The backlash reached the states, and the grid produced its hardest number yet. New York became the first state to pause data centers — though the executive order's own text is narrower than the coverage of it, suspending only discretionary state permits above 50 MW, leaving local approvals untouched, and ending when a state impact statement lands rather than on a date; Maine's earlier first-in-nation bill turned out to have been vetoed. Hillsboro, Oregon, the state's densest data-center city, gave one day's notice and paused for 120 days. Ohio EPA dropped a draft permit whose own text called lowering state water quality "necessary to accommodate important social and economic development," after 7,000 comments. Texas approved a state water plan that does not count data centers at all, and will not separate their demand until 2032. On the grid, one fault in Ashburn took more than 3 GW off PJM in seconds — roughly double a comparable 2024 event — via a protection scheme that counts voltage dips and, at three in a minute, walks the building off the grid until a person walks it back; NERC says there are no ride-through standards for loads this size, and its own definitions of "load loss" exclude what happened. Against that, the money kept moving: OpenAI contracted 3.2 GW in rural Georgia without either party disclosing a permanent-jobs number, and the Wall Street Journal reported Nvidia weighing a ~$250 billion lease guarantee at SB Energy's 10 GW Ohio campus — where a cabinet officer, not a utility, allocates the power, and against a disclosed guarantee book of $3.5 billion. And the cycle's clearest finding was about the evidence itself: the 426 TWh-by-2030 figure now circulating under Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's name is not in that report, which publishes 176 TWh for 2023 and a range, not a point, for 2028 — while the number the coverage omits is that indirect water use at the power plants supplying data centers runs about twelve times their direct draw.
The Whole Story
AI runs on land, water, power, and silicon. The datacenter buildout has become one of the largest capital programs in industrial history — the fourteen largest operators alone are on course to spend roughly $750 billion in 2026 — and the discourse around it swings between alarm and dismissal, often untethered from the permits, filings, and utility data that actually measure it. This page tracks the buildout and its consequences on the record: what is being built where, what it consumes, what it pays, and what the GPU market that fills it costs.
The through-line this cycle is the gap between what is announced and what is real. Headline commitments run to the hundreds of billions, but the primary record keeps adjudicating in both directions — energized concrete at Abilene and Mount Pleasant on one side; a 600 MW Stargate expansion scrapped, up to half of 2026's planned capacity slipping, and a causal study finding data centers create almost no permanent jobs on the other.