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