance. The read is that the board's too boxed in to move on integration. That's why there's now a countdown. I want one thing nailed down — what actually triggers the federal takeover? A missed vote? A weak reform package? Or FERC just deciding PJM blinked? Because that 'or else' only has teeth if we know what trips it. And 'impose reforms' is a big verb from a five-member commission. Putting a deadline on the calendar is easy. Getting a September package that actually clears the twelve gigawatts sitting in that queue? Much harder. Right — a threat doesn't reform anything. Give the grid people credit for getting FERC to draw a line, but nobody's energized a single megawatt with a warning. Sarah Rankin, over at WSLS, has the details. Virginia's putting water on paper — a state study calling for tighter regs across the whole data center corridor. It's the county-level fight out of Botetourt, now with the state's name on it. And right on cue, Google says the first Botetourt building goes air-cooled to lower water use. Convenient timing for a headline about tighter water rules. Lower than what, though? Air cooling trades water for power, and nobody in that press release is telling me the new megawatt number. You don't get to pick which resource you strain and call it a win. In the study's fine print, I want to know whether it actually mandates anything or just recommends it. Ohio's EPA went project by project on wastewater review. If Virginia just files a report, the hyperscalers who write the economic-impact numbers get to keep writing them. Same corridor where OpenAI's Georgia flex clause meets its first hot August. Now the pressure's coming from both the grid and groundwater, and I'll believe "tighter" when I see a permit denied, not a study published. TechTimes, with Roger Satterfield:
Wistron Corporation's new Fort Worth factory opened July 21 and immediately began mass-producing NVIDIA's GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Superchip — marking the first time the most powerful AI data center system in the world has been assembled and tested on American soil.
Wistron's D1 facility in Fort Worth opened July 21. It's a $700 million operation with full rack-scale L6 assembly, and it's the first U.S. site building the GB300. The press release leans hard on the phrase 'pre-built digital twin,' which is a lovely way to say they simulated the factory before they poured the concrete. Digital twin of the assembly line, sure. Where's the digital twin of the grid connection? A superchip fab pulling serious power and water into Fort Worth during a Texas summer — and I read that whole release without seeing the word ERCOT once. Meanwhile, the Vera Rubin ramp is already shipping to OpenAI and CoreWeave, plus Azure and Meta. So these U.S.-built GB300s feed the same hyperscaler campuses we cover every day. Right — so the chip's made in Texas, the load it runs is somebody else's problem, and the financing stack behind those campuses often includes the same capital buying this output. Supply-chain resilience makes a great headline. Who's the utility? What's the peak megawatt draw? And does ERCOT show up before or after the first August heat wave? If The Data Center Daily keeps you informed, subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. Reviews help other people find the show, and we appreciate the support.
We'll be watching PJM's September reform deadline. After that, FERC says it could impose changes itself.
Links to every story in today's briefing are in the show notes if you'd like to dig into any of them.
That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.