Saturday, February 28, 2026

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.

Today's Lead

Google is assembling nearly 2 gigawatts of dedicated datacenter power across Texas, Minnesota, and Nevada through custom utility tariffs and a landmark 20-year PPA with AES for a new Texas facility coming online in 2027. The AES deal puts generation assets on secured land with existing interconnection agreements, while the Minnesota arrangement with Xcel Energy creates a "Clean Energy Accelerator Charge" that shifts costs directly to Google rather than ratepayers. Combined with Alphabet's $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect Power in December, Google is building an integrated bring-your-own-power model that positions it ahead of Trump's February 25 demand that tech companies "pay their way" for datacenter electricity. Six major companies will sign a formal datacenter power pledge March 4.

[1]·[2]

Power

Off-Grid Is the New Baseline, from Utah to Virginia

Joule Capital Partners is deploying 1.5 GW of onsite natural gas generation across a 4,000-acre Utah campus, with Wheeler Machinery delivering 636 Caterpillar engines starting March 2025 and 455 MW firm by end of 2026. Managing partner Conor Andrus told BloombergNEF the captive model flips competitive advantage: "We know when we can deliver the power." Meanwhile, microgrid company Scale acquired powered-land startup Reload, which pre-permits sites with onsite energy so they can energize immediately. Developers are building power plants, not waiting for grid upgrades.

A podcast discussion on Financial Sense Newshour flagged six states (New York, Vermont, Oklahoma, Maryland, Georgia, Maine) now imposing moratoriums or severe restrictions on datacenter construction, accelerating capital flight toward permitting-friendly jurisdictions. If self-supplied power becomes table stakes, developers without generation partnerships face structural disadvantage in every market where interconnection queues stretch beyond 18 months.

[3]·[1]·[4]

Power/Politics

CyrusOne's Jack County Campus Shows Texas's Captive-Power Edge

CyrusOne is planning a 144 MW, $600M-$2B campus on 300 acres straddling the Jack/Wise County line, powered directly by the adjacent Wise County Power Station natural gas plant. This adjacency sidesteps the grid interconnection delays plaguing other Texas projects. CyrusOne President John Hatem confirmed the company operates roughly 20 Texas campuses already, leasing to Microsoft, Meta, and Google.

The transaction structure raises questions: the land is owned by Fort Worth-based Black Mountain, an energy conglomerate, and state records show "Fort Worth Power Core" (sharing Black Mountain's office address) holds active TCEQ air quality permits for the project across 10 counties. No tax abatement has been finalized with Jack County. Because the site is in unincorporated county territory, the abatement negotiation gives commissioners rare leverage to impose operational conditions. Watch whether Fort Worth Power Core's multi-county TCEQ permits signal a broader gas-to-datacenter play beyond this single campus.

[5]

Water

The Industry's Megawatt Obsession Is Hiding a Water Crisis

JD Supra's legal analysis quantifies what project finance teams are starting to price in: U.S. datacenter water demand could reach 29-161 billion gallons annually in Texas alone by 2030, up from an estimated 25 billion gallons in 2025. Two-thirds of facilities built or under development since 2022 sit in high water-stress zones, and 70% of major aquifers are in long-term decline.

CyrusOne's Jack County project offers a counter-model: closed-loop cooling holding 200,000 gallons per building, filled once via truck and then recycled, explicitly designed to avoid the sustained groundwater extraction triggering pushback near Fort Worth. But closed-loop is atypical. Developers without firm, senior water rights or proven reuse strategies increasingly face permitting delays and investor skepticism. In prior-appropriation states, junior water rights holders face curtailment during drought. Lenders are starting to treat water entitlements with the same rigor as power contracts.

[6]·[5]

Politics

Nebius Faces Community Revolts on Two Fronts

Nebius, the Netherlands-headquartered AI infrastructure company, is fighting organized opposition simultaneously in Independence, Missouri, and Birmingham, Alabama. In Independence, the city council votes Monday on a 90% tax abatement covering $150.6 billion in investment over 20 years, translating to a $6.26 billion tax break on a 1.2 GW, 398-acre campus. The "Stop the AI Data Center in Independence" Facebook group has 2,500+ members; a February 16 public hearing ran four hours with majority opposition.

