2026-09-25 — Cleveland puts no Project River annexation on Monday’s agenda; Pulaski County’s judge vetoes Arkansas data-center rules

• The City of Cleveland, Tennessee said Friday that no annexation related to Project River is on the City Council’s agenda for Monday, September 28 (3pm at the Municipal Building). The statement comes after the developers of the $11.3 billion Bradley County campus asked the city on 09-18 to pause action while a third-party technical team reviews the project. (Cleveland Daily Banner)
• Pulaski County, Arkansas Judge Barry Hyde on Friday vetoed the ordinance regulating large data centers that the Quorum Court had passed 11-4 on September 22, saying his objection was not to “reasonable regulation” but to whether it can be administered without exposing the county to legal risk. A three-fifths majority of the Quorum Court can override; sponsor Julie Blackwood said members will try at their next regular meeting. The rules, which would create a permitting process for “high-intensity digital infrastructure,” were written in the middle of AVAIO Digital Partners’ proposed $6 billion campus in south Pulaski County. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Arkansas Times)

2026-09-24 — Oracle tells Project Jupiter’s developer it may invoke force majeure

• Oracle sent a force majeure notice to the developer of its Project Jupiter data-center campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, a unit of Blue Owl Capital, to protect itself from higher costs and defer payments if the campus is not operating by 2028, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Oracle told CNBC “Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule” and that it is “fully committed to New Mexico”; Blue Owl said the notice “does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project.” Oracle shares fell about 4% in early trading. The campus, part of the Stargate buildout with OpenAI, has faced permit litigation, a power plan redesigned around fuel cells, and about $18bn of project loans trading at stressed levels. (CNBC, Roic)
• The Energy Transfer gas pipeline meant to feed Oracle’s Project Jupiter campus has slipped nearly six months to February 1, 2027 after repeated permit denials, and New Mexico’s environment department faces a November 23 deadline on the campus’s fuel-cell air-quality permit, TechCrunch reported The detail comes with Oracle’s force majeure notice to the campus developer; Oracle says the project “remains on our planned schedule,” Blue Owl says the notice “does not change the financial commitments,” and no OpenAI comment appeared in TechCrunch or CNBC coverage. (TechCrunch, CNBC)
• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into hundreds of Texas data-center developments that have not answered the state Water Development Board’s water-use survey His office says it is demanding a full survey response from every data center in the state, with initial targets in counties including Harris, Dallas, Travis, Bexar, El Paso and Lubbock; the release names no companies and no penalties. (Texas Attorney General, KRIS TV)
• Palm Beach County, Florida commissioners voted unanimously on Thursday for a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale AI data centers, adding a definition of a large-scale data center to the county code while staff draft permanent rules The final vote follows the commission’s July rejection of the Project Tango data-center proposal after nearly 12 hours of debate; rules under consideration include capping a facility’s power use at 50 megawatts. (WPTV)
• US Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) called on Thursday for a “pause” on data centers in New Mexico and set out “No Blank Checks for Data Centers Principles,” under which a project must show it will not raise electricity bills or harm water, meet the state’s renewable-energy requirements, create union jobs, take no taxpayer subsidies and win community approval Source NM notes the call follows Oracle’s force majeure notice on Project Jupiter and fellow Rep. Melanie Stansbury’s concerns about the campus last month. (Source NM)
• CDC Data Centres, part-owned by Australia’s Future Fund and Infratil, is pitching a A$15 billion (US$10.5bn), 1.4-gigawatt data-centre campus near Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, according to a scoping report lodged with the state on September 16. Mingtiandi, reporting it Thursday, said the campus on 103.8 hectares of grazing land at Gregadoo would be the largest planned in the state and is pitched as sovereign computing for government, defence and AI workloads, echoing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s July 15 speech on AI and national security. (Mingtiandi)
• Palm Beach County commissioners, the same day they finalized a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, abandoned their original plan for a resident-led task force to help draft the county’s new rules and instead directed staff toward hiring an outside consulting firm, at an estimated cost of $200,000 to $2 million. Commissioner Joel Flores, who had originally championed the task force idea, said “I don’t know that we need a committee, I think what we need is a consultant that’s an expert in the field”; residents can still speak at future commission meetings’ public-comment periods. (WFLX)

2026-09-23 — Chicago’s mayor proposes a one-year data-center moratorium

• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson introduced an ordinance on 09-23 for a 12-month moratorium on new data centers in the city. It is cosponsored by Alds. Maria Hadden, Lamont Robinson and Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth and follows an August executive order that created a city task force and told departments to intensify scrutiny of new projects; Hadden said the pause “doesn’t even have to last the year” if rules are ready sooner, and Johnson is heading into a re-election campaign. (Chicago Tribune)
• Chicago Ald. Bill Conway (34th) introduced his own data-center ordinance the same day Mayor Brandon Johnson’s 12-month moratorium reached City Council, offering zoning restrictions and a Plan Commission review process instead of a citywide pause, while Ald. Marty Quinn sent Johnson’s moratorium to the Rules Committee — a maneuver Block Club Chicago said is often used to delay or kill legislation. Conway’s version would ban new data centers in some commercial corridors and parts of Downtown and require a Planned Development zoning process (triggering a community meeting and Plan Commission approval) elsewhere; he cited a data center moving forward at 400 S. LaSalle St. in his own ward with no community input, saying “a nail salon has more oversight than a data center does right now.” The Data Center Coalition industry group called Johnson’s moratorium a signal Chicago is “closed for business,” warning it would drive away union construction jobs. (Block Club Chicago)

