Data-center gas plants just walked into regulators. Meanwhile, a transformer most people have never heard of is finally carrying a real GPU load. This is The Data Center Daily. North Carolina and Louisiana got handed the same kind of ask and did very different things with it. Guess who finds out what that costs. Plus Cipher's new 8-K and Digital Realty's green notes. But first, solid-state transformers. Latitude Media, with Lisa Martine Jenkins:
DG Matrix and TerraFlow Energy are preparing to deploy what will be one of the first SST architectures to power a high-performance computing cluster in the U.S. The pilot project, part of a commercial agreement the companies announced today, will pair one of DG Matrix’s SSTs with one of TerraFlow’s vanadium redox flow batteries to power Dell servers.
Twelve hundred GPU cores. I've stood in electrical rooms bigger than that cluster. But okay, DG Matrix says it's run simulated loads for a year and a half, and this is the first real one. Real load counts. The scale's tiny. The stack's what's interesting. A DG Matrix solid-state transformer feeding a TerraFlow vanadium flow battery feeding Dell servers. Two technologies that are both still proving themselves, bolted together. So if one leg hiccups, whose press release eats it? And who's on site at three a.m. when it does. Look, the only reason anyone's piloting this is that a regular transformer takes years to show up. The grid people have been yelling about those lead times forever. If an SST can actually flatten AI power spikes, I'm rooting for it. Rooting's fine. Jefferies pegs the U.S. data-center SST market at 4.3 billion dollars in 2030, up from 37 million today. That's more than a hundredfold, from a company with eleven units in the field. Show me a hyperscaler purchase order and I'll draw the curve myself. Here's Earthjustice:
The Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) made a hasty and legally unjustified decision to reject an Administrative Law Judge’s (ALJ) order requiring Meta to hand over critical information about its Hyperion data center project, according to an appeal filed by advocates on Friday.
So walk the sequence. Back in July, the commission's own administrative law judge says Meta has to hand over the Hyperion data. Then at the August open session the PSC reverses her without even discussing it. And Entergy's seven gas plants just keep moving on the fast track. And per the filing, the Meta attorney who wouldn't answer commissioners' questions just walked. The Alliance for Affordable Energy and Union of Concerned Scientists, with Earthjustice, filed Friday in the 19th Judicial District asking to reinstate the subpoena. They've got to show 'arbitrary and capricious,' and that's a steep standard. Steep, sure. But who pays while it sits in civil court? Richland Parish ratepayers get handed seven plants sized off load numbers nobody outside Meta and Entergy is allowed to check. Which is exactly the gap California just wrote into statute. AB 2469, 1577 and 2619 make that load and investment disclosure mandatory. In Louisiana, the same fight comes down to a subpoena and an appeal. Slower tool. Same missing spreadsheet. Here's Nitish Kishor at Kalkine:
Cipher Digital Inc. told investors in an 8-K filed September 25 that it has amended its lease for the Barber Lake data center campus in Colorado City, Texas, and locked in a new 10-year lease commitment from an unnamed “leading AI laboratory.”
Five point two billion dollars, ten years, and the tenant is... 'a leading AI laboratory.' That's the name on it. So who is it, and what happens to Barber Lake if they walk in year four? Sure, but look at what they did put in the 8-K, filed September 25. Cipher eats the first $359.3 million of construction overruns. Past that, the tenant covers half, paid back through higher rent. That's a real cost-sharing term, and developers don't usually spell that out. Half. Through rent. So the lab repays the overrun over a decade, assuming it's still around to cut the checks. Meanwhile Cipher's holding the first 359 million flat. Same flavor as the Meta story: huge number on paper, name kept quiet. At least here it's shareholders on the hook, not Louisiana ratepayers. Layer it on the existing Fluidstack lease and the site's got over $9 billion contracted across a combined 20 years. For Colorado City, Texas, that's a lot of faith in one campus's power hookup arriving on schedule. From Clark Savage at Energy News Beat:
September 18, 2026, the North Carolina Utilities Commission denied Duke Energy Progress a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for a new natural-gas simple-cycle combustion turbine at the Sherwood H. Smith Jr. Energy Complex in Richmond County. The denial is without prejudice, meaning Duke can refile. The message, however, is clear: data-center load forecasts and voluntary pledges are not enough if the utility cannot show, on this record, that everyday customers will not underwrite the plant.
So a Republican-controlled commission looks at a Duke Energy gas peaker, and on September 18 it votes three to one: no. Right across the street from Amazon's ten-billion-dollar campus in Hamlet. Numbers: roughly 240 to 255 megawatts, hydrogen-capable, about 584 million dollars, January 2030 in-service. It'd be the sixth combustion turbine at Sherwood Smith. Duke never formally tied it to Amazon. The commissioners just read the forecast and went, yeah, we know who this is for. And hold that up against Louisiana. Seven gas plants fast-tracked, Meta's numbers under wraps. North Carolina's basically saying: show us on the record that regular customers aren't carrying this plant, or don't come back. Careful, though. It's without prejudice, and staff hasn't finished reviewing the forecast in the Carbon Plan case. To me this reads as a sequencing call. Duke refiles once that review wraps. Sure, they can refile. But now the data-center forecast has to prove itself before anybody signs off on the plant. And if the generation stalls and the transmission credit's still stuck in Congress, where does Hamlet's power actually come from? Here's Aleksandra Chaikina at Traders Union:
Digital Realty Trust is tapping the Swiss franc debt market as demand for data center capacity remains supported by AI workloads, cloud adoption and migration away from on-premise infrastructure. The CHF 510 million issuance is backed by group guarantees and is intended to fund eligible green projects as well as general corporate needs, including near-term debt repayment.
Digital Realty's CHF 510 million green notes. Read the use-of-proceeds line: eligible green projects, general corporate purposes, and repaying near-term debt. So some of the green bond pays off the old bond. Sure, but look at the price. One-point-six-eight percent to 2029, two-oh-six to 2032, two-four-one-five out to 2036. That's the cheapest money anybody on this beat has shown us all week. Cheap because it's Swiss francs and it's guaranteed by three Digital Realty entities. Fitch is grading the parent's balance sheet, Sarah. The solar arrays barely come into it. Which is my point. BBB, stable, leverage in the high fours, and Fitch says EBITDA growth is covering the development debt. Compare that to Cipher, where the whole deal rides on one AI lab we can't name. Here a full operator's credit is on the line, and that's what the biggest colo players actually borrow against mid-buildout. Fine. Real money, real rating. Just don't let anybody tell you the green sticker says what's plugged in behind it. If you track the energy costs behind data centers, check out Power Bill. It covers residential electric rates and utility cost shifts on weekdays, so you know what hits your bill next month before it does. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
We're watching whether Duke refiles the Richmond County peaker CPCN once staff finishes reviewing its data-center load forecast in the pending 2025 CPIRP case.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so take a look at the ones that caught your attention. That's The Data Center Daily for today. We'll be back tomorrow. This is a Lantern Podcast.