A hundred and five billion dollars. That's what Nvidia has guaranteed on campuses where OpenAI is the tenant, in case the lease goes bad. And as of Thursday, Nvidia doesn't have a permanent CEO. Not a sentence I expected to read this year. This is The Data Center Daily for Friday, November 13th. Four stories: what Jensen Huang's resignation could mean for the projects Nvidia helps finance, the Senate permitting bill clearing cloture with its data center terms tightened, PJM's market monitor putting a dollar figure on data center load in the capacity market, and three hyperscalers backing away from secrecy deals with local governments.
The CT Bureau at Communications Today, reconstructing the week:
Jensen Huang resigned on November 12 as president, chief executive officer, and board member, effective immediately, after a week of escalating allegations about his personal relationships and their national security implications. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is serving as interim CEO while keeping her CFO responsibilities, and the search for a permanent successor is open to internal and external candidates.
That was Thursday. Harvey C. Jones becomes Nvidia's first board chair. The stock fell as much as 14.35 percent during the session and closed down 4.34 percent, roughly 182 billion dollars of market value. Here's why it's our story. Latitude Media, writing Thursday on the energy fallout, reports that in August Nvidia signed residual value guaranties worth a combined 105 billion dollars with SB Energy and OpenAI, covering more than four gigawatts of IT load over two decades, per an SEC filing. They pay out only if OpenAI defaults on its lease. Latitude says the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio, built by SB Energy with OpenAI as tenant, is financed through a tangle of Nvidia's balance sheet, SB Energy debt and tens of billions promised under a US-Japan trade deal for a nine gigawatt gas plant. The Energy Department leases most of the land, a former uranium enrichment site. Latitude's read is that without Nvidia's guaranties, SB Energy likely couldn't raise project-scale debt at all. So if you're lending against that campus, the question is what the guarantee is worth when the guarantor is the headline. Care on the allegations. On November 4th, three House Republican committee chairs asked Huang for a closed-door briefing on his contacts with Alice Huang, a former executive of Singapore-based Megaspeed, whom US authorities assessed to be a Chinese intelligence asset. China denies that, and Reuters couldn't verify it. Two later alleged relationships, reported by the New York Times and by Reuters, are unconfirmed. Megaspeed is listed as an official Nvidia cloud partner, which ties this to our Tuesday story on Nvidia's reported cap on Chinese customers at overseas clouds. On the buildout, Rob Day of Spring Lane Capital models three outcomes: growth carries on, the bubble pops into a capex collapse, or a slow deflation. He picks the middle one. Building slows, nothing collapses. Power suppliers with hyperscaler contracts feel it last, and the ones serving neoclouds feel it first. I'd sign that ordering. We already watched CoreWeave bonds yield fifteen percent earlier this month. The operating picture hasn't changed on paper. Nvidia guided third-quarter revenue to 108 billion dollars, plus or minus two percent, with no China data center compute assumed, and it says supply is the constraint, not demand. Next tests: earnings Tuesday, November 17th, the first report since the change, then Huang's testimony to Congress, expected before Thanksgiving.
White & Case, in a client alert on the Senate permitting bill:
While the prior version of the proposed legislation limited the definition of “computational loads” to data centers and computing facilities of 20 megawatts (MW) or greater, the substitute amendment eliminates the threshold altogether.
On Tuesday the cloture vote was still pending. Per White & Case, BAAJA, S. 5653, cleared cloture Monday, November 9th. Amendments come next, and a final Senate vote could come the week of November 16th. That quote changes something we told you. On Tuesday we passed along a Grid and Generation summary saying the twenty megawatt line survived the substitute. White & Case reads the substitute as deleting it. Every data center, any size, would carry its full incremental grid costs and its embedded transmission service costs, with no cross-subsidy from other customers. Both readings can't be right, so check the bill text before you rebuild a model on either one. Two provisions matter for sites already running. FERC would have to issue a policy statement within ninety days of passage, and the mandate covers existing transmission customers by requiring revisions to existing transmission service rates, which reopens a pricing policy FERC set in 1994. The firm notes FERC's show-cause orders reached single-site loads above 50 megawatts interconnecting above 69 kV. This would go well beyond that. So a colo hall that's been energized for ten years could get a new transmission bill. Expect the Data Center Coalition's phones to be busy next week. There's also a five megawatt cap on individual resources in a virtual power plant, and a clause putting RTO corporate governance explicitly under FERC, which White & Case says is aimed at PJM. The cloture margin is soft. Several Democratic senators said their votes to proceed are not votes for the bill, citing tribal sovereignty, environmental protections and state authority. White & Case still calls the bipartisan progress a good sign for final passage. My read: lenders on projects of every size should run the direct-assignment case now, not after the vote.
