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PJM Just Made Grid Power Conditional for Data Centers
On July 27, PJM Interconnection's board directed staff to file a proposal with FERC that changes a basic assumption the data center industry has been building on for two years: that a signed interconnection agreement means firm power. It doesn't anymore, or at least it won't after June 2027, a shift tech and energy press picked up on within a day as a sign the AI buildout had hit a hard limit. The proposal defines a "Large Load" as any customer with 50 MW or more of cumulativ
1 day ago4 min read


Siting 2026's AI Superfactories Beyond the 7-Year Grid Queue
Siting next-generation AI infrastructure is no longer an interconnection game. It's a land intelligence game. Interconnection queues across major grid operators now stretch 4 to 7 years, and in some PJM territories a single 100 MW connection can take seven years on its own. Hyperscalers and data center developers can no longer count on a traditional utility power drop to energize a gigawatt-scale campus on schedule. The response: capital is shifting toward behind-the-meter (B
1 day ago3 min read


EPA's Acid Rain Exemption for Islanded Power
On July 16, EPA Assistant Administrator Aaron Szabo sent a letter that quietly reshapes the economics of self-generation for data centers. In it, EPA concluded that power plants supplying electricity only to a data center, not to the broader grid, do not fall under the Clean Air Act's Acid Rain Program. The agency confirmed the interpretation publicly on July 27. Reuters and other outlets, including The Hill, framed it plainly: developers can now sidestep one of the country's
4 days ago4 min read


BlackRock's $12 Billion Bond Sale Signals a New Financing Playbook for Data Center Developers
On July 20, BlackRock began marketing a bond sale of more than $12 billion to help finance a single data center campus: Meta's project in El Paso, Texas. JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are running investor calls this week, with pricing expected early next week. If it closes near that size, it will rank among the largest single-site financings ever assembled for digital infrastructure. For developers watching from outside the hyperscaler tier, the headline number is less in
Jul 215 min read


Beyond the Warehouse
PJM is running out of room. So is every other grid where data center demand is highest. Developers are responding with floating server farms, orbital compute, and mines repurposed into hyperscale campuses. Our new whitepaper benchmarks four unconventional data center formats against conventional builds and finds that the ones with the best shot at scale aren't the flashiest. They're the ones engineered to work with the grid and the community around them, not against either.
Jul 171 min read


Meta's $50B Louisiana Bet: The Hyperion Expansion & the New Data Center Playbook
Meta confirmed this week that its Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is growing to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, pushing the company's regional investment past $50 billion (CNBC; Blockspace). The project began in December 2024 as a $10 billion, roughly 2 GW campus on a 2,250 acre former farm between Rayville and Delhi. Eighteen months later it is one of the largest data center buildouts in history, and a useful case study in how land, power, and rur
Jul 134 min read


Siting Data Centers on the Subtransmission Grid
For hyperscale campuses, colocation facilities, and edge deployments alike, subtransmission is the variable that determines whether a site can actually be powered.
Jul 76 min read


Inside the Hawesville Site of the $19 Billion Anthropic-TeraWulf Lease
On July 6, 2026, TeraWulf and Anthropic announced a 20-year lease agreement that will turn a shuttered Kentucky aluminum smelter into one of the largest AI infrastructure campuses in the country. The headline numbers are impressive on their own: roughly $19 billion in contracted lease revenue, 401 megawatts of critical IT load, and a phased buildout stretching from second half 2027 through early 2028. But the number that should catch every developer's attention isn't the doll
Jul 76 min read


A Developer's Guide to LandGate's Nationwide Data Center Due Diligence Data
For data center developers, site selectors, operators, and investors, one constraint sits above all others: power. A site can have ideal land, connectivity, and incentives, but if it cannot secure large, reliable power quickly and connect to the grid without prohibitive upgrades, it is not a data center site. Around that central question sit the others that decide a project: fiber and interconnection, real estate and lease economics, tax incentives, backup and resilience, and
Jul 211 min read


Reading the Map Before It's Drawn: How to Evaluate Sites Against Proposed Transmission Projects
Proposed transmission lines are electric transmission projects that have been announced, planned, or are under development but have not yet been constructed or energized.
Jul 16 min read


