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.
Hyperscaler capital has decoupled from its largest AI tenant; turbine slots and city councils now set the build rate.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday 28 April that OpenAI now targets roughly $600bn in compute spend through 2030, down from the $1.4 trillion Stargate nameplate, and has dropped or paused flagship sites in Texas, England and Norway.
OpenAI told investors in late April it now plans to spend roughly $600bn on compute through 2030, down from the $1.4 trillion Stargate figure. It dropped its lease on Crusoe's Abilene, Texas site and paused its UK and Norway plans.
The company's $25bn annual cash burn against a $30bn revenue target left it no room to carry first-party campus risk. The hyperscalers building the infrastructure have not changed their plans.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta together spent $110.75bn on capital projects in the first 90 days of 2026, with two of the four raising full-year guidance even as OpenAI trimmed its own compute commitment.
Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta together spent $110.75bn on capital projects in the first three months of 2026, a record for a single quarter. Alphabet and Meta both raised their full-year spending targets.
This is happening while OpenAI, which runs its AI models on their infrastructure, just cut its own compute plans by $800bn. The companies providing the pipes are spending more; the company filling them is spending less.
Camden County Georgia enacted a 9-month freeze on Tuesday 5 May; Normal Illinois, Denver, Seattle and Minneapolis all hold their own moratorium votes in the week beginning Friday 15 May.
Five US cities and counties held or scheduled votes on data-centre construction bans within a single week in May 2026. Camden County in Georgia had already enacted a nine-month moratorium. Normal, Denver, Seattle and Minneapolis were all due to vote between 15 and 21 May.
This cluster followed the failure of a statewide ban in Maine, where the governor's veto in late April pushed opponents to try at city and county level instead. Each local council can set its own rules, making the opposition much harder to defeat with a single lobbying campaign.
GE Vernova reported a $163bn backlog at the end of Q1 and closed its $5.3bn Prolec acquisition the same week, locking in the supply-side choke point that decides which 2026 announcements actually commission.
GE Vernova, which makes the transformers that data centres need to connect to the electricity grid, reported on 22 April that its order backlog hit $163bn and it acquired transformer maker Prolec for $5.3bn.
Transformer lead times have stretched to five years, up from two years before 2020. Only one in three of the data centres planned for 2026 is actually being built right now. The rest are waiting on equipment that will not arrive until 2031.
Equinix reported 46 active projects across 32 markets and agreed alongside CPP Investments to acquire atNorth, adding roughly 800 MW of Nordic capacity in a single transaction.
Equinix, the world's largest data-centre company, reported on 29 April that it has 46 buildings under construction across 32 countries and that available space is already selling out. On the same day, it agreed with a Canadian pension fund to buy atNorth, a Nordic data-centre operator, adding 800 megawatts of capacity in Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Norway.
Finland, Sweden and Iceland generate most of their electricity from hydro, geothermal and wind at rates far below the US or UK, making data centres there cheaper to run. The deal confirms that pension funds now treat data centres as infrastructure assets alongside roads and airports.
Gallup's first poll on the topic, conducted on 1,000 US adults between 2 and 18 March, found 71% oppose data-centre construction in their local area, with 48% strongly opposed.
Gallup published the first national poll on data centres in May 2026. Of 1,000 US adults surveyed between 2 and 18 March, 71% said they oppose having a data centre built near them. That is higher than the 53% who oppose a new nuclear plant.
Half the opponents cited energy and water use as their main concern. The industry's standard argument for local support, job creation, is undermined by the fact that a large data centre typically employs only a few dozen permanent workers once it is running.
Prince William County dropped its appeal of the Virginia Court of Appeals ruling that voided the Digital Gateway rezoning, ending a 2,000-acre programme that had already cost the county roughly $2m in legal fees.
Prince William County in Virginia announced in May that it will not challenge a court ruling that had struck down a fast-track approval for a massive 2,000-acre data-centre development called Digital Gateway. The county had already spent around $2 million in legal fees on the case.
A second proposal nearby, Quantico Ridge, was pulled by the developer before its planning hearing. Northern Virginia has been the US capital of data-centre building, and losing both proposals in one week narrows where new campuses can be built.
