Bring your own capacity, or you're the first one they switch off. That's Pennsylvania's new pitch to data centers. And sixty billion dollars of debt just lined up behind one chip deal. Credit desks are building data centers now too. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: Pennsylvania's curtailment order, a sixty billion dollar package for Broadcom's Anthropic compute, the fine print on Colossus's leases, a year of unpermitted generators in New Jersey, and Amazon's billion-dollar community pledge. Hit follow so the next one shows up without you hunting for it.
Anela Dokso, writing in Energy News Beat:
Under the order, utilities would identify large loads in their territories and set procedures for curtailing them during PJM events. The priority rule is the core of it: a new large load that has not brought its own new capacity is interrupted ahead of ordinary customers.
Finally, somebody put the risk on the load that created it. The Pennsylvania PUC voted four to nothing this week on a tentative order. New large loads without enough new capacity get curtailed before homes and small businesses. And per FOX56 in Harrisburg, utilities couldn't classify data centers as critical users exempt from reductions in pre-emergency or emergency events. Why now: a study the commission released September 14. Its reference scenario fails the PJM reliability planning standard from 2027 to 2030, with modeled risk by 2030 nearly six times the standard. This sits on top of the model tariff the PUC finalized in May for loads of fifty megawatts or more. And look at what it's tied to. The trigger is an event under PJM's proposed Interim Resource Adequacy Service. So the state rule leans on PJM's design, the same week FERC sent PJM's backstop procurement back over cost allocation. ENB says it plainly: this holds the line while procurement catches up, but it doesn't add a megawatt of supply. It's tentative. Comments run thirty days after Pennsylvania Bulletin publication, then fifteen for replies, with a final order targeted for January 28. The fights to watch are who counts as critical load, and how a utility verifies that a project actually brought sufficient new capacity. Expect developers to have opinions on that second one.
AI Industry Today, summarizing Bloomberg's reporting:
Banks involved in the transaction are preparing to syndicate a $42 billion Class A senior-secured tranche, while Blackstone is leading a separate $18 billion Class B junior-debt tranche, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Blackstone plans to commit $9 billion through its own funds and syndicate the remainder of the junior tranche.
Sixty billion dollars of debt to fund chips and compute for Anthropic and other customers. Forty-two senior, eighteen junior. On Wednesday we had Anthropic's prospectus, per Reuters, showing a hundred sixty-one point two billion in mostly non-cancelable Broadcom equipment leases. This is what the other side of those leases looks like. It builds on the platform Broadcom set up in June with Apollo and Blackstone, aimed at more than twenty gigawatts of compute on Broadcom XPUs and networking through 2028. It opened with a thirty-five billion dollar Apollo-led deal backing more than a gigawatt of Anthropic infrastructure. So the chip vendor is now arranging the financing for its own sales. Great when demand holds. And on Friday it was Amazon shopping an eight billion dollar GPU leaseback. Everybody's moving accelerators off somebody's balance sheet and onto a lender's. To be clear about status, this is syndication starting, sourced to people familiar with it, via a secondary write-up. The test is whether credit investors fill both tranches, and at what price. If the junior piece prices tight, expect more of these.
Diego Almada Lopez, writing in Crypto Briefing, on SpaceXAI's Colossus leases:
There is a catch for xAI. The Anthropic contract includes a 90-day termination clause, which means the headline figure is less locked in than the multi-year label implies.
The headline figures: Anthropic took all of Colossus 1, about two hundred twenty thousand GPUs, at one point two five billion dollars a month through May 2029. Google takes a hundred ten thousand GPUs at Colossus 2 for nine hundred twenty million a month through June 2029. Per Vincent Jiang at The Inference, add Reflection AI and an unnamed client due in December, and it's three point four billion a month, or forty-one point one billion annualized. And the utilization number. Research circulated October 1 puts the fleet of nearly five hundred fifty thousand GPUs at about eleven percent, with roughly sixty thousand chips active at Colossus 1 as of May. So the original cluster is a rental property now, and the biggest tenant is the lab Grok was built to chase. The Inference flags that eleven percent as single-source. But per Anthropic's prospectus, this lease sits in the cancelable fifth of its five hundred eighteen billion. And Google's lease can be ended by either side on ninety days' notice after this year. A quarterly rental with a multi-year headline, as The Inference puts it. Meanwhile second-quarter capex ran eighteen point four billion against seven point eight billion of revenue, and Musk is promising three more batches of two hundred twenty thousand GPUs by December, chasing the same buyers. Anthropic may file publicly as soon as mid-November. Whoever's marking that lease book as locked revenue should read the exit clause first.
Floodlight, in partnership with The Guardian, via Latitude Media:
DataOne, the Microsoft-linked New Jersey datacenter recently hit with a $1 million fine for running unpermitted generators, emitted large amounts of health-harming air pollution for nearly a year before state regulators stepped in, according to public records obtained by Floodlight. The Vineland facility’s 62 gas-fired generators became public in August after a Floodlight/Guardian visual investigation found them operating without permits.
Sixty-two tractor-trailer-sized gas generators. Rutgers' Xiaomeng Jin estimates about a hundred forty tons of NOx. That would put one data center in New Jersey's top five NOx polluters of 2025, per EPA data. The potential number is worse. Jin and Bruce Buckheit, a former EPA air enforcement chief, both put full-use emissions above fifteen hundred tons a year. That's nearly twice what Linden Cogeneration, the state's largest NOx emitter, is permitted for. New Jersey's major-source threshold is twenty-five tons. And the timeline. The state says inspectors found the generators on July 29 but not during a December visit. Per Floodlight, DataOne's own letter to the DEP indicates the fleet was there to find. So who was actually checking? DataOne disagrees with the DEP and argued the generators didn't need permits, but says it'll apply now, and that it's moving to low-emission fuel cells as the permanent power solution. Microsoft says it expects suppliers to meet their legal obligations. Bridge power is the buildout's shortcut, and this is what it looks like without the permits.
Ashley Belanger, writing in Ars Technica:
Laying out other community commitments, Amazon also promised to ensure data centers wouldn’t increase power bills or wipe out local water supplies. Regarding the latter, Amazon promised to be “water positive” by 2030, while claiming that 75 percent of projects have already met this goal.
The headline commitment Friday: more than a billion dollars over five years to communities near its data centers, with communities choosing the priorities, per AWS CEO Matt Garman. Amazon also says it's ending NDAs on new data center deals, and that its backup generators typically run roughly ten hours a year. And then Garman says rivals are trying to trick us into slowing down, and that moratorium calls have to stop or American AI falls behind China. That's not a community pledge, that's a lobbying memo with a check attached. Stand.Earth's response, to Ars: credit on ending NDAs, but it calls the rest damage control. Its math is a billion over five years against two hundred twenty billion in data center investment this year alone. And the part the pledge skips. Stand.Earth says Amazon is building what it calls the single largest source of U.S. climate emissions, a power plant in Pecos, Texas, at thirty-three million tons a year. That's their claim. The bill and water promises are the parts operators can hold them to. Whether the pledge buys any permits is another question.
If there's a docket, a deal or a site we should be tracking, tell us. Write to datacenterdaily at lantern podcasts dot com. We read everything.
We're watching for Pennsylvania Bulletin publication of the PUC's curtailment order, which starts the comment clock, and whether the sixty billion dollar Broadcom package fills both tranches. 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.