BlackRock's crowd is circling a giant Asia data center deal, and back home the utilities just told us what's actually going to keep the lights on for AI. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: who's really buying, what's really burning, and how much of the queue is just bragging. Plus a Florida city hits pause. We start in Asia, where the price already moved. One tap on follow, and we'll be back in your ears before you know it. Here's IJR News:
A consortium that includes the BlackRock-backed Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) and IFM Investors has entered exclusive talks with Blue Owl Capital Inc. to acquire Stack Infrastructure's Asia-Pacific data centers. A deal could value the portfolio at $20 billion to $25 billion. The buyers are preparing due diligence. Blue Owl had earlier sought more than $30 billion.
Blue Owl walked in asking north of thirty billion for Stack's Asia-Pacific portfolio. Exclusive talks land at twenty to twenty-five. So five to ten billion walked out the door before anybody's even opened a diligence binder. Yeah, the price discovery is the story. Exclusive means the AIP and IFM consortium gets the room to itself while it kicks the tires in Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Melbourne and Johor Bahru. Nothing's signed. It could still drag, or fall apart. And look who's inside AIP. Microsoft, MGX, Nvidia. The tenant and the chip vendor are sitting on the buyer's side of the table. Who exactly is haggling with who? Somebody haggled well enough to knock a third off the ask. For scale, AIP's first deal was Aligned: forty billion, over six point four gigawatts. So this one's smaller, it came pre-discounted, and it's still just talks until there's ink. From Nick Zenkin at Latitude Media:
On July 2, PJM set an all-time peak load record, estimated at 168.2 gigawatts, using every single generator available to serve it. Two days before, Energy Secretary Chris Wright had signed emergency orders letting PJM push large users, including data centers, onto their own backup generators and letting power plants run past their pollution limits, as temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit across the mid-Atlantic.
Thirty-seven point three gigawatts. Latitude says that's how much of the roughly sixty-two gigs approved, contracted, or under construction for data-center load is gas. So next time a utility CEO gets on a panel and says 'committed to clean,' I wanna know which thirty-seven they mean. And the headline's true, which is the annoying part. Most new US power is clean. Just not the slice getting wired into data halls. Then July second: PJM sets an all-time peak, about 168.2 gigawatts, running every generator it has. That's two days after Chris Wright signed emergency orders letting PJM push data centers onto their own backup gens and letting plants blow past pollution limits. So the stress test already ran. Hundred-degree heat across the mid-Atlantic, and the answer was diesel in the parking lot. Nobody put that slide in the sales deck. I'll push back a little. Picking gas for a twenty-four-seven load on a grid that just maxed out isn't irrational. What I want to see is the rate case that says who carries that plant if the tenant walks. And given that Stack haircut, tenants walking isn't hypothetical. Here's Seyi Fabode at Texas Energy and Power:
That gap, the one ERCOT revealed with batch zero and the one Exelon calculated, is what we in the industry now call bragawatts. That is, announced capacity that may never get built. While the word captures the imagination (it is quite catchy), it isn’t a true reflection of what is actually going on. Bragawatts are not lies. Bragawatts are a predictable result of a rush to get an option on scarce grid capacity. A queue position is not a lie.
Back to Texas and ERCOT's 474 gigawatt request pile. New wrinkle is batch zero. Only 127.9 gigawatts made the studied-load cut. So roughly three-quarters of that pile is people saving a seat. And keep walking down the funnel. 205 gigs into batch zero, 66.4 tagged as base load, and about 3.9 counted as large-load peak consumption. At 474 everybody's a hyperscaler. At 3.9 the room gets real quiet. Fabode calls bragawatts options on scarce grid capacity. Fine, I'll buy it. Then price them like options. PUCT cutting the non-refundable deposit made that option cheaper, and cheap options get stacked. Somebody's paying ERCOT engineers to study all of it. I'm with Fabode, though. Exelon ran this exact filter late last year, requiring collateral-backed transmission security agreements, and 18 gigawatts shrank to 11. Put money on the table and the list sorts itself. And with those Latitude gas numbers in mind, I'd much rather utilities size generation off 127.9 than 474. From Mike Phillips at Bisnow:
Virtus Data Centres said it secured a £2.45B finance facility from a consortium of 13 banks led by BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Societe Generale and Standard Chartered. It is one of the largest-ever data centre debt facilities completed in the UK, Virtus said in a statement. The debt includes a £1.2B green capex facility, available through both term and revolving tranches, which Virtus said provides it with flexibility to fund expansion and support its growth ambitions.
Thirteen banks, £2.45 billion for Virtus, and £1.2 billion of it carries a 'green capex' label. Green how, exactly? It's a sticker on a credit line. I want to know what's actually plugged into Saunderton. Look at how it's built, though. Term and revolving tranches, so Virtus draws as it builds: 78 megawatts in Buckinghamshire, plus more at London19 in Slough. And after Blue Owl's thirty-billion ask got cut down, it's nice to cover a number that actually closed. Closed debt, sure. Debt doesn't energize anything. Eighteen sites, three hundred-plus megawatts, all ringed around London. The banks priced the credit. Did anybody price the wait for a grid connection? I think the banks would argue they priced both. Equinix borrowed £280 million in August against two Slough buildings valued at £500 million. Lenders keep choosing that corridor. And with STT GDC and Macquarie behind Virtus, the owners can afford to sit through a delay. From Daniel Finton at YourSun:
The motion that passed through second reading temporarily halts the building of data centers in North Port. But it also allows the process for acceptance, processing and review — but not approval — of an application for a data center that North Port received. The application was previously under a non-disclosure agreement, but is now publicly available.
North Port, Florida had a data center application sitting under an NDA. Now it's public, and late Tuesday the commission passed an 18-month moratorium on second reading, three to two. Read the stipulation, though. That one pending application can be accepted, processed and reviewed. It just can't be approved. So the developer's file keeps moving while the approval clock sits frozen for a year and a half. A moratorium with a waiting room. Which is why Petrow voted no both times. He wanted the existing application frozen too. And Duval flipped after worrying about a lawsuit on first reading. His new line: 'If they want to sue us, let them sue us.' Brave words. The majority's version is the one a city attorney writes, so nobody can say North Port refused to process a filed application. And funny thing, after all that bragawatts talk, here's a project you know is real. Filed application, lifted NDA, 409 comments at the first hearing. The town looked at it and said wait. For another daily look at electricity costs, try Power Bill: residential electric rates and utility cost shifts, weekdays, so you know what hits your bill next month before it does. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so you can dig into whatever caught your attention. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next episode. That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.