Fairfax County passed new data-centre regulations on a 8-2 vote on Tuesday 12 May; in Seattle, Sabey Data Centers withdrew its 68 MW Tukwila power request rather than wait out the city's 365-day freeze.
Fairfax County in Virginia voted 8-2 on 12 May to add new planning requirements for data centres, including minimum distances from homes and mandatory noise studies. The county is trying to avoid the contested legal fights that have blocked projects in neighbouring Prince William County.
In Seattle, data-centre developer Sabey pulled its plans for a 68-megawatt site rather than wait for the city's vote on a possible year-long construction freeze. Equinix and Prologis are still in the queue for 249 megawatts across three buildings, awaiting the 20 May committee decision.
NESO issued the first transmission connection offers under the reformed UK queue in mid-May, with AI Growth Zones drawing priority access, electricity discounts and the right to build their own high-voltage infrastructure.
United KingdomBritain's grid operator NESO started issuing the first connection offers under its reformed electricity queue system in mid-May 2026. The queue had grown to more than 45 gigawatts of requests from data centres and other large users, more than the country's entire peak demand, with wait times of up to 15 years.
Data centres in specially designated AI Growth Zones now get priority queue positions, discounts on electricity bills, and permission to build their own high-voltage lines. The aim is to keep new data-centre investment in the UK rather than losing it to Scandinavia or the US.
PJM Interconnection must file its revised co-located load tariff with FERC on Monday 18 May, the regulatory precursor to RM26-4-000 and the rules that govern the Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William corridor.
PJM Interconnection, which manages the electricity grid across 13 US states including Virginia and its data-centre cluster, had to file revised rules with FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) by Monday 18 May. The rules govern how data centres can use their own on-site generators rather than drawing from the public grid.
FERC had already rejected PJM's first attempt at defining these arrangements in April. The 18 May filing is the second try. If FERC accepts it, data-centre operators across the region will know by end-June whether they can site their own power generators on campus without paying full grid-connection charges.
Amazon agreed to pay $20.5m to settle a class-action over nitrate pollution from its Boardman, Oregon campus, the first major US data-centre pollution settlement to reach a public dollar figure.
Amazon agreed in March 2026 to pay $20.5 million to settle a pollution lawsuit from residents near its data centre in Boardman, Oregon. The data centre's cooling systems discharged water that raised nitrate levels in local groundwater above safe drinking limits.
This is the first major pollution settlement for a US data centre. It gives lawyers a price to work from when filing similar cases against other large facilities near agricultural areas. The settlement is small for Amazon but significant as a legal template for the industry.
Aikido Technologies confirmed an end-2026 METCentre Norway pilot of its AO60DC platform, combining 15-18 MW of floating wind with 10-12 MW of compute and a power usage effectiveness below 1.08.
A San Francisco start-up called Aikido Technologies confirmed in March 2026 that it will test a floating platform off Norway's coast by the end of the year. The platform attaches a small data centre directly to a floating wind turbine, using cold seawater flowing through the hull to cool the computers instead of energy-hungry air conditioning systems.
The design aims to get around the long waiting times for grid connections that are blocking most new data-centre construction. If the pilot works, the company plans a commercial version off the UK coast by 2028.
Consent risk is escalating faster than capex risk: 14 active US moratoriums as of 16 May 2026, a 71% Gallup opposition figure (March 2026, 1,000 adults), and a Virginia Court of Appeals ruling that voided a $2.5bn, 37-building campus in the world's densest data-centre corridor. Capital is finding routes around the constraint via UK Gate 2 offers (electricity discounts, HV self-build rights, mid-May 2026 start), ERCOT's 9,042 MW approved-to-energise pool, and G42's Q3 2026 Abu Dhabi sovereign anchor. The mechanism that tips escalation higher is a successful Seattle or Denver vote between 18 and 21 May 2026 that spreads the moratorium template to markets that currently hold live hyperscaler planning approvals; the mechanism that reverses it is a permissive PJM co-location tariff filed by the 18 May deadline, which would give operators a grid-legal alternative to the state and local approval chain.
