Seventy-four billion dollars, two campuses, and two very different answers to where the power comes from. SpaceX laid out that plan on Thursday, just over a week after Texas voters turned on data centers. Timing is a choice. Welcome to The Data Center Daily, Saturday edition, November 14th. I'm Sarah, here with Matt. On the rundown: SpaceX's Starbase and Cochise County campuses, new research claiming banned Blackwell chips trained China's top open models, ISO New England's answer to FERC on large loads, and Latitude's count of how much data center load is actually signed. One tap on follow, and we'll be back in your ears before you know it.
Dan Rabb, writing in Bisnow:
The company announced the plans Thursday, outlining a $50B project at a new site in Cochise County, Arizona, and a $24B development on 444 acres near the firm’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas.
Some context. On Wednesday we covered a permit application in Cochise County from SpaceXAI affiliate Tombstone Resources: 747 acres near the Willcox Playa, four stages of 1.5 gigawatts, six gigawatts in all. Bisnow doesn't say whether the fifty billion covers that same filing, though it's the same county. What's new is the price tag, and a second campus at Starbase. And look at the power split. Bloomberg reports, per Bisnow, that Texas gets a natural gas plant SpaceX would develop, own and operate itself. Arizona leans at least partly on grid electricity from local cooperatives, plus existing renewables and cooling designed to avoid groundwater. So in the desert they promise not to touch the aquifer, and in Texas they just become their own utility. That fits the pattern. Almost all of SpaceX's compute sits in the Memphis area at Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, where environmental and civil rights groups allege gas generators ran without required federal permits. Bisnow notes the Justice Department asked a judge to dismiss that litigation on national security grounds. The court denied xAI's own motion to dismiss the NAACP suit on October 30th. Now the politics. Gina Hinojosa beat Governor Greg Abbott after making tighter data center policy a centerpiece of her campaign, and Bisnow says Musk spent roughly 180 million dollars backing Texas Republicans, five million of it to Abbott. His post-election take on X was that data centers in space were looking pretty appealing. Arizona isn't a clean escape either. Democrats now hold both legislative chambers and the governor's office, and legislative Democrats are openly discussing a pause on new data centers. Governor Katie Hobbs says she opposes a blanket moratorium. The next hard date is the county zoning decision, expected December 9th. Until then, seventy-four billion is an announcement. Bisnow names no turbine supplier, no interconnection agreement, and no outside tenant beyond the phrase outside hyperscale customers.
Tim Fernholz at TechCrunch, on Friday:
The leading open-weight models developed by Chinese companies were trained on Nvidia chips that the U.S. government restricted from shipping to its largest geopolitical rival, a new research effort claims.
The researcher is Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher who leads the nonprofit Unemployment Labs. He analyzed released weights from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group, and says the most closely watched, Moonshot's Kimi K3 releases and DeepSeek's V4 models, carry fingerprints of Blackwell training. Blackwell is banned for China and for Chinese-owned firms. And Epoch AI estimates about two million advanced chips entered China in 2024 and 2025 through schemes built to hide where they ended up. TechCrunch adds its own caveats. The finding doesn't show the models were trained entirely on Nvidia silicon, or that export law was necessarily broken. The chips could have been in an offshore data center. Epoch counts about 275,000 Nvidia accelerators imported into Malaysia over those two years. Which is the loophole from our Tuesday story, the reported rule that Nvidia's cloud partners serve at least 51 percent non-Chinese customers. Police who owns the chip, shrug at who rents it. The partner in the middle is Megaspeed. TechCrunch writes that Huang left after admitting to an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, who has been alleged to be a Chinese intelligence agent. China denies that. And on Friday, Bloomberg reported a company linked to her was involved in smuggling banned chips to a data center in Shanghai. TechCrunch's read is that Nvidia's potential corporate liability on export controls likely factored into the split, and that it becomes a much bigger problem if investigators confirm smuggling and that Huang knew. Nvidia and Huang have both vouched for Megaspeed's data centers. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick could reportedly lose his job over investigators who missed suspicious buyers. One more number for the PORTS-Pike exposure we flagged yesterday. ANS Nuclear Newswire, citing the Financial Times on November 10th, says SoftBank posted a quarterly loss of about seven billion dollars, and that per sources 3.7 billion of it came from nonrefundable down payments on gas turbines for that Ohio campus. Reuters says the campus timeline hasn't changed. Nvidia reports Tuesday, November 17th. Listen for anything on partner audits and export compliance.