2026-09-22 — Data Center Watch’s Q2 count: $68bn/45 projects blocked or delayed, with 843 opposition groups now active in 49 states

• Research group Data Center Watch counted roughly 45 US data-center projects worth $68bn blocked or delayed by local opposition in Q2 2026 (April–June), and identified 843 organized opposition groups now active across 49 states (all but Hawaii) — the direct follow-on to this thread’s own 08-31/09-04 entry logging the same group’s Q1 2026 figure ($130bn across 75 projects). The Q2 total is a smaller dollar figure than Q1 but confirms the pattern this thread has tracked case-by-case all year (Cary, Bradley County, Mona UT, Prince William, San Francisco, and others) is now a measured national trend, not a string of isolated fights: roughly 30 state legislatures have introduced or adopted rules on data-center siting, power or water this year. Widely corroborated same-day/next-day (Bloomberg, Tom’s Hardware, Breitbart, IBTimes, Yahoo). (Bloomberg, Tom’s Hardware)
• Prince William County, Virginia’s Board of Supervisors voted 8-0 to end by-right approval of data centers, shrinking the overlay district where they can be built without a public hearing from about 9,700 acres to roughly 3,650 The Tuesday vote adopts the zoning change its Planning Commission recommended 09-10: most new data centers outside the overlay now need a special-use permit with public review and a board vote, the overlay keeps by-right status only for properties meeting one of five eligibility criteria (including existing data-center rights or projects already in the pipeline), and the overlay is closed to future expansion. Supervisors kept a 90-day transition period for some properties already inside the overlay (the commission had urged 120), and a motion to drop the grace period entirely failed. (Patch, InsideNoVa)
• Baltimore County’s Council voted unanimously to extend its data-center moratorium through at least the end of 2027 The freeze dates from February, when the council stopped a plan for a 42-acre data center in a former Social Security Administration building in Woodlawn. Republican Councilman Todd Crandell said the industry “has not come to us and explained” its environmental and energy-cost impacts; the county planning board approved its data-center study report 09-17, which the council chair said he had not yet reviewed. Speakers at a hearing earlier in the month urged the council to go further and ban data centers outright. (WYPR, FOX45)
• San Francisco’s Planning Department says it does not track how many data centers exist in the city, as a private-equity firm appears to be eyeing a 1.6-acre Dogpatch site for what could be the city’s largest yet The Standard reports the city has no land-use definition for data centers, and that Supervisor Shamann Walton’s 45-day moratorium proposal (which he says would force staff to build that count) still needs a Board of Supervisors vote; the Dogpatch lead, at 1215 Michigan St., was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. (San Francisco Standard)
• An Oakland City Council committee voted unanimously on Tuesday for a 45-day moratorium on new data-center projects; the full council must still vote. The measure, from Councilmember Carroll Fife, followed an August announcement by Behring Companies of a plan for a data center in a downtown building that once housed a Department of Energy supercomputer; only one project has been proposed in the city. Gilroy and Richmond have passed 45-day pauses of their own. (The Oaklandside, NBC Bay Area)
• Thornton, Colorado voted 5-3 for a one-year moratorium on data centers larger than 50,000 square feet, and Commerce City voted 7-1 for a six-month halt on accepting data-center applications. Both took effect immediately, joining Denver, Jefferson County, Larimer County and Loveland; Thornton’s interim city attorney said the city has one operating data center and no pending applications, while Aurora rejected a moratorium in August and is drafting regulations instead. (Denver Post)
• New Jersey fined the operator of a Vineland data center $1.07 million, the largest enforcement action against a data center in state history, for running 62 large natural-gas generators without required air permits The state environmental agency found them at a July 29 inspection; the operator, DataOne, was given 45 days to apply for permits and can keep running the engines meanwhile, disputes the fine and says it is moving to fuel cells, and Ars Technica reports residents say the site powers Microsoft’s Copilot tools. (Governor Sherrill, Ars Technica)

2026-09-21 — A second lawsuit targets OpenAI’s Project Camellia; Anne Arundel softens a ban into a pause

