Friday, May 1, 2026

Fort Bliss Becomes the Borderland's Third Gigawatt Build in 18 Months

Fort Bliss joins a borderland buildout where developers are buying generation, land, and fuel in single transactions because the queue is no longer a viable path. MARA's $1.5B Long Ridge acquisition and Oracle's 2.45 GW Bloom fuel cell pivot tell you what 432 GW of ERCOT backlog actually costs the operators still sequencing power after the fact.

Today's Lead

The U.S. Army and Carlyle Group are advancing a 3 GW data center complex at Fort Bliss, with 100 MW targeted for next year and full build-out by 2029. The scale eclipses El Paso Electric's entire 2.9 GW system and lands alongside Meta's $10 billion Northeast El Paso build and the Oracle/OpenAI $165 billion Project Jupiter campus across the New Mexico line.

The Army hasn't formally requested service from El Paso Electric, hasn't decided whether to grid-connect at all, and El Paso Water has only "preliminary information" on sourcing. Three simultaneous gigawatt-scale builds in the Borderland, and the power and water architecture is still being written.

[1]

Power

Developers are buying their way out of the queue.

MARA Holdings is acquiring Long Ridge's 505 MW combined-cycle plant in Hannibal, Ohio for $1.5 billion plus $785 million in assumed debt, bundling 1,600 acres, fuel supply, water access, and grid interconnection into a single platform. Fred Thiel's framing is plain: "Power is the scarce input in AI." Oracle's Project Jupiter went a different route to the same destination, swapping a 2.8 GW gas turbine plan for up to 2.45 GW of Bloom Energy fuel cells running behind the meter as the primary source, with grid as optional backup.

The mechanics matter for Texas. ERCOT's interconnection queue hit 432 GW against 85.5 GW peak demand, and Caprock Renewables founder Raina Hornaday describes the resulting shift as "the energization of land," with distributed generation and behind-the-meter resources outpacing transmission-dependent models. Risk: developers still sequencing power after interconnection filings are competing against operators who already own the generation, the land, and the fuel.

[2]·[3]·[4]·[5]

Politics

Moratoria spread elsewhere; Texas pressure runs ground-up.

Michigan Rep. Jennifer Wortz filed a one-year statewide moratorium bill in February 2026. Maine's LD 307 would have paused facilities over 20 MW through November 2027 before Governor Mills vetoed it, though a study process is moving forward by executive action. Champaign County, Illinois imposed a one-year moratorium on April 23 after county officials refused to disclose which companies were proposing 300-acre and 313-acre sites. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Utah, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio are writing data center-only tariffs that allocate new generation costs directly to large loads.

Texas inverts the pattern. Hood County and Granbury residents have filed litigation and packed meetings; Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller floated "Agriculture Freedom Zones" in January to redirect projects toward marginal land and brownfields. Risk: developers who treat public consent as sequencing friction rather than a hard gate will lose permits to operators who lead with water documentation, benefit-sharing, and brownfield siting.

[6]·[7]·[8]·[9]·[10]

Power

The capacity gap is real and the rate-shielding template is forming.

Microsoft's commercial RPO nearly doubled to $627 billion while AI revenue runs at a $37 billion annual rate, and HyperFrame's Steven Dickens identifies "the grid-to-chip interface, especially transformer availability and local utility capacity" as the binding constraint. Six-month deployments now stretch to 18 months. Meanwhile, OG&E and Google structured a roughly 1 GW Oklahoma deal where Google covers 100% of interconnection costs and pays contracted minimums regardless of actual draw, with OG&E's Christi Woodworth stating "there's not a scenario where their rates would go up because of Google."

That contract structure is the template state regulators want. Risk: the developer who can promise and deliver in 12 months instead of 18 owns a scarce asset, and whoever can't write a credible rate-shielding clause into the tariff filing won't get the permit.

[11]

Sources we cited

11 articles across 9 publishers · 255 reviewed today

[1]Texas Tribune
Proposed Fort Bliss data center could use more power than all of El Paso
Apr 30, 2026·The U.S. Army is proposing developing a gargantuan, 3-gigawatt data center complex on Fort Bliss property that within a few years would cons…
[2]MARA Holdings
MARA Advances Its Optimized Digital Infrastructure Strategy with Agreement to Acquire Long Ridge Energy & Power
Apr 30, 2026·Establishes Premier Digital Infrastructure Campus with Over 1 GW of Total Potential Capacity, Including 200 MW of Existing MARA Capacity and…
[3]Data Center Dynamics
Mara acquires 505MW gas plant in Ohio, intends to construct 200MW data center at site
Apr 30, 2026·Transaction set to be completed for approximately $1.5bn Cryptocurrency and HPC data center developer Mara Holdings has signed a deal to ac…
[4]Data Center Richness
Fuel Cells Will Power 2.4 GW Oracle Campus
Apr 29, 2026·Oracle has redesigned the power strategy for Project Jupiter, its massive AI data center campus in New Mexico, turning to fuel cells from Bl…
[5]Texas Energy and Power
Transmission Takes a Decade, Load Doesn't — with Raina Hornaday
Apr 22, 2026·Transmission has long lead times, and demand growth is not waiting. Raina Hornaday walks through what that means for how the Texas grid actu…
[6]Data Center Frontier
Data Centers Face a New Constraint: Public Consent
Apr 29, 2026·For the data center developer in 2026, a new and potentially volatile constraint has come into focus across the United States: public consen…
[7]Data Center Dynamics
Who is going to foot the data center power bill?
May 1, 2026·The data center utility debate, and how AWS is handling the balancing act There is a shared anxiety bubbling in the US. The AI data center…
[8]POWER Magazine
Power, Policy, and Scale: Inside the State Regulatory Response to Data Center Expansion
May 1, 2026·Powering data centers is receiving significant attention at the federal level with the Department of Energy’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Ru…
[9]CU-CitizenAccess
Champaign County put brakes on “mystery” data centers; joins state, other communities’ efforts to pause construction of centers - CU-CitizenAccess.org
Apr 30, 2026·Last week, Champaign County officials voted to establish a one-year moratorium on new data centers on April 23, following “serious” inquirie…
[10]Data Center Frontier rural
The Rural Data Center Boom Comes Into Focus: Challenges and Opportunities
Apr 30, 2026·Pew Research Center’s latest snapshot of the U.S. data center buildout lands with the force of a market correction: 67% of planned U.S. data…
[11]Datacenter Knowledge
Microsoft AI Surge Exposes Data Center Capacity Gap
Apr 30, 2026·Azure growth and a $627B backlog show AI demand outpacing power, cooling, and data center build capacity. Microsoft’s AI-driven cloud deman…

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