Twenty-year term, eighty percent minimum bill, fifteen years of exit fees. Michigan just wrote the data center contract everybody else will copy. Meanwhile Amazon wants to sell its GPUs and rent them right back. Asset-light, they call it. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: DTE and Google get the green light in Michigan, Amazon signs Calvert Cliffs, Amazon's eight billion dollar chip leaseback, a blackout warning from Ireland's regulator, and a fifteen billion dollar campus next to a JERA power station in Chiba. Hit follow so the next one shows up without you hunting for it.
Here's the Michigan Public Service Commission, announcing its order:
In addition, the CCAA terms require Google to pay for DTE Electric to develop up to 1,600 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy and 480 MW of battery energy storage to serve the data center. According to DTE Electric, the data center is expected to begin taking service in December 2027 with a maximum load achieved by December 2028.
That's Google's Van Buren Township campus, Project Cannoli, roughly one gigawatt of contracted load near Detroit Metro Airport. Approved Thursday. And the part I care about is who pays. Google pays for that sixteen hundred megawatts of renewables and the storage. DTE builds it, owns it, runs it. And the supply agreement is the template. Twenty years instead of the five DTE's large-load D11 rate normally requires. Minimum billing demand of eighty percent, versus fifty to sixty-five in the general tariff. An early termination payment covering at least fifteen years of minimum monthly charges. Plus credit and collateral requirements. Compare that to yesterday. FERC's sending PJM back to the drawing board on cost allocation, and a co-op was staring at a two billion dollar collateral call. Michigan just settled it inside a single contested case. The Attorney General and the intervenors saw everything, including the sealed filings. One claim to flag. DTE says the deal produces a one point seven billion dollar benefit to other customers over twenty years. That's the utility's number. Service starts December 2027, full load by December 2028, with a new three hundred forty-five kV switching station and two high-voltage feeds planned for the site. Per MLive, it's only the second hyperscale contract Michigan has approved.
Christine Condon, writing in Maryland Matters:
The agreement with Amazon covers 690 megawatts worth of power from the 1,790-megawatt plant — which will expand to 1,980 megawatts after the upgrade.
Constellation and Amazon announced it Wednesday. Twenty years, six hundred ninety megawatts, and that includes a roughly one hundred ninety megawatt uprate arriving between 2030 and 2032. More than three billion dollars of plant investment. Pricing is confidential. Do the subtraction. Five hundred of those megawatts are existing output. And the electrons don't go to Amazon. Constellation's Dardis says every megawatt still flows onto the PJM grid, with a separate retail supply agreement covering Amazon's load across the thirteen-state footprint. So it's a financial contract on a plant that was already running. Fair, but the contract is what buys the uprate. Dardis says it also gives Constellation the revenue certainty to relicense. The two reactor licenses expire in 2034 and 2036. His line on forecasting power prices: we're always wrong. And remember, less than two months ago AWS walked away from a hyperscale campus on the Calvert Cliffs site after the community pushed back. Now Amazon gets the nuclear attributes without the building next door. Honestly? That's the version Calvert County can live with. Constellation also says it'll evaluate small modular reactors at the site. Evaluate. The firm part is the uprate, and that doesn't land before 2030.
Reuters, summarizing a Financial Times report:
In recent weeks, Amazon has held talks with investors to gauge interest in the deal that would move thousands of Grace Blackwell chips it is installing in US data centres into a special-purpose vehicle, the report said.
About eight billion dollars of Nvidia Grace Blackwell hardware. Amazon moves it into an SPV, leases it back, and the vehicle raises outside debt. Amazon offers up to ten percent of the equity. Chips already installed in more than a dozen U.S. data centers across five states, including Nevada and Virginia. Per the FT, the goal is a stronger, more asset-light balance sheet. The chips were either bought or leased by Amazon to begin with. This is talks, not a deal. Amazon and Nvidia didn't immediately respond to Reuters. So who's holding the residual value risk on a GPU generation when the next one ships? That's the whole trade. Yesterday we had Oracle's Jupiter bank loans quoted at eighty-nine to ninety-one cents on the dollar. Lenders are already pricing AI infrastructure risk. Now they'd be underwriting the accelerators themselves. It's a familiar move. Sale-leaseback, applied to the fastest-depreciating asset in the building. If it prices, watch whether the other hyperscalers try the same structure. It turns capex into a lease line.
Cillian Sherlock, reporting for the Press Association, on a new paper from Ireland's Commission for the Regulation of Utilities:
It said when a fault occurs, most data centres – even those remote from the fault – automatically and near instantaneously significantly reduce consumption from the grid and switch to their own temporary back-up sources of supply to ensure continuity of service.
Fault ride-through. The data halls protect themselves, all at once, and the grid eats the swing. On June 6, a single-phase fault at Poolbeg 220 kV in Dublin knocked about four hundred eighty megawatts of data center demand off the system. That's fifty-two percent of all data center demand in Ireland. And the trend is the alarming part. The paper documents four earlier single-phase faults, 2022 through 2025, with the demand drop growing each time. EirGrid and SONI put the manageable upper bound at nine hundred megawatts lost. Credible scenarios without mitigation exceed thirteen hundred. A three-phase fault could be significantly worse. The CRU says EirGrid has very limited operational tools left, apart from curtailing data center demand at times. Aggregate data center demand peaked up to a thousand megawatts in June and August. Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan is calling for a moratorium. For U.S. operators this isn't an Irish curiosity. It's the reliability case for large-load standards like NERC's computational-load project, which passed an initial ballot last month. The CRU says urgent action is required. Expect ride-through requirements to show up in interconnection agreements well beyond Dublin.
Mayumi Negishi, for Bloomberg, via The Japan Times:
The project, aimed at strengthening Japan’s domestic AI capacity, is expected to involve more than $15 billion in capital deployed across land, power infrastructure, construction and computing. Operations are slated to start around 2028, and it will be powered by as much as 400 megawatts of electricity with help from Jera’s nearby thermal power station.
The developer is U.K.-based RHAELM Holdings, partnering with JERA, Japan's largest generator, and Dell, with Apollo as strategic investment and financing partner. Nikkei frames the siting plainly: build next to the power station to avoid grid pressures. Bring your own generation, Japanese edition. Same idea Texas is pushing, except here the power company is in the deal. Though let's be clear, that's a thermal plant. Nobody's calling this one clean. JERA's global CEO Yukio Kani went big. He calls it the biggest single Asian AI data center project now, says it could grow quickly toward three or four gigawatts, and puts that at roughly a hundred fifty billion dollars. He sees Japan's data center power need potentially reaching ten gigawatts. Four hundred megawatts is the number on paper. Three to four gigawatts is a CEO talking. Still, fifteen billion for four hundred megs, compute included, tells you where the money goes. And Apollo keeps showing up. It's already financing AI infrastructure for Nvidia, Broadcom and Anthropic. Operations target around 2028.
If you track how data center costs land on utility customers, check out Power Bill. It covers residential electric rates and utility cost shifts every weekday, so you know what hits your bill next month before it does. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
We're watching whether Amazon's Grace Blackwell vehicle actually prices, and for the next move on fault ride-through from Ireland's regulator and EirGrid.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so take a look at the ones you'd like to dig into. That's The Data Center Daily for this week. We'll be back Monday. This is a Lantern Podcast.