• Effingham County, Georgia residents and the group One Hundred Miles, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed a second lawsuit over OpenAI’s $20bn Project Camellia campus, this time against the county Industrial Development Authority The suit alleges violations of Georgia’s Open Meetings and Open Records Acts: the project appeared on the authority’s July agenda only as “Project Gateway”, with no description of the proposal or of a tax abatement the complaint values at nearly $900M; the meeting was rescheduled without the required seven days’ notice; and public land was sold to an OpenAI affiliate (Octans, GA LLC) through a private agent without a public meeting. It follows the residents’ 09-02 suit against the county commissioners over the zoning change that cleared the site. (SELC, Inside Climate News)
• Anne Arundel County’s Council voted Monday to turn a proposed countywide data-center ban into a possible temporary moratorium; the bill still needs a final vote The bill’s sponsor called the compromise a “kumbaya moment”. (Baltimore Sun)
• A developer behind “Project Midspan,” a proposed data-center campus on about 306 acres directly behind Walker Valley High School in Bradley County, Tennessee, sued the county on 09-17 to overturn the data-center rules commissioners adopted 14-0 on 04-20; the county mayor made it public on 09-21. The plaintiff, SDCL Tennessee Propco LLC of New York, says it paid $19,904,950 for the land on 04-28-2025, when nearly all of it was zoned for a data center by right, and that the new rules (data centers only in a special-impact industrial district, with a 3,000-foot setback from homes, schools and churches) came after. The mayor said the nearest building would be about 1,700 feet from the school and that defending the rules “will not be inexpensive.” The county now faces this alongside Project River, whose developers asked Cleveland to pause on 09-18. (Chattanoogan, NewsChannel 9)

2026-09-18 — Project River’s developers ask Cleveland to pause; SELC challenges the annexation

• The Wright family, developers of Bradley County, Tennessee’s $11.3bn Project River energy-and-data-center campus, asked the City of Cleveland to pause further action while it brings in a third-party technical team to review the project The request, made in a statement 09-18, came three days after the family said it would accept the city’s proposed PUD 77 limits (500-foot data-center setback, 60-decibel property-line noise cap, at least 75% of directly used power and 90% of process water generated on-site, closed-loop cooling, no direct Hiwassee River utility connection). The same day the Southern Environmental Law Center sent Cleveland’s mayor, council and planning commission a nine-page letter arguing the city lacks legal authority to annex the ~850-acre main parcel. A petition against the project has more than 4,000 signatures, and an opponent quoted by Local 3 on 09-21 said the annexation hearing set for 09-28 (for a 385-acre portion) was still on the calendar. (NewsChannel 9, WCLE Mix 104.1, NewsChannel 9 on SELC letter)

2026-09-17 — New Mexico’s Supreme Court lets Project Jupiter’s permitting resume

• The New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously rejected two environmental groups’ challenges to Project Jupiter’s air-quality permit proceeding and its use of an emergency construction water well, and lifted the stays it had imposed on 08-23, in brief orders with no explanation. The Center for Biological Diversity and New Energy Economy had argued the proceedings lacked due process; the air-permit hearing that had been set for the following Monday has no new date because the Environment Department’s hearing officer recused himself in August and no replacement has been named. The permit at issue covers the site’s natural-gas fuel-cell power system, which projections show would emit about as much greenhouse gas each year as New Mexico’s largest cities combined. (Source NM)

2026-09-15 — San Francisco becomes this thread’s first major coastal-city moratorium fight, aimed at a Bayview data-center expansion

• San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton introduced a 45-day data-center moratorium ordinance on 09-15, joined by supervisors Jackie Fielder, Chyanne Chen and Connie Chan, aimed squarely at a planned expansion of an existing NOVVA data center in the Bayview neighborhood — one of the city’s 12 data centers, which brought its first 9MW online this summer with a stated path to 36MW by 2028. The pause can be extended to roughly 220 days if the Planning Commission finds the city’s 12 data centers pose a threat to residents; sponsors argue the city’s zoning code, unchanged since 2001, predates the AI buildout entirely. This is this thread’s first entry naming a major West Coast coastal city rather than a Sun Belt/Rust Belt exurb or county — the same pause-and-study pattern already logged repeatedly (Cary, Mount Pleasant, Dougherty County) reaching a dense urban jurisdiction for the first time. ⚠️ Introduction only, not yet voted. (KQED, Hoodline)
• Michigan City, Indiana’s Common Council tabled a proposed data-center moratorium 8-1, replacing it with a plan to have the planning commission shape any rules. The ordinance would have paused permits and tax abatements for data-center projects until zoning rules were added, exempting Google’s Project Maize on the former Federal Mogul property; the council attorney said members will draft a resolution directing the planning department instead. Residents and Just Transition Northwest Indiana objected, some fearing the delay lets planners add a data-center zoning district; neighboring St. Joseph County is weighing a ban. (WVPE)

2026-09-10 — Prince William County’s Planning Commission votes to end by-right data-center approval in one of the country’s largest data-center counties

• Prince William County, Virginia’s Planning Commission voted 5-2 to recommend ending by-right data-center approval and shrinking the county’s data-center overlay district; the Board of Supervisors takes it up on 09-22. Caught nine days late. Prince William County, Virginia’s Planning Commission voted 5-2 on 2026-09-10 to recommend eliminating by-right data-center development, backing a zoning text amendment (DPA2026-00006) that would shrink the county’s Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District from roughly 9,700 acres to about 3,500 acres and require a special-use permit with public hearings for any new project — removing several previously by-right parcels, including the site of the Jiffy Lube Live amphitheater and county school land, from automatic eligibility. The commission also favored a 120-day grace period for sites dropped from the shrunken district. Prince William, in Northern Virginia adjacent to Loudoun County (“Data Center Alley”), is itself one of the largest data-center-hosting counties in the country — this is a county-level by-right rollback of the same shape Virginia’s governor made statewide eight days later (09-18, this thread’s existing top entry), from the same region. The Board of County Supervisors holds its own public hearing on the amendment 2026-09-22 — a dated resolution point worth a ledger entry. (InsideNoVa, Rappahannock News, Prince William County — DPA2026-00006 primary)

