Data Centres: Boom and Backlash

Texas halted environmental permits for data-centre projects on 21 September until they pay their own way, days after Loudoun voted to draft a year-long pause and Holyrood backed halting decisions. Spain, Ireland, Victoria and Singapore set proof-first conditions too. Brazil and Argentina moved the other way, cutting taxes and clearing grid.

Brazil's Senate has passed a data-centre tax regime whose benefits hang on a water number checked every year. In the same twenty-five days, lenders, a Finnish grid operator and an Australian listed operator all drew the same line between capacity promised and capacity anyone can point at. Singapore rationed 200 MW with conditions attached, and Britain's most-quoted connection-queue figure cannot be found in the register it is credited to.

Nebius raised $775m in July against deployed GPUs and one investment-grade customer contract, three and a half months after its auditors gave an adverse opinion on the controls counting those assets. Australia, New South Wales, Taiwan and Gujarat all attached conditions to large loads in nine days. Texas froze its own queue audit, and a 212 MW Edinburgh refusal now goes to a full environmental impact assessment.

Ofgem wants developers to post up to £712,500 per megawatt to hold a grid connection slot, refundable only on energisation. Amazon's 10-Q discloses $137.2bn of data-centre leases it has signed but not opened. Six US grid operators told federal regulators that none of them can serve its data-centre queue under current rules, and PJM has asked to buy 6,831 MW back at up to $555 a megawatt-day.

New Mexico's land commissioner rejected the gas pipeline feeding the Oracle-OpenAI Project Jupiter campus for a second time on 15 July, blocking the power rather than the build. Alphabet raised its 2026 capital budget to $195-205bn the same week, and MISO hit its second grid emergency of the month. Virginia, lacking grounds to refuse, issued Amazon's Lake Anna cooling-water permit anyway.

New York's data-centre backlash turned binding on 14 July, when Governor Hochul froze new hyperscale permits by executive order rather than wait for her legislature. The same fortnight brought an approved 29% Oregon surcharge, an 8-0 Virginia zoning refusal, an Irish grid-fault curtailment procedure, and outright county bans in Indiana. The instruments are hardening from temporary pauses into permanent structure.

Virginia's $0.011-per-kilowatt-hour data-centre tax took effect on 1 July, the first US per-unit levy on compute power, and the rival backup-generator fee died. New York's one-year freeze now waits on Governor Hochul's signature. The backlash is spreading below the statehouse: nearly a third of Indiana's counties now restrict data centres, and Santa Fe County set the lowest bar yet at one megawatt.

Chevron will build Microsoft a 2.67 GW gas plant in West Texas, the year's largest dedicated-power deal, struck because the grid route slowed and the cheaper workarounds are closing fast. FERC deferred a binding connection rule to 2027, Virginia taxed self-generated power, transformer waits reached four years, and fresh commitments flowed to India, where Amazon alone lifted its total to $48bn.

Virginia's Senate has floated a $35 to $45 per-kilowatt fee on data-centre backup generators, the first US levy aimed at installed fallback capacity rather than the power a campus actually uses. It lands the same week Oregon's consumption tariff stalls at the regulator, both targeting the behind-the-meter gas Washington has switched off twice this year. The fight over who pays for AI's grid burden is changing shape.

Portland General Electric filed a 29% rate rise for data centres on 4 June and cut household bills 1.3%, the first US regulator to move grid costs onto operators. Hill County dropped its Texas moratorium under a $100m lawsuit the same week. And SoftBank chose France, not Britain, for the boom's largest European bet.

PJM has told 13 governors that unless states write data-centre cost rules before its September backstop, household bills could absorb the grid costs. ERCOT's queue hit 410 GW even as transformers run four years out, and a Texas developer is now suing a county over its moratorium on Fifth Amendment grounds. Amazon's Lake Anna cooling discharge reaches a 9 June hearing while Singapore takes the opposite route, pricing the conditions up front.

The Department of Energy let PJM curtail backup-equipped data centres for three days during a mid-May heat event, the second such order in 2026. Virginia's tax fight is killing projects before they file. Meta is buying firmed solar and geothermal, and NVIDIA's networking revenue is now growing 2.6 times faster than its compute.

OpenAI compressed its compute commitment from $1.4 trillion to $600 billion through 2030, dropped the Crusoe Abilene lease and suspended its UK and Norwegian sites. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta still poured a record $110.75 billion of capex into the quarter, with two raising full-year guidance. Five US cities and counties hold data-centre moratorium votes in the next seven days.

The consent map redrew this week. Maine's first-in-nation moratorium fell to a governor's veto, Seattle introduced a 365-day freeze, and a Virginia court invalidated Prince William's fast-track rezoning. Hyperscalers ignored all of it: combined 2026 capex now stands at $725 billion, up 77 per cent year-on-year.

Capital is no longer the bottleneck for data centres; consent is. April 2026 brought the first US statewide moratorium, the IEA's hardest figures yet on growth and onsite gas, and a UK grid queue that exceeds Britain's peak demand. Operators with consent push concrete; operators without it pause, relocate, or burn gas behind the meter.