Sarah: Riot has a massive AI lease.
Sarah: Now comes the awkward part: finding the power.
Matt: On The Data Center Daily: Texas promises, Arizona guardrails, and FERC telling grid operators to explain themselves.
Sarah: First up: Riot Rockdale, and the delivery dates buried beneath the headline.
Matt: Follow the show and the next briefing lands in your feed on its own.
Sarah: Here's Foley & Lardner LLP:
Quote: The lease which runs through June 2048
Quote: is expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion in total initial contract revenue and includes two five-year extension options that could
Quote: increase the total potential contract value to approximately $16.1 billion.
Quote: The agreement provides for a phased deployment schedule
Quote: with the initial 96 IT MW expected in December 2027 and the full 191 IT MW deployment expected by June 2028.
Sarah: There’s a real contract number here: 191 IT megawatts, 20 years through June 2048, and about $9.1 billion in initial revenue.
Sarah: The $16.1 billion figure only comes with the extensions, so keep that in the optional-upside column.
Matt: The first 96 megawatts are due in December 2027, with all 191 by June 2028.
Matt: Rockdale is in ERCOT, while Abbott has paused new data-center connections for that 474-gigawatt queue audit.
Matt: Those dates still have to survive a very crowded power system.
Sarah: This is Riot’s second Rockdale tenant after AMD
Sarah: putting the campus at 241 MW of contracted critical IT capacity and roughly $9.8 billion in long-term revenue.
Sarah: It’s bigger than Bitdeer’s Tydal arrangement, too—but watch the phased delivery dates, not the headline valuation.
Sarah: David Bell, writing in GilaValleyCentral:
Quote: PHOENIX — The electric co-ops serving Southeastern Arizona joined together to try to ensure that residential and retail customers aren’t
Quote: paying more to subsidize large users
Quote: such as data centers.
Quote: On Wednesday, Aug. 12
Quote: the Arizona Corporation Commission approved the application by Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (AEPCO) for a standardized process for
Quote: approval of large-load customer agreements.
Sarah: We just had a $9.1 billion Texas lease with delivery running into June 2028.
Sarah: In Arizona, co-ops are putting the customer agreement under a microscope before a big load leans on rural wires.
Matt: Finally, paperwork with teeth.
Matt: Under AEPCO’s August 12 process
Matt: the applicant has to disclose the business
Matt: location interconnection
Matt: self-supply interruptibility
Matt: and the actual agreement—before households get volunteered as the backstop.
Sarah: It’s a standardized approval process, not blanket approval.
Sarah: AEPCO explicitly says large-load inquiries include data-center developers, along with industrial, manufacturing, and greenhouse customers.
Matt: One big gap: it covers electric supply, not water use.
Matt: A campus can answer whether it brings onsite solar and still leave the local water fight for another room.
Sarah: Here's Sebastian Moss at DataCenter Dynamics:
Quote: The rapid buildout of the largest data center project in history is hard to keep up with.
Quote: In the course of conversations over several months with OpenAI staffers about the trillion-dollar Stargate project
Quote: the scope and scale of the endeavor have morphed
Quote: growing ever larger and more expensive.
Matt: OpenAI’s Keith Heyde says the execution strategy is “constantly in flux.” On a trillion-dollar build
Matt: the land power shells
Matt: GPUs debt and partners are all moving targets at once.
Sarah: DCD’s reporting makes Stargate look less like one campus plan and more like separately negotiated infrastructure layers.
Sarah: We just covered Riot’s 191 IT MW lease with December 2027 and June 2028 delivery dates.
Sarah: Stargate has to coordinate that kind of timetable across a vastly larger portfolio.
Matt: “Awe-inspiring compute demand” is a lovely phrase until somebody has to finance the power plant and transmission.
Matt: DCD says NVIDIA’s Ohio residual-value guarantees already cap at $105 billion—and that’s one partner on one piece of this machine.
Sarah: The key disclosure is that the plan is still moving, not the trillion-dollar headline.
Sarah: If partner roles and execution paths keep shifting
Sarah: an announced capacity figure needs a date
Sarah: a signed power path and an in-service commitment before it goes in the delivered column.
Sarah: Here's EnergyCentral:
Quote: This summer federal regulators told the operators of America's largest power grids that their rules for connecting big new customers
Quote: what the industry calls large load interconnection
Quote: appear inadequate and gave them a deadline to fix those rules or justify them.
Quote: It's the most serious attempt in years to change how anything gets connected to the grid.
Matt: A children’s hospital and a gigawatt server farm sit in the same interconnection line, and we still call that a functioning system.
Matt: FERC told all six organized markets their large-load rules look inadequate.
Matt: BYOP is what happens when customers stop waiting for permission.
Sarah: And BYOP is bigger than a Texas data-center escape hatch.
Sarah: The piece argues hospitals
Sarah: water authorities and industrial parks may pursue self-supply too
Sarah: meaning the grid’s biggest customers increasingly solve reliability outside the tariff.
Matt: Right, but self-supply still needs equipment, land, permits, and often a wire somewhere.
Matt: You don’t defeat a five-year interconnection queue by printing a brochure that says ‘bring your own power.’
Sarah: Arizona’s co-op process offers another approach: connect the large load, but spell out who pays.
Sarah: FERC is pushing on the queue from above, while state regulators decide who carries the bill.
Sarah: Inevitable writes:
Quote: Yasir Arafat is the co-founder and CTO of Aalo Atomics
Quote: a company developing factory-manufactured modular nuclear power plants designed for AI data centers.
Quote: Before founding Aalo, Yasir led the MARVEL microreactor program at Idaho National Laboratory.
Quote: In this episode of Inevitable, Yasir explains how Aalo became one of four U.S.
Quote: nuclear startups to achieve criticality by the July 4, 2026 deadline.
Matt: Aalo reached criticality by July 4—one of four U.S.
Matt: nuclear startups to clear it.
Matt: That’s a real reactor milestone, not another rendering with blue server racks behind it.
Sarah: And Yasir Arafat’s team says it sustained a fission chain reaction in less than a year, after building its reactor building in 36 days.
Sarah: For nuclear, those are unusually concrete schedule markers.
Matt: But criticality doesn’t mean 24/7 power at an AI campus.
Matt: Factory manufacturing may compress construction, but it doesn’t make the licensing, fuel, and operating case disappear.
Matt: Physics remains stubbornly unpersuaded by hyperscaler capex.
Sarah: Put Aalo beside the BYOP pressure we just covered: with large-load grid rules under federal scrutiny
Sarah: a co-located microreactor is a long-lead answer to a very immediate power problem.
Host: If you follow the infrastructure behind modern AI
Host: check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch
Host: a daily briefing on Anthropic’s fight with the DoD over Claude
Host: military AI use autonomous weapons
Host: and AI procurement blacklisting.
Host: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Host: What we’re watching next: Riot’s first 96 IT MW under the Rockdale AI lab lease is expected in December 2027
Host: followed by the full 191 IT MW deployment in June 2028.
Host: Links to every story are in the show notes, so take a look at the ones that caught your attention.
Host: That’s The Data Center Daily for today.
Host: This is a Lantern Podcast.