2026-09-08 — A four-minute hearing five months ago approved a $10bn Utah campus; residents only just found out

• Juab County’s Planning Commission approved a conditional-use permit for “Project Nebo” — developer SetSquare Capital Group’s roughly $10bn, ~3-million-sq-ft data center campus near Mona, Utah, needing up to 750MW from Rocky Mountain Power — on 04-15-26, in a hearing residents say lasted four minutes and carried no mailed notice (conditional-use permits, unlike zoning changes, require none under county rules). Opposition organized only once construction plans became public months later: over 300 residents joined a “Mona Cares: Neighbors for Responsible Development” Facebook group, at least 100 protested outside a 09-08 Juab County Commission meeting at Rocky Ridge Town Hall, and a Deseret News poll found 93% of surveyed county residents opposed. Commission Chairman Clint Painter told the 09-08 meeting he doesn’t know if revoking the already-issued permit is “even legally possible” without inviting a lawsuit, and commissioners made no decision. This thread has repeatedly logged the after-the-fact-discovery pattern (Bradley County, Michigan City, Detroit) where a rushed or opaque process draws backlash in real time; Mona is the first instance where the approval itself predates any public knowledge of the project — by five months. (Salt Lake Tribune, KSL, Deseret News)

2026-09-12 — Project River’s second forum happens as scheduled: protest outside, union endorsement inside, still no vote

• The second of two scheduled public forums on Bradley County, Tennessee’s $11.3bn Project River campus went ahead 09-12, 10am-noon at the PIE Center, as this thread’s 09-01 entry flagged it would — producing more back-and-forth but still no vote, rezoning decision, or annexation date. Dozens of protesters carrying signs gathered outside the venue over the project’s proposed on-site biomass plant near the Hiwassee River; inside, representatives from Wright Brothers Construction and Azure Energy took further questions on environmental impact and noise. The split on display: Lee Lunsford of Boilermakers Local 454 said the union has “tons of members in Bradley County” who support the project (“these power plants, in particular, for us, that’s our bread and butter”), while resident Rick Waldrop said “I’m a lifelong conservationist and environmentalist, and I’m not in agreement with them building that here in Bradley County.” Matthew McCollum of the Hiwassee River Alliance said the format still didn’t live up to what residents were promised as a “public forum.” Formal rezoning/annexation votes remain ahead, expected before the Cleveland Municipal Planning Commission and City Council later in September — this forum answered the “did it happen” question from the 09-01 entry but not the open “does it produce a vote date” one. (Cleveland Daily Banner)

2026-09-11 — Aligned breaks ground on a ~$10bn, 2GW campus at a former Pennsylvania coal plant, built with its own gas generation

• Aligned Data Centers broke ground on “Project Phoenix,” a roughly $10bn, up-to-2GW, three-building campus at the former Bruce Mansfield coal plant site in Beaver County, Pennsylvania (Shippingport Industrial Park), owned by Frontier Group of Companies. Frontier is separately spending up to $3.2bn converting the shuttered coal plant to burn natural gas, and the site plan includes an on-site natural-gas power-generation pad — the campus is being built to bring its own gas generation rather than relying solely on grid interconnection. Zoning modifications were already granted by Shippingport Council before groundbreaking, making this a sited, permitted, under-construction addition to this thread’s gigawatt-campus worklist rather than a live opposition fight. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

2026-09-03 — Effingham County, Georgia residents sue over the zoning ordinance that cleared the way for Project Camellia

• Three Effingham County residents sued the county Thursday, seeking to void the zoning ordinance that opened industrial land to data centers ahead of OpenAI’s Project Camellia campus. The 14-page complaint, filed in Effingham County Superior Court by Dr. Michelle Finch-Mincey, Lehman Mincey Jr. and Raymond Carver, argues Ordinance 2026-352 — given final approval August 4, 2026 — skipped the public hearings state law and the county’s own rules require before the Planning Board and the Commission, and that the county manager signed a non-disclosure agreement blocking disclosure of a deal negotiated “behind closed doors” before its July 26 announcement. Plaintiffs seek a declaration the ordinance is invalid, an order blocking further county action on it, and attorney’s fees under Georgia’s Open Meetings Act. This is an allegation in a freshly filed complaint, not a ruling — no court has found for either side yet. (WTOC, Effingham Herald)

2026-09-01 — Project River’s first public forum draws jeers over log-truck counts, sets no vote, and schedules a second round for 09-12

