The AI buildout has reached the point where the county gets a vote, and so do the courtroom and the water meter. If you're just joining us, OpenAI’s Stargate buildout is running on two tracks: building new data center capacity with Oracle and SoftBank, while leaning more heavily on rented AI servers from cloud providers. The company has reorganized compute and infrastructure into teams for data center design, commercial partnerships, and operations. Sachin Katti oversees the Stargate groups. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: water fights, provisional power, and local officials asking whether an AI campus can bring its own gas plant. Start in New Mexico. Algernon D’Ammassa, writing in Albuquerque Journal:
The Center for Biological Diversity filed an emergency petition challenging the Office of the State Engineer’s approval of a well supplying groundwater for the data center’s construction. Based on meter readings, the petition alleges over 100 million gallons of water have been pumped from the new well since April.
We finally have a hard number on Project Jupiter’s water use: more than 100 million gallons pumped since April, based on meter readings cited in the petition. A meter is considerably less impressed by an AI campus rendering. One construction well in southern New Mexico tops 100 million gallons, and the State Engineer approved it under an emergency authorization two days after the application. Then ten months pass without the hearing protesters requested. Who thought that would stay quiet? The Stargate buildout has run into a site-level constraint in New Mexico: petitions over construction water and how the project was permitted. Oracle and OpenAI may be building on 1,400 acres, but the fight comes down to one well, one water right, and whether emergency paperwork can replace a public-interest hearing. And here’s the gap everyone keeps stepping around: power disclosures can tell you plenty about a big load, but water fights land with a different regulator and now the state Supreme Court. The physical bill has more than one meter. From btw.media:
That distinction is the centre of the market story. An allocation can give an operator a credible basis for negotiating land, energy, finance, equipment and anchor customers. It can reserve room inside a market where new data-centre growth is deliberately controlled. It does not pour concrete, energise a switchboard, install a liquid-cooled rack or place a customer's workload into production.
Singapore handed out 200 megawatts in four tidy 50-megawatt slices—to Digital Realty, Equinix, Keppel, and STT—and people will call that 200 megawatts of AI capacity. Each is provisional permission to start solving the hard parts. Exactly. We just had a New Mexico story anchored by a 100-million-gallon meter reading. DC-CFA2 sits at the opposite end of the chain: a policy allocation, long before site delivery, financing, energisation, or a customer workload. And Equinix now holds this provisional 50-megawatt allocation on Jurong Island alongside that 50-megawatt Flo Energy option. Very respectable stack of paper. Let me know when the cooling plant is running. Singapore’s being deliberate: more than 20 applicants competed on economic contribution and sustainability, not just who could write “AI” in the largest font. The first DC-CFA’s 2023 awards flowed into construction schedules that run through 2026 and 2027. That’s a long calendar. Here's The Register:
Nvidia can only sell as many GPUs as there are datacenters to put them, and those datacenters can only be deployed where there’s adequate power to support them. And since its latest round of GPUs can’t just be dropped into any old bit barn, Nvidia is going to need a lot more datacenter capacity, and by extension a lot more power.
Nvidia’s minority investment in Cloverleaf is a blunt move. Cloverleaf locks up land and power rights, and Nvidia needs somewhere to put liquid-cooled Blackwell-scale systems that older air-cooled halls can’t simply absorb. The GPU vendor is now helping finance a way around a bottleneck its own product roadmap helped create. The racks are denser, they need liquid cooling, and their power appetite is bigger. Now Nvidia is in the powered-land business by proxy. The Register calls it Whac-a-Mole, and that’s close. Capital can secure a site position; it can’t energize a substation, deliver cooling water, or shorten a transmission study. And after the water fight we just covered, land and power rights only start the paperwork—for the people next door and the grid operators who have to make the project run. Here's Brian Neben at 1340 KGFW - The Information Channel:
Per current data center regulations, the facilities total electrical demand will be 368 megawatts. The project was described as a medium sized data center. The site already has an existing 100 megawatts. of capacity that will be repurposed, from the cryptocurrency operation, to support the first phase.
Kearney approved a 368-megawatt conditional-use permit, and phase one gets 100 megawatts repurposed from the crypto operation already on site. Finally, powered land with an actual prior use. Skip the glossy field drawing. And the permit has teeth. Phases one and two cleared the 55-dBA property-line standard; when phase three expands the building, Kearney can require another sound study. The approval spells out the phasing before any future press release gets to interpret it creatively. Closed-loop cooling is a condition here, too. At 368 megawatts, that’s the kind of sentence locals should insist on seeing before they get handed a rendering and a promise of economic development. Project Horizon has cleared a meaningful permitting gate. The site is named and east of Kearney. Phase one has 100 megawatts identified, and the technical conditions are on the record. The remaining 268 megawatts still have to turn into physical capacity. Idaho State Journal, with Taylor S. Calder:
Bannock County Commissioner Jeff Hough is organizing a work group that will bring together officials from Power, Oneida, Franklin and Caribou counties to draft model rules for how local governments handle large AI data center projects. The effort comes as Bannock County's temporary moratorium on new data centers, which applies only to unincorporated parts of the county, leaves the surrounding region without any local ordinances specifically addressing the facilities.
Bannock County had to put a temporary moratorium on data centers in unincorporated areas before it had even written an ordinance. That’s local government admitting the developers arrived before the rulebook did. Commissioner Jeff Hough is bringing Power, Oneida, Franklin, and Caribou counties into a technical work group to draft a model ordinance. They’re starting with energy demand, environmental effects, and state tax law—sensible order of operations, for once. And each county gets a template ordinance to adapt, then public hearings. Good. If a campus wants the grid, the water, and tax treatment from a community, it can survive a meeting where people ask what the deal actually costs. We just heard New Mexico’s fight arrive as a 100-million-gallon meter reading and emergency petitions. Idaho is trying to write the permitting terms before the meter starts spinning. If your team needs a daily briefing on your own industry, Lantern can build a private version around your competitors, market, or beat. It goes to a private feed for the whole team. Learn more at lantern podcasts dot com slash briefings, with a 14-day free trial.
We’re watching EDB and IMDA’s review of whether Singapore needs another data center call for application in 18 to 24 months.
Links to every story are in the show notes—take a look at the ones you’d like to explore further. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.