Jared Anderson at S&P Global, on PJM's independent market monitor:
"The inclusion of existing and forecast data center demand in PJM's capacity market has resulted in an irreversible increase of $29.4 billion in capacity market costs for all customers to date," Monitoring Analytics, PJM's IMM, said in its Q3 state of the market report.
The report came out Thursday. The monitor says data center load and its effect on capacity raised PJM's total wholesale power cost in the third quarter from 101.66 to 111.61 dollars a megawatt-hour, up 9.8 percent. It expects December's 2029/2030 auction to clear at the maximum price and add another five to ten billion dollars. Its fix is blunt: postpone December, pull all forecast data center load out of the auction, and make data centers bring their own new generation, through bilateral contracts or a backstop auction. It blames extraordinarily high data center load built on what it calls unsubstantiated forecasts. Those are the monitor's words, not a finding. But the shortfalls back up the direction: 208.7 megawatts short in the 2026/27 auction, 6,516.6 in 2027/28, 6,831.3 in 2028/29. And energy prices. Real-time load-weighted prices for the first nine months rose 48.4 percent from a year earlier, 50.51 to 74.98 dollars a megawatt-hour, while average hourly load rose 3.4 percent. Prices up nearly half on three percent more load. That's the ratepayer bill. Now the timing. Load Factor News reports PJM refiled its backstop procurement on November 9th, substantively the same design we covered last week, asking FERC for an order by January 29th so bidding opens March 1st, 2027. PJM also asked FERC to waive its duty to file a separate backstop auction if December comes up short for a third straight time. So the monitor wants the backstop before the auction, and PJM wants it about three months after. Comments on that refile are due Monday, November 30th. Whether FERC acts on the waiver before December's results post isn't in the record. Separately, Exelon's request to replace the forward auction with a prompt one from 2030/2031 is still pending.
Justin Gray of Channel 2 Action News in Atlanta, reporting Wednesday:
Three of the nation's largest technology companies are promising greater transparency about their data centers after Channel 2 Action News Investigates uncovered nondisclosure agreements between tech companies and Georgia governments that blocked public access to information about the massive facilities.
Per the station, Amazon, Microsoft and Google said in separate blog posts that they will end or phase out NDAs with local governments on data center projects. Amazon says it no longer uses them with the agencies it works with. Google says it will eliminate them with state and local governments. Microsoft told the station it has started terminating its active NDAs with local governments, municipal utilities included. Look at what got blacked out. A Google agreement with the Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority redacted the specific water usage and water requirements. In one development agreement with that same authority, even the company's name was redacted. You can't ask a water authority to plan for a customer it can't name. This fits the post-midterm arc we've tracked. OpenAI's National Community Compact on November 5th ruled out NDAs with officials, though only at sites it owns and operates. Now three of the largest builders say something similar. What the report doesn't say is when each policy takes effect, or whether Amazon's and Google's existing agreements will be released. April Lipscomb of the Southern Environmental Law Center put the leverage plainly: keep up the secrecy and projects get denied. The station counts 331 data centers planned, under construction or operating in Georgia, using Data Center Map. That's a lot of county meetings where somebody asks for the unredacted copy. For site selection teams, the working assumption should be that water and power terms end up in the public record. Negotiate them accordingly.
One request before the weekend. If The Data Center Daily has earned a place in your morning, a rating or a short review in your podcast app helps the next utility planner or infrastructure investor find it. One line is fine. Grid people respect brevity.
Next week's calendar: Nvidia reports Tuesday, November 17th, the Senate could take a final vote on BAAJA, and Huang's testimony is expected before Thanksgiving. Our next episode is Monday, November 16th. Enjoy a weekend with no capacity auction in it. The Data Center Daily is a Lantern Podcast. Sarah and Matt, signing off for the week.