• The first of two public forums on Bradley County’s $11.3bn Project River campus produced no vote, no rezoning decision and no annexation date — only a second forum, set for 09-12, 10am-noon at the same PIE Center venue. Panelists from Azure Energy and Wright Brothers Construction took pre-submitted questions on the 850-acre site’s 1,000MW gas plant and 500MW biomass facility. The disclosure that drew jeers, boos and hisses was a logistics number rather than a power one: 380 to 500 timber trucks per day. Attendees also pressed on odor, noise and endangered species, and one complained the pre-submitted-question format allowed no live audience questions. Developers said the project “is not a data center,” has no signed power contracts, and cannot begin environmental or traffic studies because engineering is only 20-30% complete and must wait on zoning. (Cleveland Banner, NewsChannel9)

• This fits the backlash pattern the thread already tracks (Camellia, El Paso, Bradley County). The Michigan City, Indiana Common Council gave first reading to an ordinance that would moratorium future data-center projects, while explicitly exempting “Project Maize,” the $832M Google data center already under construction on a converted 70-acre former Federal-Mogul windshield-wiper plant (Google took over the Phoenix Investors-originated project in April 2026; it has no disclosed power/GW figure). Councilman-at-large Bryant Dabney said he wants the pause to run at least a year past the facility’s certificate of operation (targeted 2027, so through roughly 2028) and rejected exempting Project Maize’s successors the way the current build is exempted: “We’ve already collected permitting fees from the building of the current center. That would kind of be a breach of contract” — meaning the moratorium, if passed, is squarely forward-looking. Residents raised air-quality and unnamed-chemical concerns and said too little research preceded the original approval. The ordinance goes to the Planning and Zoning Committee, with second reading set for the council’s September 15 meeting — a dated resolution point. (ABC57, WSBT, Construction Review Online — Project Maize background)

• Bulloch County, Georgia commissioners voted 4-3 against a permanent ban on data centers in unincorporated areas, with Chairman David Bennett casting the tiebreaking “no” vote, even as he said “I don’t think that this community needs a large-scale, ‘Meta,’ data center” — citing legal exposure from an outright ban over targeted regulation. The county’s existing moratorium stays in effect through December 31, 2026, and commissioners created a 21-member “Working Group on Data Centers” (three citizen nominees per commissioner) to study mitigation options before it expires. This is the same pattern already on this thread from Bradley County and Michigan City — pause-not-ban as the default landing spot — but a distinct county not yet on the record. (Statesboro Herald, The Georgia Virtue)

• A coalition of nine environmental-justice and community groups, plus U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a state senator and a Detroit City Council member, are pressing Mayor Mary Sheffield to adopt a data-center moratorium the Council itself already recommended in March 2026 and that she has not acted on. The City Planning Commission is drafting ordinance recommendations, expected “in the coming weeks” as of this report, while the administration has informally paused permitting new data centers in the meantime; Council Member Scott Benson wants regulations in place by year-end. Named local flashpoints: a Google 1GW proposal that moved off Detroit’s Packard Plant site to Van Buren Township after pushback, and a dropped Shoemaker Street proposal. Not on this map anywhere — checked Datacenter Sites and Grid & Turbines plus a repo-wide grep for “Detroit”; the only hit is an unrelated Gaza-war reference. (Planet Detroit)

2026-09-01 — California judge forces full environmental review, halting a 330MW Imperial County data center

• An Imperial County Superior Court judge tentatively ruled that Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing’s (IVCM, developer Sebastian Rucci) 330MW, 950,000-sq-ft data center campus must undergo a full California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review, overturning the county’s prior approval of the project’s lot merger. Judge L. Brooks Anderholt found the county “prejudicially abused its discretion” by approving the merger without the CEQA analysis, after the City of Imperial and the Sierra Club sued, arguing the county improperly treated the approval as ministerial and relied on a stale 2017 environmental review that never addressed the current proposal — a 330MW substation, an 862MWh battery storage system, four 500,000-gallon water tanks, and a 330MW backup generation facility built on 132 natural-gas generators. The county must now restart its approval process and complete an Environmental Impact Report before any permits can move forward; the developer has said he will seek a hearing to contest the tentative ruling. (KPBS, KESQ, Data Center Knowledge)

2026-08-31 — A second wave of local moratorium votes lands the same 24-48 hours, echoing the 08-28 pattern

• At least two more jurisdictions moved on data-center moratoriums within the same window this thread flagged 08-28 as a same-day pattern: Mount Pleasant, SC’s Planning Commission voted to recommend a 120-day moratorium (full council vote set for 09-08), explicitly to let staff rewrite the town’s definition of a data center before any project can exploit gaps in it; and Dougherty County, GA (Albany) extended its existing data-center moratorium by another 180 days — its second extension after an original 45-day pause in July — with residents already organizing to press the county’s planning-and-zoning meeting on 09-03 for permanent noise/setback/water rules. Roughly a dozen more local moratorium actions were reported across other states (MA, IA, FL, CO, KY, GA) in the same 24-48 hours; only these two were independently corroborated beyond a single outlet. Not a general-front-page event, but the cadence itself — multiple jurisdictions moving in the same two-day window, twice in a week — is now a repeated shape, not a one-off. (WCIV/ABC News 4, Mount Pleasant, WALB, Dougherty County)