The Duck Curve, reading ISO New England's new filing at FERC:
Both non-firm services carry the same condition: the ISO re-dispatches all or part of the load's non-firm service whenever its local price exceeds $250/MWh, and the customer either cuts consumption or raises output from an associated generator.
Filed Friday under docket ER27-484, in answer to FERC's June 18th show-cause order. It covers loads of 50 megawatts or more connected above 60 kV, with three services. Firm service requires every identified network upgrade in service plus enough designated new capacity resources to cover the firm amount. Until then there's interim non-firm service, for up to seven years or as long as the upgrades take. Or permanent non-firm, with no capacity requirement. Bring your own capacity, New England edition. Here's the number a hyperscaler cares about. The ISO's testimony says the real-time hub price topped 250 dollars a megawatt-hour in one percent of intervals from January 2021 to February 2026, so a non-firm load could expect to draw system energy in 99 percent of hours. With the ISO's own warning that history isn't a forecast. On the wires, the transmission owners' Large Load Cost Recovery Agreement charges net upgrade costs monthly, with an exit fee at net book value plus decommissioning if the load leaves early, backed by credit support. NEPOOL joined everything except that piece. The owners argue it avoids what sank most of PJM's package at FERC on October 9th: no curtailment priority, no retail rate. And the filing concedes these loads have yet to materialize in New England. Flat or declining load for a decade. They're writing a tariff for customers who haven't shown up. Honestly, that's the right order. Still open: what counts as new capacity, plus accreditation and location rules, all due in a 2027 filing. Applications open June 1st, 2027, service June 1st, 2028, and the ISO asked FERC to set comments due December 7th. CAISO and PJM plan their responses for around Monday the 16th, SPP about the 20th.
Maeve Allsup at Latitude Media, on a figure of 120 gigawatts:
That’s the amount of signed data center load Latitude Intelligence is tracking (53 utility territories at launch, though the list is soon to expand), meaning projects for which there’s an executed agreement to take service. Compare that to 22 GW of currently operating data center load across the same footprint: Signed load is around 5.5 times what is currently online today.
One disclosure: these figures come from Latitude Intelligence, Latitude's own research platform, which launched this week. Across the same territories it counts 537 gigawatts of reported load, about four and a half times the signed number. Georgia is the widest gap. Georgia Power has 12.8 gigawatts signed against 80.1 reported. Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms has promised a temporary ban on new data center approvals pending a review of costs and environmental impacts, and the state's Public Service Commission flipped blue for the first time in three decades. That's sixty-seven gigawatts of maybe, in a state that just voted for slower. At the other end, signed load in AEP Ohio territory is 235 percent of the utility's current peak. NIPSCO in Indiana sits at 169, PPL in Pennsylvania at 145. Per Latitude, Ohio voters favored restricting development in all 21 local measures, and a statewide constitutional amendment is gathering signatures for next fall. Supply side: 37 gigawatts of generation procurements open or under consideration at the six largest utilities Latitude tracks. Dominion alone is after up to 7.3 gigawatts of dispatchable generation, final submissions December 18th. A solicitation isn't a plant, and Latitude says as much. And timing. Latitude's average from announcement to first power is 33 months, on a small sample, so most of what energizes next year was announced in 2024. The midterm effect lands on later cohorts, which is where Morgan Stanley already pushed five gigawatts from 2028 into 2029. Last word to Latitude analyst Victoria Yang, on SPP's curtailable pathway: a hyperscaler can live with real-time curtailment, but it can't underwrite not knowing whether that's 20 hours or 400 a year. Hold that up next to New England's 99 percent and you see why a published price trigger matters.
A question for the operators and planners out there. Is a non-firm product with a 250 dollar trigger something you could actually finance? Write to us at datacenterdaily at lantern podcasts dot com. Extra credit if you've signed a minimum bill and lived to regret it.
Monday, November 16th, brings our next episode, along with the show-cause filings from the regions that haven't answered FERC yet. Nvidia's report follows on Tuesday. Go outside. The grid will still be short on Monday. The Data Center Daily is a Lantern Podcast. From Sarah and Matt, enjoy the rest of your weekend.