A nuclear contract that gets pricier every year finally found a customer who wants it. Oracle. And Spain wants data centers to prove, hour by hour, that they're running on renewables. Or lose the grid connection. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: Oracle's Point Beach offer in Wisconsin, Spain's draft data center decree, a twelve billion dollar Texas complex with a blank tenant line, Memphis's moratorium vote, and Indonesia stopping a six hundred forty megawatt campus. Hit follow so the next one shows up without you hunting for it.
Vincent Jiang, writing in The Inference:
Oracle will buy 125 to 250 megawatts of Point Beach, Wisconsin's only nuclear plant, and says taking that bill onto itself spares other customers $300 million through 2033. Every decision that matters now sits with one state commission, and the terms are still unwritten.
The bill is the contract We Energies signed when it sold Point Beach to what's now NextEra in 2007. The price per megawatt-hour doubles between 2009 and 2027, then keeps rising six to eight percent a year through 2033. Oracle would take that slice for Project Lighthouse, the one point three gigawatt Port Washington campus it's building with OpenAI and Vantage. The savings, more than a million customers, 2027 through 2033, are Oracle's and the utility's estimate. And that escalator is real money now. The Inference says it drives twenty percent of We Energies' proposed one hundred seventy-six million dollar electric increase for 2027. But read Oracle's own line. Julia Robin: it's available now, it's a burden on the ratepayers, we need the power, we're going to take it. That's not charity. The campus can't take load until a new American Transmission Company line clears the same commission. And none of the terms are public. Volume, duration, pricing, risk allocation, all still to be filed with the Public Service Commission. Tom Content of the Citizens Utility Board calls the contract a hockey stick that keeps hitting customers, and says until he sees details, it's hard to know if it's a big win or baby steps. Context for the politics. Seventy-four percent of Wisconsin voters told Marquette's September poll data centers cost more than they give. And as we covered Sunday, the federal Ratepayer Protection Act died in the Senate last week. For Oracle, three hundred million over seven years is about one percent of one quarter's capex. Cheap insurance, if the commission buys it.
Kevin Yeandel, in an analysis of Spain's draft data center decree:
The remedy is not a deposit. It is an hourly test: at least 80 per cent of the electricity a data centre draws in each hour must be backed by renewable generation produced in that same hour, checked monthly by the system operator, with network tariff surcharges that reach 500 per cent and, for significant repeated breach, loss of the connection permit.
The reason is in the preamble. Spain's AI strategy planned for two and a half gigawatts of compute by 2030, which the government translates to three and a half to four gigawatts of demand. The draft records more than six gigawatts of transmission access granted to data centers since the end of 2023, and around six more on distribution since 2020. Its own words: permits already granted exceed the most ambitious deployment estimates. Roughly twelve gigawatts reserved against a four gigawatt plan. That's the bragawatts problem, admitted in the legal text. And Spain already had a deposit, forty thousand euros a megawatt. Ofgem looked at it in July and concluded it had limited effect on the queue. On the enforcement detail: the hourly correlation breach carries ten or thirty percent tariff surcharges, depending on how many hours miss. The five hundred percent ceiling is for failing the additionality requirement, where new renewables cover under twenty percent of annual consumption. Significant, repeated breach of either can cost the access permit. And the industry's pushback isn't nothing. SpainDC says an hourly eighty percent rule is effectively prohibitive until clean power tops ninety percent of the mix, and puts about nine billion euros of investment at risk. Hardest on the least flexible load there is, a training cluster. Ministers expect approval this month under an urgent procedure.
Vincent Jiang, writing in The Inference:
Two filings published today add a $4.8 billion Jayton campus to Crusoe's Project Hyper, taking the complex to $12 billion. The Jayton half names no tenant and delivers in 2029, against a ledger of six gigawatts sold and one standing.
The filings are two Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation registrations, dated October 1, for Project Hyper spur buildings in Kent County. About seven hundred fifty-nine thousand square feet and two point four billion dollars each, construction starting January 2027, completion in mid-2029. The Childress half, filed in September, is three buildings at seven point two billion, targeting the first half of 2028. And there are no megawatts in these filings. No water figures either. Lubbock's 806 Connect points out Kent County has no groundwater conservation district for the Dockum aquifer. Tenant field: Not Assigned. IREN's Childress site next door is Microsoft. Jayton is the blank. One caution. The owners are two LLCs, and 806 Connect notes the filings never name Crusoe. Data Center Dynamics linked them through the Project Hyper name. And these registrations record what an owner plans to build. They're not land, water or power approvals. Here's the ledger, per The Inference. More than six gigawatts contracted, about one delivered, over a hundred forty billion in contracted value, fifteen days after a three point nine billion dollar Series F at a thirty point nine billion valuation. Contracts hedge demand falling. They don't hedge schedules slipping.
Andre Washington, writing in Hoodline:
The same reporting revealed that utility leaders disclosed in April that xAI had paused construction on a promised $200 million greywater recycling plant to prioritize immediate computing expansion, extending the facility's reliance on municipal drinking water instead of the treated city wastewater it originally pledged to use.
That's the backdrop for tomorrow. Memphis City Council takes the third and final reading of a data center moratorium on Tuesday, pushed back from September 15. It's a pause, not a ban, while the city writes permanent rules. Right now the Unified Development Code has no definitions for hyperscale data centers, so Colossus sits under standard industrial classifications. And the water numbers. Protect Our Aquifer reports xAI pulled an average of eight hundred twelve thousand gallons a day from the Memphis Sand Aquifer for Colossus 1, and bought more than twenty-five million gallons from utilities in March alone. At nineteen cents per hundred gallons, against thirty-two for residents. For balance, University of Memphis researcher Chunrong Jia showed the council satellite analysis finding minimal change in ambient air quality from the turbines since September 2024, while saying ground-level sensors are still needed. Separately, the NAACP lawsuit over twenty-seven allegedly unpermitted turbines is ongoing. Timing matters. Slicast, citing Crypto Briefing, says xAI plans to switch on about four hundred twenty thousand GPUs there in November. And Colossus 1 is the capacity Anthropic is leasing, as we covered Saturday. Watch whether the final text has teeth on water.
Headtopics, drawing on reporting from The Straits Times:
The halt came less than two weeks after BDx announced on Sept 22 that it had begun construction of the 640MW AI campus. The 111,000 sq m project, roughly the size of 15 football pitches, is located about 5km from the Jatiluhur reservoir.
West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi ordered work stopped on September 30. Two approvals are missing: the AMDAL environmental impact assessment, and the PBG building approval. BDx confirmed the halt on Saturday and says it still targets the first phase, a hundred twenty megawatts of IT in the first building, for early 2027. And the governor says he told them back on July 28 not to build until the permits were issued. They broke ground anyway. He's blaming the project's consultant for being slow with paperwork. BDx didn't answer questions about which consultant. The bigger issue is water. Jatiluhur supplies Greater Jakarta and irrigation across West Java. Provincial officials say demand could eventually reach about three hundred eighty-four liters per second at full build. Dedi wants the environmental analysis made public and an independent review from a University of Indonesia academic. BDx already has eight hundred forty-five MVA of grid capacity secured from PLN. So power wasn't the bottleneck. Permits and a reservoir were.
If you track how data center deals land on household bills, like that Point Beach escalator, 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 the Memphis council vote Tuesday, and for the terms Oracle and We Energies file with Wisconsin regulators on Point Beach. 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 today. We'll be back tomorrow. This is a Lantern Podcast.