• “Build American AI,” funded through the Andreessen-Horowitz/Greg Brockman-backed super PAC Leading the Future, began a multimillion-dollar ad blitz in Wisconsin, Ohio and Kansas — three states where data-center siting has become a live issue in statewide races — as Annenberg Public Policy Center polling (1,320 adults, June 16-July 19) found 61% oppose new data centers near where they live, and Data Center Watch counted roughly $130bn across 75 projects blocked or delayed in Q1 2026 alone. This is the industry’s most direct political counter-mobilization yet against the backlash this thread and Grid & Turbines have tracked all year, and it is not on either thread. (Bloomberg, CNN)

2026-08-28 — Five local fights on one day, and Cary redefines what a datacenter is

Cary, North Carolina’s town council unanimously approved an 18-month datacenter moratorium that drops the definitional threshold from 25MW to 1MW — roughly the draw of a thousand homes. That is not a stricter moratorium, it is a twenty-five-fold wider net, catching edge and colocation builds every other local ordinance this thread has logged would exempt. No pending applications are affected. ⚠️ Single-outlet. (WRAL/ABC11)

Four more local actions landed the same day: a federal noise class action in Vineland, New Jersey against DataOne USA covering ~1,013 households within a mile, where thermal imagery showed 45 of 62 generators running in mid-August; Atmosphere Data Centers withdrawing its challenge to Montgomery County, Maryland’s permitting moratorium; new opposition in Wisconsin Rapids organised around developers’ Russian corporate connections; and Easton, Pennsylvania moving to harden its zoning. ⚠️ Each is single-outlet from a named local or regional publication and none was cross-verified — reported as a same-day pattern, not five independently confirmed facts. (The Guardian on Vineland)

2026-08-26 — Project Camellia’s power contract clears the Georgia PSC

• Georgia Power announced at ~21:00 ET that its contract to serve OpenAI’s 3.2GW Project Camellia campus in Effingham County “has been approved as part of the regulatory process with the Georgia Public Service Commission,” with revised terms raising projected system savings to ~$950M/year from 2029 and typical residential savings to ~$180/year, up from an earlier $102 projection. Reporting on 08-25 had PSC staff raising objections as the original deadline neared; the negotiated-changes path staff had signalled is what played out. ⚠️ Scored on a staff-level clearance, not a Commission vote — no source describes one, consistent with the staff-objection-resolution mechanism under the PSC’s April 2025 rule, and the literal docketed staff filing was not retrievable (psc.ga.gov 403’d). (Georgia Power, Data Center Dynamics)

2026-08-26 — Amazon withdraws a groundwater bid after Virginia says no

• Amazon Data Services withdrew its Virginia DEQ application to draw up to 6.4 million gallons a year from the Potomac aquifer for the proposed Birchwood Tech Campus in King George County, after a DEQ report warned the aquifer could not absorb major new withdrawals and a state senator called the request “indefensible.” Water is now doing what interconnection queues have been doing — a hard physical constraint a siting decision has to route around rather than negotiate. (Virginia Mercury)

2026-08-25 — A state regulator, a unanimous denial, and an $11bn filing in one day

• Georgia PSC staff hit their deadline to refer or object to Georgia Power’s 3.2 GW Project Camellia contract with OpenAI, having signalled they would object absent changes. The Effingham County campus is to be delivered in phases 2028-2032. This is the first of this thread’s siting fights to reach a state utility regulator rather than a county zoning board — a materially higher bar. (The Current GA)

• Pataskala, Ohio’s city council voted unanimously to deny Aligned Data Centers’ site plan for the Pataskala Corporate Park. A separate resident-driven ballot measure on a broader data-center ban still goes to voters in November. The unanimity is the signal — this thread has logged many contested votes, but a zero-dissent denial with a ballot measure still queued behind it is a different political fact. (NBC4 WCMH)

• Backers of “Project River” filed rezoning and annexation applications for an $11.3bn Bradley County, Tennessee campus pairing a large data center with on-site natural-gas and biomass generation. Public forums are set for 09-01 and 09-12 before any vote. The bring-your-own- generation pattern routes around the interconnection queue that has been the binding constraint at most of this thread’s other sites. (Chattanoogan)

2026-08-23 — The governor of the buildout’s biggest state says the data centers “dug their own grave”

