The AI buildout bill is headed for a House vote—and developers are already looking for ways around the grid. This is The Data Center Daily. We’ve got cost rules on deck, plus a 266-megawatt marker in ERCOT’s queue and an off-grid pitch with a six-month clock. Let’s find out who’s carrying the risk. One tap on follow, and we'll be back in your ears before you know it. From Environment+Energy Leader:
The House is scheduled to vote this week on H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, pushing a question utilities and state regulators have wrestled with for two years into a single federal standard: Who pays when a data center forces a utility to build new generation, transmission, or distribution capacity.
H.R. 9340 is on the House schedule this week. It would put a federal rule around loads above 100 megawatts: full incremental generation, transmission, and distribution costs, plus financial assurances before the utility builds. Good. A 100-megawatt data center that changes its mind after the wires are planned shouldn’t get to hand the bill to households. But I want to see the ugly case covered: canceled load after a transmission commitment, not just a deposit for an interconnection study. Congress is mostly staying in its lane. The bill amends PURPA: states still set rates, but regulators would have one year to start considering the standard and two years to finish. A 52-to-zero vote out of Energy and Commerce suggests even Washington has noticed the invoice. ISO-NE put an operational line at 50 megawatts; H.R. 9340 picks 100 for the financial guardrail. Fine—just don’t confuse a threshold with a grid model. A training load can still behave nothing like the customer the utility studied. Here's Stock Titan:
Soluna Holdings, Inc. (SLNH) disclosed that ERCOT has conditionally classified the 100 MW Project Dorothy campus as Base Load in Batch Zero, preserving its studied interconnection capacity and exempting it from further reliability evaluation or megawatt allocation within that study. This follows a prior conditional Base Load position for the full 166 MW at Project Kati, bringing the conditionally classified Base Load capacity across both Texas campuses to 266 MW.
Soluna has 266 MW in ERCOT Batch Zero: 100 MW at Dorothy and 166 at Kati. The operative word in the 8-K is “conditionally” — ERCOT is still verifying both classifications. And Dorothy already has 98 MW energized behind the meter at the 150 MW Briscoe Wind Farm. Fine. But conditional Base Load preserves the studied spot; it doesn’t wave through every ride-through and dynamic-model requirement for all 266 MW. PRISM MarketView says clearing the full 266 MW went more cleanly than it did for larger peers in Batch Zero, and the wind-co-located design clearly helped. Soluna also has a separate 50 MW Dorothy request under direct utility study, so the queue story is still moving. Congress just drew a 100 MW line for big-load accountability. Soluna has a 100 MW campus, plus another 50 MW request at the same site — the grid needs the whole electrical picture, not a stack of individually convenient filings. Catherine Boudreau, writing in Latitude Media:
The Austin-based startup TAR aims to build off-grid power for data centers in less than six months — and rely primarily on renewables to do it. That’s according to cofounders Pat Becker and Leonhard Soenke, in emails exchanged in the days after announcing the company’s $120-million Series A, led by $100 million from Spark Capital.
Latitude Media’s Catherine Boudreau reports TAR raised $120 million, with Spark Capital putting in $100 million, to promise off-grid data-center power in under six months. That’s a very confident timeline for a company that launched in June. They’re skipping the interconnection queue in West Texas—that’s real strategy. But “primarily renewables” means somebody needs to explain the other hours: what backs up the batteries, what fuel is it, and who owns that equipment if the neocloud customer bails? TAR says it has one project underway with a large neocloud, though it isn’t naming the customer, and its first regional manufacturing plant is due this month. The pitch is an integrated solar, storage, and power-electronics block. Six months is still the claim. After the 100-megawatt cost fight we just covered, here’s another escape hatch: build far enough from the grid to avoid the queue altogether. Great for the developer—until the backup system turns into a private gas plant with better branding. From The Business Times:
Long before its servers ever spin up, a data centre campus in Ulu Tiram, Johor, already has its water sorted. Since August 2025, a water treatment plant on site has been taking treated effluent and cleaning it further into water fit for cooling, even as construction on the data centre itself continues around it.
Bridge Data Centres started treating effluent at Ulu Tiram in August 2025, while the campus was still under construction. That beats bolting a sustainability slide onto the grand-opening deck. Good. Cooling water has to exist on the hottest day, not in a corporate brochure. They’re taking treated effluent, then running membrane bioreactor and reverse osmosis on-site—so at least they’ve built a physical answer before the AI load arrives. The Business Times calls it Malaysia’s first water-treatment plant built inside a data-center site, co-developed with local firms and cleared through national water guidelines. After the off-grid power story, we’re seeing the buildout get very literal: developers are securing the inputs themselves. And it needs to be literal. Johor Special Water and Indah Water were involved, along with the regulator, before construction finished. That’s how you avoid discovering your cooling plan is somebody else’s water problem after the servers show up. Have feedback, a story idea, or a correction? Email us at datacenterdaily at lantern podcasts dot com. Your notes help us make The Data Center Daily better.
Coming up, we’ll be watching the House vote on H.R. 9340 during the week of September 14, along with ERCOT’s verification process for Soluna’s conditional Base Load classifications. We’ll also track the expected completion this month of TAR’s first West Texas modular power equipment plant.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so check out the ones that caught your attention. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back tomorrow. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.