Developers Face a Choice: Disclose or Lose the Next $46 Billion

Roughly $18 billion in datacenter projects have been halted and $46 billion delayed nationwide as community opposition hardens around a single failure: water disclosure. From Santa Teresa, where Stack Infrastructure's belated reveal of Project Jupiter's water needs landed in a community already drinking arsenic-tainted water, to Montana, where NorthWestern Energy has signed preliminary agreements with three developers while releasing almost zero water data, the pattern is consistent. A bipartisan federal bill from Sens. Hawley and Blumenthal would force facilities above 20 MW to procure dedicated generation and disclose consumption publicly, a threshold low enough to catch mid-tier colocation operators across ERCOT. The developers still winning approvals, like Skybox in Round Rock with its closed-loop pledge and unanimous council vote, are the ones putting numbers on the table before opponents put petitions on the street.