Grids, fiber routes, and town halls — the AI buildout is squeezing all three at once, and today one company decided to buy its way to the middle of it. If you're landing on this mid-arc, here's the short version: local data center fights have moved past ordinary NIMBY politics and into resource allocation and legal leverage. Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing is suing the Imperial Irrigation District for 260 million gallons of Colorado River water a year — after publicly pledging recycled wastewater. Add local bans, moratoria, tighter water rules, project withdrawals, and community pushback, and that's the board we're playing on. This is The Data Center Daily — NextEra shopping for Dominion, a billion-dollar Verizon fiber deal, and a Korean mega-campus that just died over power and water. First up: what NextEra actually brings to Northern Virginia — and what happens to that queue if a generation company owns the utility. Here's Benjamin Storrow at E&E News:
NextEra Energy is trying to position itself as the electricity source of choice for artificial intelligence. The power giant’s moves were on display Friday as company executives announced their quarterly earnings. NextEra said it had received approval from Iowa regulators to restart a shuttered nuclear power plant that will sell electricity to Google.
Sixty-seven billion for Dominion, and Ketchum's pitch to investors comes down to one word: scale. The Virginia SCC apparently wants more than that. It's stretched the review from sixty days to a hundred and eighty. Sixty to a hundred and eighty days — good. This is a generation company buying the utility that sits on top of the densest data center queue in the country. NextEra would own both the power and the toll booth to the grid. And it goes beyond Virginia. NextEra's Florida utility saw data center interconnect requests jump two gigawatts in a single quarter — more than Orlando's peak load. Then there's an Iowa nuclear restart selling straight to Google. So all week, FERC's been leaning on PJM to set up an independent board. Now the biggest transmission owner in that footprint is about to change hands. You can't call the rate-setter independent when the utility at the table is also the company building the generation. This one's from Telecompetitor:
Verizon has signed an agreement worth more than $1 billion to supply Google with dark fiber that will connect the technology company’s data centers, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman disclosed during the carrier’s second-quarter earnings call on July 24.
Verizon's $1 billion dark fiber deal with Google — Schulman put it on the Q2 call July 24, not in a press release. Free cash flow was $10.2 billion for the first half, up 16 percent, so that number's got a real balance sheet behind it. But notice what Verizon didn't say: the contract length, the revenue timing, or whether this rides existing routes or needs a new build. That last one matters. And that's why I like this one, Sarah — dark fiber. Verizon lays the glass, Google lights it with its own gear. It's a billion-dollar infrastructure number that doesn't need a substation or a water permit. After a week of megawatts and stranded-asset fights, here's one piece of the AI buildout where the grid guys can actually sleep. Google controls its own routing between campuses — no ratepayer eats this one. Schulman's calling it a starting point too — he says more deals by year-end, worth billions over several years. Which, on an earnings call, is exactly what you'd say either way. Right. Until the second signature lands, it's a pipeline, not revenue. But dark fiber for campus-to-campus interconnect is real backbone infrastructure. Nobody tracks that connectivity layer while everyone's counting gigawatts. Here's Joseph Kelliher at Utility Dive:
One of the proposals advanced in the record of the PJM Interconnection governance proceeding at the Federal Energy Regultory Commission is recommendations by the Organization of PJM States, or OPSI, that both PJM and PJM transmission owners be required to make Federal Power Act Section 205 filings at OPSI’s behest.
Utility Dive ran an opinion piece today by former FERC chairman Joseph Kelliher, arguing that the commission should reject OPSI's proposal to give PJM states Section 205 filing rights over PJM and its transmission owners. Section 205 is a utility's own right to propose rate changes. OPSI wants states to be able to force filings the utilities themselves oppose. Kelliher says you can't hand that gun to the states. Read the byline, Sarah. Joseph Kelliher — former FERC chair, former EVP of federal regulatory affairs at NextEra. Published the same morning NextEra's out buying Dominion. So the argument is: keep the states off the filing button, just as a generation company moves to buy the utility seat in the densest data center market in the country. Convenient. From WHYY:
Plymouth Township Council is accusing the developer of a proposed data center in Conshohocken of intimidation and bullying over their opposition to the controversial plan. The 2 million-square-foot facility would span 10 existing buildings at the recently closed Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill, which sits on 66 acres of land along the Schuylkill River, about a mile from the borough’s vibrant downtown area.
That local data center backlash just got uglier — Plymouth Township Council is accusing the Conshohocken developer of bullying them over their opposition. A council calling a developer's zoning challenge a tantrum on a livestream — that's my kind of Monday. The site is 2 million square feet across ten buildings at the old Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill — 66 acres on the Schuylkill, about a mile from downtown Conshohocken. Brian O'Neill's move is to challenge the validity of the township's zoning ordinance itself. And he's already rejected the township's mitigation criteria. His answer to inconvenient local rules is to challenge the ordinance in court rather than negotiate. Lynne Viscio's line was, quote, we will not be bullied, full stop. On paper, reusing a dead steel mill is a genuinely clean site story — the power infrastructure's already there. The fight is over who gets to write the conditions. This is the closest thing to a real no we've seen — an actual opposition on the record. The challenge details go public this week. I want to see the exact zoning language he's calling a roadblock. From Lee Jin-Seok at Seoul Economic Daily:
Plans by Kakao, Woori Bank, and Shinhan Bank to build a mega data center in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province, have failed to gain momentum due to a suspension of the review process. The failure to sufficiently present plans to secure the electricity and water needed to operate the data center is understood to have been the stumbling block.
Namyangju. A 210-megawatt data center backed by Kakao and two banks, Woori and Shinhan, died in the review room over one thing: they couldn't show where the power and water would come from. Right — the Metropolitan Readjustment Committee suspended the Wangsuk complex review back on June 24. Add the 210 megawatts to the 90 already there, and you're at 300. Namyangju City couldn't prove the headroom was there. Target completion was 2029. It's the same pair of constraints we've been seeing in PJM and Texas, now showing up in Gyeonggi Province. The bottleneck doesn't care what continent it's on. The committee simply asked for the power plan, the water plan, and the renewable and distributed piece. The answer wasn't good enough. Clean, boring, and enough to stop the whole thing. Two banks and Korea's biggest platform company, and the grid still said, prove it. That's the version of accountability I keep asking for here — Korea just did it first. If you follow what's shaping AI infrastructure, check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch, a daily briefing on Anthropic’s fight with the DoD over Claude, military AI use, autonomous weapons, and procurement blacklisting. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Here's what we’re watching next: Virginia regulators have extended their review of NextEra’s proposed Dominion Energy acquisition from 60 to 180 days. Verizon expects more dark-fiber agreements before the end of 2026, and Plymouth Township says Brian O’Neill’s zoning challenge will go public this week.
You’ll find links to every story in the show notes if you’d like to dig deeper.
That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.