Ep. 032 - 300 Datacenter Bans, 6 Projects Delayed: Moratoriums Explained (Datacenter, Energy)

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Semi Analysis Weekly. I'm joined this week by Maya and Raik from our data center, energy, and industrials team. We're going to talk everything about data center moratoriums, what they are, our methodology for tracking them, some examples of local and state ones, what are all the things that have to go wrong for them to actually be delayed, and then a few specific examples of how people are potentially circumventing them. Guys, welcome to the show. I'm excited for this one.

Yeah, thanks for, uh, thanks for having us.

Happy to be here on my first podcast.

Love it. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome, Maya. Okay. So very first, uh, upfront, Maya, could you take us through just the definition? What's a moratorium? It's kind of a politically charged topic that a lot of people are talking about right now.

Yeah.

So a data center moratorium is essentially a temporary legal pause that's usually enacted by a local government. It can also be a state government, and it generally halts approval, permitting, and construction of new data centers. So almost every one of these is a freeze on accepting new applications. So it doesn't affect existing data centers, and these can last anywhere from months to a year and can be often revoked or replaced by new regulation and can also be extended. We've seen that moratoriums in the US are overwhelmingly local, so at the county, city, township level. But we've also seen that state-level action has started over the, this past summer, mostly through executive orders rather than legislation. And governments use them for, I would say, 2 main reasons. They use them because many zoning codes were written before anyone was considering those huge 100+ megawatts to the multiple gigawatt facilities that are being built. And so a pause buys time to Write data center-specific rules and assess infrastructure needs. And it's also a quite low-cost way for elected officials to answer local opposition.

Makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. So how this piece came about is we've all seen in the headlines over the past year, especially in the summer, that US data center buildout, like, it looked like it was coming under increasing pressure with one moratorium after another being announced. And then several states taking action, first New York, then Texas pausing the next step in the ERCOT interconnection queue, then Pennsylvania and Oregon, which we touched upon in the article, also taking measures but stopping short from an actual moratorium. And yeah, also over the past year and a half, so it's a quite recent phenomenon, more than 300 towns, cities, local governments have voted to pause data centers. And there's been a sharp acceleration over the summer with, as you can see in the chart in our article, a visible peak in May, June.

So it kind of looks like it's declining. Do you think that there's a change in like the political tides or there's just, you know, you're running out of, you know, locales to actually enact these moratoriums? Like, what do you see?

Yeah, maybe. I think it's a bit early to say. It could, there could be a new peak. So those track enacted moratoriums, especially Yeah, in June there was a huge peak, but you can see July is still quite high. So I wouldn't read into it. I think a lot of the moratoriums also that were adopted late last year, early this year that were 6 months are slowly expiring.

So what's the methodology generally that you are using to track these? Like if you're having a cumulative 300+ and there's, I mean, many more, townships, I guess, or cities to track around the country? How do you actually keep track of all of these?

Yeah, so following all of these announcements where, when moratoriums seemed like they were popping up all across the US, I decided I wanted to understand actually how much capacity was actually at risk of delay because most people, it seemed to me, were counting these moratoriums, but we're not mapping them onto the data center sites. So what I did is I started by building a data center moratorium database, recorded, I think, 400+ local instruments, actions, proposals. Oh, we have a guest.

What's up?

Unannounced guest.

Third continent has entered the podcast here. We've got Jeremy calling in from Where are you?

In Bangkok. But sorry, I don't wanna interrupt. You were, you were saying, Maya, it seemed interesting. You were saying—

