Monday, September 14, 2026

Rowan's $4.2B Cleared Water and Power; One Zoning Vote Remains Sept. 17

Rowan's $4.2B Temple campus locked closed-loop cooling and a $32M ASR commitment with one zoning vote left Sept. 17, as 75 projects and $130B sit disrupted outside Texas. Developers who've packaged water design, self-supplied power, and neighbor notice before the hearing keep the runway others lose.

Today's Lead

Rowan Digital Infrastructure’s Temple campus is now $4.2B in committed private capital across three projects (Temple, Stampede, Ranger), a fourteen-fold jump from the $300 million 2021 filing. Five of six buildings are approved or under construction; the Lasso Building hits Temple City Council for second reading on Sept. 17, the last zoning gate before phase-two construction.

Texas is taking capital that clears water and power first, while out-of-state gigawatt campuses absorb court pauses and ordinance fights.

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NATIONAL CONTEXT

Local opposition is hardening into bans, rate cases, and preemptive ordinances outside Texas. Data Center Watch counted at least 75 projects and about $130 billion disrupted in the first three months of 2026; more than 500 counties and municipalities have already blocked or restricted projects.

New Jersey alone has 38 municipal bans, and 56 percent of New Jersey voters back a statewide prohibition. Nebius and DataOne’s nearly 300 MW Vineland site (Microsoft GPU deal up to $19.4B) sits a mile from homes and is drawing noise grievances.

Alabama has pushed the issue into the 2026 midterms. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Doug Jones is running town halls on cost, farmland loss, and thin permanent jobs; an August Heatmap Pro/Embold poll found 75 percent of registered voters oppose data centers.

Michigan’s Oxford Township is drafting a Data Center Overlay with noise, cooling, utility, and decommissioning rules before its moratorium ends in February 2027, while a University of Michigan and Los Alamos 220 MW Ypsilanti Township proposal faces a hostile town hall. Markley Group’s Lowell, Massachusetts colocation site is in Middlesex Superior Court over 27 diesel backups and 16 cooling towers.

Pennsylvania’s PUC is reviewing large-load cost responsibility after estimating industrial power use up 18.56 percent and residential bills up 10 percent from gas price pressure; Governor Josh Shapiro has conditioned AI load on self-supplied power. Spain’s draft decree (1 MW threshold) would add hourly renewable correlation, additionality, PUE 1.15, and WUE 0.1 for new grid access.

Oracle’s $165 billion Project Jupiter in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, faces a New Mexico Supreme Court air-permit pause and Land Office pipeline blocks even after a fuel-cell and matching pivot. Prepared developers treat these as site-selection filters, not distant headlines.

[3]·[4]·[5]·[6]·[7]·[8]·[9]·[10]·[11]·[12]

Power

NEW: Behind-the-meter orders set the build sequence

SemiAnalysis tracks 75 GW of firm OEM equipment orders for behind-the-meter AI compute, with roughly 20 GW ordered in Q2 2026 alone; about 3 GW of U.S. datacenter IT is on track to run onsite by year-end. Microsoft has signed over 5 GW year-to-date; OpenAI’s Shackelford County, Texas campus runs 1.4 GW IT on more than 500 Jenbacher engines; Google is placing hundreds of megawatts of off-grid turbines and fuel cells; Anthropic and Meta each signed 300-500 MW genset deals with Enchanted Rock.

Inference economics make the math blunt: roughly $100B API revenue per gigawatt annually at high margins against about $5B for an islanded plant. Governor Greg Abbott and Governor Josh Shapiro have both pushed large AI load toward self-supplied power rather than open-ended grid draws.

Construction cost guides still put power infrastructure at about 21 percent of all-in U.S. development cost, with powered land averaging $584,000 per MW in 2026. Bottom line: operators who permit generation and IT on the same clock keep energization dates; those still waiting on transmission queues carry capex with no load.

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Water

NEW: Temple designs out continuous draw

Rowan’s Temple facilities use air-chilled, closed-loop cooling: 1 to 2 million gallons for initial fill, then recirculation for 10 to 15 years before a major recharge, with ongoing municipal use near 4,000 gallons per day per building for staff and sanitation. Rowan also committed to fund about 45 percent (~$32 million) of Temple’s $71.1M Synergy aquifer storage and recovery well.

Oxford Township’s draft rules still flag evaporative loads at 1 to 5 million gallons per day versus closed-loop at 20,000 to 60,000, so cooling choice is now a zoning variable, not a post-approval detail. Bottom line: closed-loop plus funded ASR keeps Sept. 17 zoning and long-term county goodwill on the same path; open-tower designs invite gallon fights before steel.

