Self-Supplied Power Is Table Stakes. Six States Are Already Closing the Door.

Google's nearly 2GW portfolio across Texas, Minnesota, and Nevada, anchored by a 20-year PPA with AES for a Texas facility energizing in 2027, isn't an outlier anymore. It's the template. Joule Capital Partners is building 1.5GW of captive gas generation on a 4,000-acre Utah campus; CyrusOne's Jack County project sits adjacent to an existing natural gas plant to sidestep interconnection entirely; Scale just acquired a startup that pre-permits sites with onsite energy. Developers who can't bring their own power are running out of places to build: New York, Oklahoma, Georgia, and three other states have imposed moratoriums or severe restrictions on datacenter construction, pushing capital toward jurisdictions that won't slam the door. And the constraint nobody's pricing correctly isn't just watts. Texas datacenter water demand alone could hit 29 to 161 billion gallons annually by 2030, with two-thirds of new facilities sitting in high water-stress zones.