I was in the flow there. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I, I was talking about how I, uh, built the Data Center Moratorium database tracking, um, over 400, uh, local instruments across 17 states in the US. And each one through the whole lifecycle. So from proposed to either enacted or rejected, also like expired, lifted, et cetera. I also included permanent bans and restrictions that were written into zoning codes because those constrain development the same way as a moratorium does, just without an expiry date. And so once I had an overview of all of these moratoriums, I mapped it against our data center project pipeline, which for the US is, I think, 3,500 projects, not projects because it's by buildings, but like entries. And I tested each active restriction against the relevant projects. So for every instrument, I verified whether the campus sat inside the jurisdiction. But that's actually not enough. You also need to check whether the developer still needs an approval if it hasn't secured it before the moratorium came into place. There's a bunch of other things which I can get into later, but you really need many things to be true at the same time for, for a project to actually be delayed and for all of those factors to align at the same time. And that Doesn't happen that often, actually. In practice, actually, at the local level, that meant passing 2 screens. So first, looking at every campus in the model sitting inside a restricted jurisdiction, and that gave me about 77 campuses above 20 megawatts. So that was about 20 gigawatts in total. And then the second screen was looking at each of these 77 campuses individually. What type of moratorium the jurisdiction they are planned in is. Does it legally reach the parcel or is there a carve-out? Does the project already hold the zoning permits? And power or other things that the moratorium gates and a bunch of other factors. And in the end, 74 of the 77 fell out and only 3 remained. So that's 7.6% of what is inside a restricted boundary. Those projects were the AWS project in Ohio near Commercial Point, the North Point campus in Pennsylvania, and a Okay.

So let's take a step back. High level is like there's hundreds of projects, thousands of individual buildings that you guys are tracking in the US. The result of all of this talk about moratoriums, which there's what I think your tracking said, there's 300+ total moratoriums across the US. I mean, the—

That are enacted. As we speak. Yeah.

Um, they're affecting 3 projects that you can find. All of this stuff on the chart is actively affecting 3 projects. I mean, yeah.

Yeah.

So that's—

Yeah, I can explain why, why, um, well, first of all, most of those moratoriums, um, I think around, I think I had it in the, in the article around 80% of live restrictions. have no capacity at all into it. So that means that those ordinances are overwhelmingly preemptive. So those are towns, cities that are legislating before a project exists or after a campus is already approved.

Makes sense. Okay, so we've got Jeremy calling in from Bangkok, and I think he seems a little busy based on where he's sitting right now, but Let's get his take high level on moratoriums and then the DC guy can drop. Jeremy, like when you hear something like this, like everywhere in the news, moratoriums is going on right now and then it's actually only affecting 3 projects by our tracking right now. Obviously that can change, but are developers taking this seriously? Are people like, how are people thinking through the political side of trying to build data centers right now?

I think like many folks don't realize we're starting to get into a moment of oversupply of early-stage projects. And so it really depends how you forecast, how you think about forecasting some of these future sites. We don't call them delays because we think, hey, those sites that maybe have been actually canceled or delayed or postponed or whatever, those were never like projects that would have a material impact to the way we forecast the market. Because they were already very speculative, because we look at the permits, because we look at the filings, we look at the physical evidence, and there just wasn't enough. And so when those get delayed, there's essentially not much impact in like the aggregate market forecast for let's say 2029. And there's plenty of other options in the reality. And especially these days, the, one of the big takes of these moratoriums, especially the, the Greg Abbott letter in Texas, is that, hey, there's not enough pushback if you connect to the grid and like risk increasing power prices for residents and so on and so forth. However, if you do off-grid and you bring your own power and you don't sort of interact at all with the system, then there's no risk whatsoever that power prices go up because of you. And so as such, it becomes an easier or more de-risked project to go with behind the meter. And so this is in fact making behind the meter more attractive. And from a market perspective, what that means is that there's much more sites that are suitable to get these massive investments. Because there are many more options that have gas available, that have plenty of land available, that are in West Texas or whatever, where you can do permits, when you can burn that sort of amount of fuel without any issues. And so the number of options for developers is materially rising. It's concentrating a lot in Texas, to be clear. But grid-connected sites are scarce and now increasingly risky, whereas behind-the-meter sites are not scarce. You just have to get the equipment, but getting everything in place is not that scarce. And so those are actually becoming kind of premium despite their high number. And so that's why our forecast sort of isn't moving. And we don't, we're not worried currently about the trajectory of sort of the data center buildout in the US. We would be worried if we start seeing really material, like state-level moratoriums that impose strict restrictions, such as the one in New York. If that were to happen in Texas, for example, at that scale, blocking even off-grid projects, uh, we would probably be fucked, you know? Uh, but for now we're fine, essentially.

Or also any legislatively, if that's a word, imposed moratorium at the— oh.

Jeremy, let Maya talk here, buddy, on the— oh, he dropped off.