Severe Weather Is Becoming a Data Center Site Selection Problem
Europe spent this week in a record heatwave, and the headlines focused on the obvious: strained grids, blackouts, and big tech scrambling to keep AI chips cool. For developers, investors, and lenders putting capital into data centers, the more important signal sits underneath that story. Severe weather has quietly become the single largest driver of insured construction losses in the data center sector, and the buildout is moving fastest into exactly the markets with the thin
Jun 296 min read


Air Permitting for Data Centers: What Developers Need to Know About Non-Attainment Areas
The race to secure land for data center development has historically come down to three major factors: fiber, water, and power. But as the grid tightens and power demands skyrocket, a silent deal-killer has emerged in the site-selection process: air permitting.
Jun 265 min read


Wood Mackenzie acquires LandGate to deliver connected intelligence for the new era of US power markets
Acquisition of 150 million parcel-level land intelligence dataset strengthens Wood Mackenzie’s leading market position and will drive faster, higher-confidence capital allocation decisions for power, renewables, and data center developers. LONDON/HOUSTON/SINGAPORE, 24 June 2026 – Wood Mackenzie, a global leader in data, analytics and insights for the energy and natural resources industry, today announced the acquisition of LandGate. The deal combines Wood Mackenzie’s power ma
Jun 243 min read


Virginia Just Taxed the World's Largest Data Center Market
The most established data center market in the country has agreed to tax the industry's power consumption for the first time. The deal is capped and temporary, but the signal it sends to developers, investors, and lenders is anything but. What the Virginia data center tax deal does After a months-long budget standoff that nearly triggered Virginia's first government shutdown, state House and Senate Democrats reached an agreement that imposes a new tax on data center electrici
Jun 234 min read


Navigating Opportunity Zones 2.0: What Data Center Developers Need to Know
The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) signed into law July 2025 officially transitions the industry from the old "OZ 1.0" model into a permanent, structurally revamped framework known as Opportunity Zones 2.0 (OZ 2.0). This represents a shift from a one-time, expiring tax incentive into a permanent fixture of the federal tax code.
Jun 226 min read


The New Prize in the Data Center Race Isn't Land. It's Land Next to Power
For most of the last decade, the data center conversation was about real estate. Find a big, flat, affordable parcel near fiber, lock it up, and build. That era is over. The binding constraint has moved twice in just a few years: first from land to grid access, and now to a far more specific question. Can this particular parcel get energized, and how soon? That shift is rewriting how the most sophisticated developers and investors value land. The parcels commanding premium at
Jun 164 min read


Using 5G Cell Tower Site Data to Predict Data Center Demand
For data center developers seeking to identify emerging markets and future demand centers, understanding the relationship between 5G infrastructure and data center development can provide valuable insight into where digital infrastructure investment is headed.
Jun 156 min read


A Developer’s Guide to LandGate's Nationwide Offtake Capacity Data
For energy and data center developers, finding a site with strong land characteristics and clean environmental conditions is only part of the equation. The other part is understanding whether the grid can actually absorb the power a project will generate, and at what cost. That question sits at the heart of LandGate's Offtake Report, which analyzes interconnection feasibility at a specific point of interconnection (POI) before a developer commits to the formal and expensive u
Jun 116 min read


Meta Is Building Data Centers in Tents. Here's What That Means for Developers
When Meta received planning permission last October to build what Data Center Dynamics called data centers in "tents" at its Gallatin, Tennessee campus, the reaction from the industry was somewhere between a double-take and a knowing nod. The project, reportedly codenamed ‘Prometheus’, is not a publicity stunt. It is a window into how the most aggressive capital deployers in history are responding to a single, unyielding constraint: time. For data center developers, the tent
Jun 105 min read


A Developer’s Guide to LandGate's National Environmental Report Data
Environmental risk is one of the most common sources of project delay in energy and data center development. Federally protected species, wetlands, contaminated land, and soil conditions can each add months or years to a permitting timeline, and identifying them late in the process is expensive. LandGate's Environmental Report consolidates these risk factors into a single, structured document that developers can use to screen sites and prioritize further investigation before
Jun 97 min read
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