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