• Texas Governor Greg Abbott, on ABC’s This Week, said data-center developers “basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them” and “got the backlash they deserve” — because they had not worked in collaboration with the state or with local governments. Interviewed by Jonathan Karl. Two days after this thread recorded site opposition becoming a securities risk factor in Anthropic’s coming S-1, the governor of the state that hosts more of this buildout than any other put the blame for the backlash on the developers themselves, on national television. (ABC News — full transcript, primary, Axios)
• He also stated the terms new sites must now meet, which is the part with operational teeth: identify water usage and not take water from communities · not draw power the Texas grid needs · lower electricity costs for consumers · not disturb neighbourhoods or rural communities · and first get the approval of local communities. That last one converts local consent from a political risk into a stated precondition. (ABC News)
• The reversal is the story. Abbott declared Texas the “epicentre of AI development” last November alongside a $40bn Google investment; he paused all new data centers on 08-03 pending an ERCOT/PUCT audit of energy, water and tax incentives; today he blamed the industry for its own backlash. Axios notes he has taken roughly $20M in donations from data-center executives, which is the pressure this pivot ran against. (Axios, Office of the Governor — audit directive)
• ⚠️ This next item’s placement on THIS thread is a stretch, stated plainly: it does not match the thread’s siting/moratorium/approval terms, and it is filed here only because this thread already houses the backlash storyline. No thread on this map covers industry messaging or public trust as a subject in its own right. Sam Altman argued the same day that the industry’s problem is how it has talked about AI, not what people object to. On David Senra’s podcast, OpenAI’s CEO said AI builders — “subtext for really, mainly Dario” — have spent years talking about extinction risk and job loss and “have not as a field done a very good job” explaining the benefits or how downsides get mitigated. He pitched AI as delivering “more power and personal freedom” and possibly “the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses that we have ever seen,” and parodied the industry’s own tone: “dear peasants, we will bequeath upon you these gifts.” (The Neuron, source clip YouTube)
• The point to land: the day holds both halves of one argument — a governor saying the industry earned its opposition, and the industry’s most visible CEO saying the opposition is a communications failure.

2026-08-21 — Site opposition becomes a securities risk factor

• Anthropic’s coming S-1 will name public opposition to data-center construction as a risk factor, per CNBC. This thread tracks where the capex lands in concrete; the new fact is that the resistance to it now has a price. On the same day, Axios Pro Rata led its newsletter with state-level pushback as underpriced risk — New York’s temporary moratorium, new Pennsylvania and Texas roadblocks, restrictions in “dozens of other states” — and The AI Daily Brief gave the theme a whole episode. Three independent sources plus a filing, one day. (CNBC, Axios Pro Rata)

2026-08-20 — Piedmont, Oklahoma residents petition against Cloverleaf’s Project Open Sky as the developer options a fallback site in Kingfisher County

• Residents of Piedmont, Oklahoma, began gathering signatures on 08-20 to force a vote on Cloverleaf Infrastructure’s “Project Open Sky,” a hyperscale campus of up to 1.5GW on 630-1,000 acres in Canadian County, on the same day Cloverleaf announced it had secured options on more than 330 acres in neighbouring Kingfisher County as an alternative location — while saying Piedmont remains its preferred site. The city council had already sent the project’s land-use amendment back to planning on 07-28 and deferred its vote to September. Cloverleaf is the developer in which Nvidia took a minority equity stake (on Power Buildout, 08-21); this is the siting fight that stake is buying into, and the fallback option is the developer’s own hedge against losing it. Not on the record until now, five weeks late. (okcfox, 08-20, okcfox, 07-28)

2026-08-17 — OpenAI’s Ohio campus lease formally signed: 20 years, phased to 2032

• OpenAI signed a 20-year lease for the Piketon, OH data-center cluster (the former Portsmouth uranium site) — initial 800MW of computing capacity targeted by 2028, full build-out running through 2032, projected at 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 permanent maintenance roles. SB Energy (the SoftBank unit building it) is reportedly planning an IPO as early as next month at a valuation up to $50B. (SiliconANGLE)

2026-08-15 — Vantage’s $25B Texas “Frontier” campus clears the audit gate

• Vantage Data Centers, alongside Core Scientific and SB Energy, committed to comply with Governor Abbott’s data-center standards (self-funded electric infrastructure, own-water reuse, no cost-shift to ratepayers, no disruption to residential neighborhoods, no reliance on taxpayer incentives) — clearing the PUCT/ERCOT audit gate this thread logged 08-03. Vantage’s named stake is Frontier, its 1.4GW/$25B, 10-building campus in Shackelford County, TX, already under construction with first-building delivery slated for H2 2026 — the largest specific site this thread has to test the gate against. (Texas Governor’s Office)
• 💡 First compliance case to sit next to the first withdrawal: the 08-04 entry below (AWS’s Lusby, MD withdrawal) was this thread’s only data point on what the Texas gate does to a named site — a project ending rather than complying. This is the other outcome: a multi-billion-dollar campus clearing the same gate. Full framing on Where the Capex Lands.

