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)

• ⚠️ Out of window (the underlying council meeting was Tuesday 09-01, before this run’s 09-02 15:00 ET window opens) and not on the existing record — checked Datacenter Sites, Google Capex, and every digest from 08-25 forward for “Michigan City” and “Project Maize”; none carry it, and this is the first time this specific site has entered the map at all. Flagging because it fits the exact backlash pattern this thread already tracks (Camellia, El Paso, Bradley County) and was missed entirely until now. 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. A broader same-window sweep turned up roughly a dozen more local moratorium actions 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 (late catch, added 2026-08-11) — 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 (caught 08-04, missed on the day)

• 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.
• Caught by the collectors, not the cluster agents — the tier-2 sweeps were pointed at memory, macro and mental health, and missed it entirely. 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 (ben-steer) — meta-thread — groups the child threads below.

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