An AI lab is about to go public, and one of the risks it warns investors about is the town meeting. Opposition to data centers, the prospectus says, has become organized across jurisdictions. Which is a polite way of saying the zoning board now has a group chat. This is The Data Center Daily, and it's Tuesday, October 27th. Today: Anthropic's S-1 lays out how it is moving from renting cloud capacity to leasing its own halls. Then states, Google and clean energy groups gang up on MISO's large-load fast track, a new ESIG and Brattle model of when a 500 megawatt customer raises everyone else's rates, and a New Jersey town that says it never read the plans. If today's show was useful, follow us wherever you're listening — the next one will be waiting.
Daniel Howley, writing for Yahoo Finance, quoting Anthropic's prospectus:
As our compute requirements have scaled, we have transitioned to a hybrid model in which, in addition to purchasing compute as a cloud service, we also procure specialized AI accelerators directly and operate this hardware in dedicated data center facilities leased and operated on our behalf, to our specification
Anthropic made the S-1 public on Monday. It calls the program Anthropic Direct. The anchor deal is already known: the 50 billion dollar investment announced in November 2025 for Fluidstack to build data centers in Texas and New York, with Anthropic leasing the capacity. What's new is the filing saying it is also leasing capacity directly and plans to sign more agreements. So the tenant is buying its own accelerators and specifying the hall. That's a different customer for Amazon and Google. Less pure cloud spend, more build-to-suit for whoever holds the lease. The risk factors are the part operators should read. Anthropic lists further moratoriums as a key risk and writes that its public profile may draw particular attention to projects associated with it. It also says the loss of a major facility may not be readily absorbed by the rest of its infrastructure. That's a company admitting it doesn't have enough slack. And the answer it gives is to go abroad, to cut concentration in the US. Yahoo points to the backdrop: a one-year statewide moratorium in New York, and the Texas permitting halt we've followed for weeks. One caution. The filing describes a model and a direction. It doesn't put megawatts or sites on the new direct leases.
Ethan Howland, senior reporter at Utility Dive:
Clean energy trade groups, ratepayer advocates and 11 out of 15 states in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator’s territory urged federal regulators on Friday to reject the grid operator’s proposal to fast-track combined large load and generation interconnection studies.
Those filings went in Friday, October 23rd. MISO's proposal is called LARS, the Large Load Addition Resource Study. It's a 120-day process for loads over 200 megawatts paired with generation in the same local resource zone, studied together. MISO says it's partly answering FERC's mid-June finding that its large-load rules were inadequate. That's the same show-cause track behind the ATC filings we covered Saturday. And the objection is the usual one. Who pays for the network upgrades? The Organization of MISO States wants cost-shift protections and a five-year sunset. Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi broke ranks and backed MISO. The interesting filer is Google. It says LARS threatens its ability to keep other retail customers from bearing the cost of serving its data centers, and notes MISO won't file the cost allocation framework until next month. Google's line is that FERC can't simply assume that problem away. When the hyperscaler is the one asking for more ratepayer protection, the tariff has a problem. Then there's the gatekeeping. Only load-serving entities can apply, so an independent power producer with a signed offtake still needs the utility to sponsor it. SEIA and Advanced Energy United call that unduly discriminatory. Even the Data Center Coalition, which generally supports LARS, flagged the utility-only door. Duke Energy Indiana and the Entergy utilities back the plan as written.
The Energy Systems Integration Group, announcing its report with The Brattle Group:
The same 500 MW data center or other large load can raise electricity rates for existing customers in one region and have far less effect in another, according to a new report from the Energy Systems Integration Group’s (ESIG) Large Loads Rate Impacts Task Force.
Released Monday. The setup is a 500 megawatt load on a 15-year contract at a utility with a 3 gigawatt peak, so 16.7 percent of peak. In the modeled Southeast utility, if there's headroom, existing customers' rates fall 0.88 cents per kilowatt-hour, about 6 percent. Without headroom, they rise 0.44 cents. Now the part every utility planner should tape to the monitor. Forecast error. If the load shows up four years late, 0.73 cents. Half the contracted size, 0.93. Leaves five years early, 0.87. All three together, 1.32, three times the base case. And if it ramps twice as fast? You save seven hundredths of a cent. So the downside of a bad forecast is far bigger than the upside of a good one. On tariffs, a termination payment cut the combined worst case by 27 percent and an 80 percent minimum billing demand cut it by 52. Assigning generation and transmission costs directly to the new load eliminated the increase. And for the RTO crowd, regional markets cut both ways. One load spread across PJM barely moves rates, 0.07 cents. Scale growth to the same 16.7 percent across the market and the PJM utility lands between 1.35 and 2.53 cents. You don't escape your neighbor's data center. The authors call the results illustrative, and they don't model distribution costs or economic development benefits. ESIG's new Large Loads Working Group meets for the first time this week in Reston.
Julio Reynoso, in a Hudson TV exclusive, quoting Secaucus Town Administrator Gary Jeffas:
Based on what I was told the Equinix project at 275 Hartz way will have a maximum usage of 50 Megawatts and the Coresite project at 215 County Avenue will have a maximum usage of 75 Megawatts. Please note that I did not review specific plans submitted by the entities.
Jeffas sent that Monday. Tonight the Secaucus council is scheduled to introduce an 80 megawatt per-facility zoning cap, covering the roughly 12 percent of town outside state Meadowlands control. Both approved expansions, CoreSite's NY4 and Equinix's NY10, sit under that line while adding 125 megawatts combined. CoreSite puts NY4 at 64 critical megawatts at full build. So the town had to email the operators to find out how much power its own approvals draw. And the cap arrives after both projects are through. That's a fence built behind the horses. On host benefits, Jeffas said no community benefit agreement is planned, quote, not at this time, since both projects are approved. Hudson TV counts about 11 million dollars in 2026 property taxes across nine data center parcels, and nothing beyond ordinary taxes and fees. The outlet also reports Jeffas left blank a question about landlord Hartz Mountain's campaign contributions. The mayor's newsletter said data center contributions enable community programs. Per Hudson TV, that meant property taxes, plus things like backpack drives and sponsoring the police union golf outing. For 125 megawatts. CoreSite, for its part, says its NY4 plans haven't materially changed since it first presented them to the town in August 2024.
If you sit on one of those MISO dockets, or you've run your own rate impact numbers and they look different from Brattle's, tell us. Write to datacenterdaily at lantern podcasts dot com.
I'm watching how many megawatts Secaucus actually caps tonight. And whether anyone in MISO puts a real number on that cost allocation framework. And CAISO's large-load board vote lands Wednesday. We'll cover it tomorrow. You've been listening to The Data Center Daily, part of the Lantern Podcasts family. Thanks for spending part of your Tuesday with us.