2026-08-10 — Sovereign capital joins Anthropic’s buildout directly

• Anthropic launched “Theseus Infrastructure” with Macquarie Asset Management and Singapore’s GIC sovereign wealth fund — Macquarie and GIC own the platform and fund the majority of the equity for purpose-built US data centers, with Anthropic as anchor tenant; Anthropic pledged to pay 100% of grid-upgrade costs and cover any consumer electricity-price increases tied to its demand. Sovereign capital entering an AI lab’s buildout directly — the same pattern as Stargate’s MGX stake, this time for Anthropic specifically. Cross-refs Circular Financing. (Bloomberg, Macquarie)

2026-08-07 — Firmus raises $2B for its Australia/APAC AI-factory buildout

• Australian AI-datacenter builder Firmus raised $2B (Coatue, Nvidia, Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Jane Street), more than doubling its valuation to $10.5B in four months, to fund its Project Southgate AI-factory buildout and APAC expansion — a former bitcoin miner turned pure AI-infrastructure builder, now over $3B raised in the past 12 months. A site outside this thread’s mostly-US map so far; missed in the 08-05→08-09 window, folded in now dated to its real event date. (Bloomberg)

2026-08-04 — A named site drops out of the pipeline: AWS walks from its Maryland campus

• AWS formally withdrew its Conceptual Site Development Plan for an 8-building, ~2.46M sq ft, ~500MW campus in Lusby, MD — filed 2026-05-04, withdrawn 2026-08-04, on ~2,000 acres of Constellation Energy land next to the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant. AWS gave no public reason; local reporting points to a contentious approval fight (a commissioner’s signed NDA, job postings that leaked before the official announcement, and county moves toward new data-center zoning restrictions). (Southern Maryland Chronicle)
• Full nuclear-adjacency angle on the Nuclear for AI thread.

2026-08-04 — Datacenter operators tap banks for billions to unlock grid connections

• Letters-of-credit deals (~$10B currently in discussion) to reassure utilities that ratepayers won’t absorb infrastructure costs if a project fails — real financing stress underneath the site pipeline, echoing the Texas PUCT/ERCOT audit gate below. (Bloomberg)

2026-08-03 — Texas puts the whole site pipeline behind an audit gate

• Texas halted new data-centre grid connections pending a PUCT/ERCOT audit of every project in the queue — tax breaks, power, water, community impact and ownership all in scope, with non-compliant projects to be denied connection outright. (Texas Tribune)
• 335 operating and 248 planned Texas facilities sit behind this gate, inside an ERCOT queue of 1,800+ projects and 474+ GW.
• 💡 The siting question changes shape: this thread has tracked where capacity gets sited. Texas has just made the answer contingent on disclosure a developer may not want to give — ownership and tax-incentive transparency are now preconditions of energising, which is a different filter than land, water or fibre.

2026-07-30 — Catch-up: Paducah, KY joins the megasite map (event 07-28/29)

• A second former DOE Cold War nuclear site converts to an AI campus — Paducah, KY, $100B, NextEra + Brookfield, 4.6GW dedicated power — same pattern as Portsmouth/Piketon, OH (10GW, OpenAI/SB Energy, flagged 07-28), a second instance inside one week. No tenant named yet. ([WSJ])
• Missed at the time — broke 07-28 (HPCwire), went wide 07-29 (DOE PR Newswire, Reuters, Bloomberg, FT, WSJ); this thread’s last entry (07-28) doesn’t have it. Backfill, not new-today.

2026-07-28 (overnight) — Datacentres get a threat model

• Satellite imagery corroborated Iranian strikes on two Amazon data centres in Bahrain — Zallaq and Askar — supporting IRGC claims released via Tasnim. Bloomberg reports significant damage at both. (Bloomberg)
• ⚠ Date discipline: the imagery is the 07-28 development, not the attack. The strikes were claimed around 07-21; the campaign runs back to Shahed drone attacks on AWS sites in the UAE on 03-01 and a further Bahrain strike on 04-01. Iranian state media named Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel and Nvidia as targets on 03-31. Reported here as corroboration of an older event.
• Why it belongs on this thread and not just the war thread: this timeline tracks where the capex physically lands — and siting has now acquired a variable it did not have. Commercial datacentres have been deliberately struck in wartime, with published damage assessment. Every megasite entry above (Portsmouth, Camellia, El Paso, the Gulf builds) carries an unpriced sovereign-risk term as a result. Logged as a recall note.

2026-07-28 — A fifth megasite enters the map: Ohio’s 10GW Portsmouth campus

• OpenAI/SB Energy’s planned 10GW Piketon, OH campus (the former Portsmouth uranium site) got a financing-backstop story — Nvidia weighing ~$250B toward the lease/construction, pushing total project cost toward $500B; full detail and sourcing in Stargate. If it holds, this is the single largest site figure in this thread’s tracker — bigger than any of the four hyperscalers’ named individual sites.

2026-07-27 — The site map, four actors traced

• Google: 15+ US states + India — MO $15B · MI 1GW “Cannoli” · TX Panhandle 1GW+ · NextEra ≥3 GW-scale campuses · India $15B Visakhapatnam (one outlet: 5GW, thin). A land-grab, not megasites.
• Microsoft: two named ~2GW builds — the WI+GA fiber-linked “AI superfactory” + Pecos TX (Chevron co-located). No company-wide GW total exists.
• Amazon: Rainier live (New Carlisle IN, 500K Trainium2, $26B) · MS $25B · PA $20B · NC $10B (07-20).
• Meta: Hyperion 5GW/$50B+ — 80% sold to Blue Owl · El Paso $10B/1GW under live local pushback · Prometheus GW-figure unclear · the 3-month tent builds are real.

2026-07-24 — Opened

• Thread opened — meta-thread — groups the child threads below.

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