Tomorrow is Election Day, and by one analyst count, roughly 30 gigawatts of data center capacity planned for 2028 sits in states where a candidate on the ballot wants a pause. So the interconnection queue now has a polling place. Welcome to The Data Center Daily. It's Monday, November 2nd. SemiAnalysis maps what Tuesday's governor races could do to the 2028 buildout. Google offers Xcel Energy minimum bills and exit fees to power a 780 megawatt campus in Minnesota. Elon Musk names two new Colossus 2 clusters and says both run before year-end. And OpenAI's Stargate team spends the weekend in Korea talking memory and power equipment. Hit follow and you won't have to come looking for the next episode.
Maya Barkin, Wayne Ma, Reyk Knuhtsen and colleagues at SemiAnalysis, in a Sunday note:
The fight is over 2028. Our model has 62.2 GW of US net additions that year, most of which hasn’t started construction. Much of it sits in states electing a governor on Nov. 3.
Their framing: next year is mostly locked in. Across their top 20 states, about three-quarters of the 33.8 gigawatts due in 2027 is already under construction. 2028 is the exposed year, and of the 13 states with the largest net additions they track, 10 elect a governor tomorrow. And this isn't one pro-build party against one anti-build party. Nine of the twenty nominees they track want a pause on new construction, eleven want conditions, and the split is about even by party. Everybody is running against the data center now. They just disagree on whether you keep pouring concrete while the rules get written. That's the line SemiAnalysis draws. If every pro-pause candidate won, those states would hold roughly 30 gigawatts of 2028 capacity. If the conditions-only candidates win, exposure falls to 5.7 gigawatts. On race ratings as of October 30th, conditions-only candidates are favored in Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Iowa, and Georgia is a toss-up. Texas is the whole ballgame. Close to 30 percent of US gigawatts added in 2028, and the TCEQ permit freeze since September 21st pulls onsite power into the hold. On Friday's show we noted banks had shelved a planned bond sale against the Nexus campus loan near Waco, citing that freeze. Their base case leans on ERCOT's audit report, targeted for December 10th, the same deadline hanging over the Batch Zero complaints. Governor Greg Abbott could reopen permitting after that and the Texas Water Development Board's water-use review, though the report alone doesn't reopen anything. His challenger, Gina Hinojosa, would hold a moratorium until legislation passes. The regular session runs January 12th to May 31st, so the freeze could run about eight months from September, or close to a year if reopening waits for new rules to take effect. And the conditions they call manageable are the ones we've chewed on all fall: pay your own grid costs, study your water, drop the NDAs. Fifteen candidates campaign on the first one. The industry already lost that argument. Tomorrow sets the price. One caution the authors flag themselves: they take candidates' positions at face value. A campaign platform is not a permit decision.
Felicity Bradstock, writing for OilPrice:
The proposed agreement includes minimum demand charges and exit fees, meaning that Google will be required to finance the development of the infrastructure even if the demand for AI decreases.
The campus is Project Skyway, 780 megawatts in Pine Island, Minnesota. Under a proposed Clean Energy Accelerator Charge with Xcel Energy, Google would finance 1.4 gigawatts of wind, 200 megawatts of solar and 300 megawatts of battery storage. It would pay minimum monthly charges on at least 75 percent of contracted capacity, and leaving early could cost up to eight years of those minimums. That's the stranded-asset answer written into a tariff. Credit where it's due. But don't hear 1.4 gigawatts of wind and assume a 780 megawatt load is covered around the clock. Bradstock says it plainly: wind and solar swing with the weather, and the batteries don't generate anything. Who firms the other hours? Xcel says the new resources serve the wider grid. Its chief customer officer, Amanda Rome, framed the protections around avoiding a buildout with nowhere for the power to go and nobody to pay for it. The structure copies the Clean Transition Tariff Google built with NV Energy, and it still needs the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. Then there's water, which no tariff fixes. The initial environmental review put the campus at about 55.7 million gallons a year, roughly a 50 percent jump in the city's total use. In a local survey run through August, 75.8 percent of respondents opposed it, and the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy has sued the city over that review. Which fits the SemiAnalysis read. Paying for your own wires is becoming the entry fee. It doesn't settle the local fight.
Jon Myers, writing for DeSoto County News:
In posts on X on Saturday, Oct. 31, Musk gave the new clusters nicknames, “Gun Range” and “Spam,” and said each would hold about 200,000 or more of Nvidia’s newest AI chips.
That came a day after the federal court refused to dismiss the NAACP's Clean Air Act suit over the Southaven turbines, which we covered Saturday. Per Musk, Gun Range, a former police gun range, gets roughly 220,000 GB300s configured for training and is tracking to run by the end of November. Spam, a building that once housed Hormel products, gets about 200,000 GB300s for inference, in December. He says the Colossus 2 campus reaches around 1.2 million Blackwell-generation chips by year-end. He says the inference build needs simpler networking and less than half the fiber, which is a real design point. What the posts leave out is the one I care about: where the power for another 400,000-plus GPUs comes from. So far the answer around here has been the Stanton Road gas turbines at the center of that lawsuit. Myers notes Musk gave no street addresses and the figures aren't independently verified. The footprint keeps spreading anyway. Parent MZX Tech has bought homes near the plant and leased a warehouse along Highway 51, and contractors have filed more than 220 million dollars in liens in DeSoto County over work on the project. Liens north of 220 million tell you how much steel and labor is moving through that county, and how fast. And the preliminary injunction motion is still pending. Two clusters coming online within weeks makes that ruling a lot more expensive to lose. Also still open: about 6.1 million dollars in potential state stormwater penalties, and a proposed class action over turbine noise.
Kwon Hyeonji and Park Joonyi, in The Asia Business Daily, on OpenAI staff who reached Seoul ahead of Sam Altman:
They reportedly discussed contract sizes and supply terms required for actual infrastructure construction, moving beyond an initial review of the project's business viability.
Altman followed on Saturday, meeting about 50 executives from Samsung affiliates in Yongin, according to Samsung. Korean media report a lunch with SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won, with SK Hynix and SK Telecom executives in the room. SK Hynix told CNBC it couldn't confirm that meeting, and nobody disclosed terms. So the news is the staff work, not the handshake. A year ago this was a Samsung letter of intent on memory and an SK memorandum on an AI data center in southwestern Korea. If people are now negotiating contract sizes, the HBM piece is getting real. That rests on unnamed industry sources. The paper also reports OpenAI staff contacted Korean power generation and equipment suppliers about supply terms. That's the line I'd circle. Data Center Digest cites substation transformer lead times past 160 weeks this year. If OpenAI is shopping for Korean power gear, it's telling you where it thinks the bottleneck sits. Not in the model weights. Until a signed volume shows up in a filing or on a Samsung or SK Hynix earnings call, this stays a talks story.
If there's a data center question on your ballot tomorrow, or you're the developer waiting on one, tell us how it looks from where you sit. Write to datacenterdaily at lantern podcasts dot com. Precinct-level gossip welcome. Megawatt-level gossip, even more so.
My watch list for tomorrow night: the Texas and Georgia governor races, and the Georgia Public Service Commission seats. Then Thursday, the Texas PUC's open meeting on the Batch Zero complaints. The Data Center Daily comes to you from Lantern Podcasts. We're back tomorrow, Tuesday, November 3rd. Thanks for listening, and go vote if you can.