PJM just let 2.1 gigawatts cut the line. Question is how much of it counts when the grid's actually short. It's The Data Center Daily, and senators finally ran the tab on the grid. Plus Meta's infrastructure chief talking big, and a Texas filing called Project Longhorn. Sarah, start with the line-cutters. This one's from Newzino:
On October 8, PJM Interconnection accepted its first three fast-track grid connections: 1.66 gigawatts of battery storage from Engie and a 455-megawatt gas-plant uprate from LS Power. All three are expected online by mid-2029. The fast track is a two-year experiment meant to bypass PJM's long interconnection backlog.
Okay, credit to the grid people, they actually cleared something. Engie's 860 megawatts of batteries in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, another 800 in Morrow County, Ohio, and LS Power bolting 455 onto its Hunterstown gas plant. Real sites, real counties. Real projects, sure, and a nameplate total. The fast track's own entry bar is 250 megawatts of unforced capacity, and batteries don't accredit like a gas uprate does. So you can't just take 2.1 gigawatts off the 6,831 megawatt gap and call it a third solved. And it's mid-2029 for all three. The load's walking in the door now. That's almost three years of hoping the summer peak behaves. Yeah, it's the same PJM crunch we've been following at FERC. The 6.8 gigawatt backstop auction's been suspended since late September, so this two-year experiment is the lane that's still moving. Seven of this year's ten slots are open, and none of these three is energized. Slicast writes:
Speaking to creator Tom Shaw, Janardhan said Meta has contracted 6.5 gigawatts of nuclear power through 2035. He said Meta designs separate custom chips for ranking and recommendations, for large language models, and for AI training and inference, and he expects its future data center fleet to split into two or three distinct templates. The video description states that it "is a part of a paid partnership project with Meta."
Read the video description first. Meta's head of infrastructure tells a YouTuber they'll spend 'well over a hundred billion' this year and have six-and-a-half gigawatts of nuclear locked up through 2035. And the description says it's a paid partnership with Meta. Fourteen hundred and eighty-three views, too. So treat both numbers as company claims. You check the hundred billion against investor guidance and filings. And 6.5 gigawatts contracted through 2035? That's a nine-year schedule. The Constellation uprates are signed, and they still aren't feeding a data hall. The host never asked about cost, water, or local opposition. Meanwhile Entergy's lined up 4,500 megawatts in Louisiana for Meta with no curtailment backstop. If the AI load cools, who's still paying off those turbines in 2035? I'll give the interview one thing. He described separate custom chips for ranking, for LLMs, and for training and inference, plus a fleet that splits into two or three data center templates. That actually changes what gets poured in concrete. The gigawatt brag, not so much. Fine. The chip roadmap I'll buy. The nuclear I'll believe when it's energized. From Digital Watch Observatory:
The report found that companies’ commitments primarily covered electricity infrastructure built exclusively for their facilities. According to the senators, those commitments did not fully cover wider grid upgrades needed because of increased demand. Companies generally opposed paying the full cost of upgrades that would not have been needed without their facilities, arguing that shared infrastructure costs should be distributed among electricity customers.
Oh, I'm gonna enjoy this one. Warren, Van Hollen, and Blumenthal spent a year digging into seven companies, and the finding is the commitments cover the wires built just for their own sites. The bigger grid upgrades their load forces? Spread across everybody's bill. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, Equinix. Per the report, their argument is that shared infrastructure should be paid by all customers. It's the line Duke's tariff drew and the fight DOE took to FERC, except now there are company names on it. So the voluntary pledge stops right where the expensive part starts. Funny how that works. And not one of the seven handed over comprehensive permanent-jobs numbers, while they're all still lining up for tax incentives. Hold the victory lap, though. It's a report from three senators, and it creates zero new rules. The actual cost-allocation calls still run through the October 22 committee and PJM's October 29 refiling. And those fast-track megawatts we just hit? They need upgrades someone has to pay for too. This one's from Energy.Media:
A $366 million data center project, dubbed “Project Longhorn – Building One,” has been filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for Cedar Creek, Bastrop County, Texas. The 498,165 sq ft facility is the first building in what is reportedly a larger campus that AI lab Anthropic is in talks to lease.
Project Longhorn. Three hundred sixty-six million, filed with Texas licensing for Cedar Creek out in Bastrop County, half a million square feet. But what's actually filed is Building One. Anthropic is "in talks." And the power's a proposed gas plant nobody involved will officially confirm. The power math's the interesting part. Pacifico's proposal is 710 megawatts of site-rated simple-cycle turbines behind 490 megawatts of IT, so roughly forty-five percent headroom from peakers. On paper, that's a campus planning to lean on its own fence line more than on ERCOT. Simple-cycle, running around the clock for an AI tenant? That's the thirstiest way to burn gas, on a 2,842-acre site that's still a proposal. Same genre as Meta's six-and-a-half gigawatts we just hit. Big number, and on this one, no tenant's signature. And the calendar's strange. Construction November 30, completion January 2028, while Abbott's September halt on new data center permits is still waiting on the ERCOT audit. Black Chamber builds shells in Northern Virginia; this is its first big Texas job. I'll call it a start date when I see the shell going up. If you're finding The Data Center Daily useful, please subscribe or leave a review wherever you're listening. Reviews help other people find the show, and we're grateful you're here.
What we're watching: Project Longhorn Building One in Cedar Creek is slated to start construction November 30, even with Texas's data center permit pause in place. ERCOT's aiming to finish the large-load audit behind Gov. Abbott's permit halt by December. And PJM still has seven of its ten 2026 fast-track interconnection slots open for projects of at least 250 MW.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so dig into the ones you'd like to explore further. That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.