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Politics

NEW: Rural Texas neighbor risk meets national ban math

Texas hosts more than 300 operating data centers and over 200 in development, yet ERCOT still publishes only aggregate large-load figures above 75 MW, so sub-threshold sites stay invisible to grid maps while neighbors hear them. In Brazoria County, Giga Energy’s bitcoin facility ~600 feet from homes registers about 79 decibels with indoor vibration, and unincorporated counties have thin zoning until commissioners write rules after complaints.

Nationally, three-quarters of Americans in recent polling oppose data centers near homes; Alabama and New Jersey show how fast that becomes campaign copy and municipal bans. Rowan’s 50 percent city/county abatement for 10 years still leaves Temple ISD, Rogers ISD, and Temple College whole, with third-party work projecting more than $45 million a year to local jurisdictions at full build and at least 120 permanent jobs.

Bottom line: noise studies, pre-build neighbor notice, and locked tax/job math belong in the site package before the first county workshop, or the ordinance writes itself after COD.

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Sources we cited

15 articles across 15 publishers · 484 reviewed today

[1]The Killeen Daily Herald
Rowan’s $4.2 billion Temple data center campus advances as water, power questions persist
Sep 13, 2026·This is a rendering of the Temple Meta data center as seen on datacenters.atmeta.com. Rowan Digital Infrastructure officials say the compan…
[2]SemiAnalysis
What is So Hard About Behind-The-Meter Power For Datacenters? Part 1
Sep 10, 2026·Last year we were the first to call out Onsite Gas Generation as the primary method adopted by AI Labs and Hyperscalers to solve power const…
[3]The New Republic
The Big Greedy Data Center Next Door
Sep 13, 2026·In 2021, Andrew and Stevi Groetsch started building a modern ranch-style home across from a peaceful stretch of farms in Vineland, New Jerse…
[4]The American Prospect
Data Center of Attention
Sep 11, 2026·This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, p…
[5]Lowell Sun
Markley Lowell pushes back against data center opposition
Sep 13, 2026·LOWELL — Jeff Markley has been building data centers since 1991. Some 35 years later, he still is, but is concerned that opposition to the t…
[6]The Oakland Press
Oxford Township begins amending ordinances for data centers
Sep 14, 2026·Hundreds of people packed the Oxford High School Auditorium on Thursday night to learn how the township plans to shore up zoning and ordina…
[7]404 Media
‘We Did Not Invite You.’ Citizens Rage at Town Hall Over Proposed Nuclear AI Data Center
Sep 11, 2026·Representatives from the University of Michigan faced tough questions and a lot of vitriol from the citizens of Ypsilanti Township Wednesday…
[8]PA Environment Digest Blog
In Case You Missed It: A.I./Data Center Articles - NewClips From Last Week - September 14
Sep 12, 2026·-- PUC Launches Review Of Utility Ratemaking, Working Group To Address Affordability, Transparency And Changing Economic Conditions [PaEN] …
[9]A&O Shearman
How Spain’s draft data center rules could transform digital infrastructure investment
Sep 11, 2026·The Spanish government has published for public consultation a Draft Royal Decree establishing energy sustainability, environmental, resilie…
[10]neoteo.com
Spain’s draft data-center rule would tie AI growth to new renewable power
Sep 12, 2026·Spain’s draft data-center rule would require new renewable power and efficiency measures, but it is not yet law. Here’s what the proposal me…
[11]Ars Technica
Oracle tries to appease Stargate data center opponents with renewables push
Sep 11, 2026·Renewables pledge won’t change the Oracle and OpenAI data center’s use of gas. Oracle’s proposed investment in 2 gigawatts of renewable ene…
[12]The Cool Down
Pennsylvania and Texas warn AI developers: Build your own power, or stay off the grid
Sep 12, 2026·The AI boom is becoming as much an energy story as it is a tech story. Pennsylvania and Texas are taking steps to ensure companies planning…
[13]techi.com
Data Center Cost Per MW: USA, EU, UAE, India, Pakistan
Sep 13, 2026·Reviewed by Muhammad Zeshan SarwarFact-checked by Nouman S. Ghumman Building a 10-megawatt data center in Mumbai costs about $66 million, b…
[14]Data Center Dynamics
From grid constraint to grid asset: Rethinking the path to data center power
Sep 13, 2026·Dr. Nigel Jakeman is the engineering and business development director at Turbo Power Systems Stop asking for permission and start offering…
[15]Click2Houston
Texas data centers are booming. Who is watching out for homeowners?
Sep 11, 2026·Amy Davis, Investigative Reporter Andrea Slaydon, Senior Investigative Producer Adrian Montes, Investigative Photojournalist The Burnett …

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