July 12, 2026
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North Carolina Repeals Its Power Tax Break. Texas Never Had One to Lose.
That call shapes whether the next Kilby stays standalone or faces interconnection pressure. Sources: [Latitude Media](https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/inside-national-grids-1-75-billion-bet-on-joulent), [Briefs Finance](https://www.briefs.co/news/microsoft-greenhouse-gas-emissions-rose-25-in-2025-amid-ai-data-center-boom/), [MLQ.ai](https://mlq.ai/news/gridmarket-and-deployable-energy-partner-on-3gw-microreactor-pipeline-for-data-centers/), [Latitude Media](https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/an-alternative-vision-of-residential-flexibility-for-data-centers/) **Water:** Cooling tech is redrawing the site-selection map. NVIDIA's Rubin-platform warm-water cooling circulates coolant at inlet temperatures up to 113°F, cutting water consumption from 2.6 million gallons per megawatt annually to near-zero where dry-cooler operation is viable. That's a hard number developers can pull into next-generation RFPs now. Meanwhile the demand side stays contested: Li and colleagues project global AI water withdrawal at 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027, while a 2025 Google paper reports Gemini text prompts at 0.26 milliliters each. The gap reflects different systems and boundaries, not one true number. Water use is geography-dependent, and grid-side thermal draw can mask on-site efficiency. Developers who model withdrawal by location, and flag which pipeline sites flip from water-stressed to water-viable under Rubin specs, claim the best sites before competitors do. Sources: [Vozpopuli](https://www.vozpopuli.com/indux/en/nvidias-new-liquid-cooling-runs-hotter-than-your-bathwater-to-chill-ai-servers-and-it-claims-to-cut-water-and-power-use-sharply/7030/), [ScienceBlog](https://scienceblog.com/t-writing-a-single-100-word-email-with-chatgpt-consumes-approximately-the-volume-of-a-standard-bottle-of-water/) **Politics:** Subsidies get repealed elsewhere; Texas faces a permit question at home. North Carolina's 2026 budget repealed the sales and use tax exemption on datacenter electricity purchases, projected to add $21.4 million in FY 2026-27, while keeping equipment and capital incentives intact. Virginia's $0.011-per-kilowatt-hour consumption tax took effect July 1. Moratoriums are spreading: Sarasota County voted 5-0 for a one-year freeze, Greenwood County, South Carolina voted 4-3 to bar data centers from all zones, and 430 opposition groups now span 40 states. As Neil Osnato of Persistence Analytics Group put it, the first-order questions stay the same: can I get power, on my timeline, with durable operating cost?