In Birmingham, the Zoning Board of Adjustment postponed its vote on a 300 MW facility after residents challenged the siting of an industrial-scale power consumer in a mixed-use corporate zone. Attorney Ryan Anderson of the Southern Environmental Law Center argued that building a substation "solves transmission logistics, not the underlying problem" of raw power and water consumption.

Penzance's contrasting experience is instructive: its $4B, 600 MW West Virginia project sailed through under HB 2014's "high-impact" datacenter law, while its Fredericksburg, Virginia project was twice rejected by the planning commission. The gap between state-level incentive regimes and municipal-level resistance is widening fast, and developers who can't navigate both layers simultaneously face cascading delays.

[7]·[8]·[9]·[10]

Power/Politics

American Tower's Edge Land Bank Hits Municipal Speed Bumps

American Tower secured zoning for 4 MW Edge sites in Oklahoma City and Tampa Bay, drawing on 1,000+ owned or controlled plots at existing broadcast tower sites to bypass land acquisition friction. Texas exposure is dense: Austin, Houston, and San Antonio are listed as construction-ready targets, with a San Antonio proposal already under regulatory review. But Indianapolis paused American Tower's planned facility after announcing zoning ordinance revisions specifically targeting datacenters, a model other municipalities could replicate. Charlotte's filing shows a discrepancy between American Tower's claimed approval and city records listing the status as pending. If Indianapolis-style zoning restrictions spread, American Tower's land advantage narrows considerably.

[11]

Sources we cited

11 articles across 11 publishers · 184 reviewed today

[1]Heatmap News
Funding Friday: Google Locks Down 20 Years of Data Center Power
Feb 27, 2026·This week is light on the funding, heavy on the deals. This week’s Funding Friday is light on the funding but heavy on the deals. In the pa…
[2]Trellis Group
How Google got ahead of the ‘bring your own’ data center power movement
Feb 26, 2026·The giant cloud and artificial intelligence services company has negotiated special tariffs and contracts in Minnesota, Nevada and Texas. Re…
[3]BloombergNEF
US Data Center Builder Goes Off-Grid to Speed Deployments
Feb 27, 2026·How quickly can you get me power? That’s the key question Conor Andrus keeps hearing as his firm, Joule Capital Partners, builds data center…
[4]financialsense.com
The AI Energy Arms Race: Gas, Nukes, and China with Robert Bryce & Doomberg
Feb 27, 2026·February 27, 2026 – Can America win the AI race if it can't keep the lights on? In this electrifying conversation, Jim Puplava sits down wit…
[5]Wise County Messenger
Developer eyes $2B data center campus near Wise
Feb 25, 2026·Construction on a data center campus near the Wise/Jack County line could begin as early as this year by Dallas-based developer CyrusOne. Th…
[6]JD Supra
Structuring Water Resilience for Data Center Development: Water Rights, Reuse Incentives, and Emerging Disclosure Risk
Feb 27, 2026·As AI-driven data center development accelerates, developers, communities and regulators are increasingly focused on water demand—both the v…
[7]thebeaconnews.org
‘Blinded by dollar signs’: Independence wrestles with 90% tax abatement for massive AI data center
Feb 27, 2026·Rachel Gonzalez did not foresee becoming an opposition leader to what could be the largest economic development project in the history of In…
[8]The Kansas City Defender
Independence Residents Fight a $6.6 Billion Data Center as Monday's Tax Break Vote Looms
Feb 27, 2026·This article is the first release of Power Grab: A Kansas City Defender investigative series on data centers and the communities paying the …
[9]WVTM
Birmingham AI factory, data center project vote delayed after community concerns
Feb 27, 2026·A decision regarding a new AI factory and data center project, set to go along Lakeshore Parkway in Birmingham, is temporarily on hold after…
[10]Charleston Gazette-Mail
Public comments unheeded, questions unanswered after Penzance data center announced - Charleston Gazette-Mail
Feb 28, 2026·The opposition couldn’t be clearer — and it was heeded. The planning commission for Fredericksburg, Virginia, on Dec. 10 considered an effo…
[11]Data Center Dynamics
American Tower secures zoning permission for two Edge data center sites
Feb 27, 2026·Company eyes Florida and Oklahoma for next developments American Tower has received planning permission for two Edge data centers in the US…

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