He left. Yeah, I was about to say, if, if a, an actual, um, moratorium is passed through the legislature, That would be, I think, quite different from having a governor enact an executive order that is revocable and that also can expire once the governor is voted out or something like that, that it's easier to, yeah, to revoke. But yeah, Jeremy touched upon the moratorium, the ERCOT moratorium in Texas. I just wanted to To finish with like the local moratoriums, explain all of these factors that I mentioned that have to happen at the same time for a project to actually be delayed. So first it has to obviously reach the parcel, and county moratoriums generally apply only to unincorporated territory. So that means that a moratorium, a county moratorium doesn't reach a project that forms part of a city because a campus inside an incorporated city within that county is outside the moratorium. It also has to be an Enacted and still in force. It has to overlap with the project's timeline, and that's very important. The project, the campus, the data center project can't be too far ahead. So in like, yeah, early stage, because many that were affected, many had the affected approval in hand before the freeze, even without shovels in the ground, and they can't be too far out, like a 3 to 6 month pause that expires Years before a project that's planned for 2028 or beyond. It also has to cover the use. So many instruments apply only above a certain megawatt or certain project size, or only crypto mining, for example. The project also still needs the affected approval. So For federal land, federal approvals, or other preexisting rights, those can provide a separate permitting pathway. Another is that the developer can't be able to redesign around it. So like change the size of the campus, the, any configuration or like a power arrangement to To go around the the moratorium, the project has to be still active. Also, it can't be cancelled, withdrawn, or delayed for another reason, and then no carve out can apply. And then there's there's one prominent example that we touched upon in the note, which is the carve out for SpaceX in in. Texas, which maybe Raik wants to touch upon.

Yeah. Raik, what's your take here, man?

Yeah, I mean, I think the SpaceX stuff is really interesting, like a good, not counterexample to how easy it is to get out of these moratoriums, but just one way of watching somebody kind of weasel out of it in a way, which was like SpaceX bought this plot in like South Texas that was part of the city of Brownsville's jurisdiction. And they bought the plot and they were fighting for, they were not fighting, but like, you know, they were in the courthouses for a long time trying to be like, listen, let's, let us get this plot. Let us do whatever we want with it. And they were in the midst of also talking about a moratorium beforehand and everything. And SpaceX's only kind of way out here was to basically Force what was called, not force, but like really push for what's called a de-annexation where it's like essentially removing this parcel from the jurisdiction's boundary. And this was like a whole ruckus in Brownsville, right? There was protests. People were in the courthouses like talking like, we don't want this to happen. Like, why do we even need to do this? And everything was happening on a weekend, right? It was like, I think it was like a Saturday or something. And it was like a 6-hour town hall and everyone's like, why are we even here? Why do they need to rush this so much? And SpaceX was like, we don't, you know, we don't care. Like we need to get, we need to de-annex this property right now. And so they ended up going through after the 6-hour session, they de-annexed the property and then Brownsville went ahead with the moratorium like a few days later. And so now technically that 444-acre parcel that SpaceX has is completely out of the jurisdiction. It's like back now into Cameron County's jurisdiction, which does not have a moratorium. And so they're like safe. It's this really weird kind of— I haven't, at least I haven't seen this yet. It's like a very clever way to play on the moratorium game where it's like, oh, I'm not in your jurisdiction anymore. Like, you can't get me, you can't get me. And so now, yeah. And so now, now they're safe to like build whatever they want there. And some of our subscribers know what they're building there, but— It'll be interesting to see how it goes.

Yeah, this is 404 acres right near Starbase, right?

Yeah, right next to Starbase. Yeah.

Yeah, I just wanted to say, this is what I mentioned earlier. It's really important, I think, to make the difference between the county jurisdiction and the city jurisdiction because that matters a lot. Because the city takes over, is not part of a county moratorium. So that will, at the level, individual project level, that will matter a lot.

Can you give examples of some more differences between local and state moratoriums? Like when I see the map that just has a big red shade over Texas and says there's a statewide moratorium, or you see some announcement in the news, it'll obviously seem like, oh, Texas is going to stop data center building. But clearly there's a ton of projects that are going forward for all these reasons that you just explained. So maybe even going between state, local, and the difference between county and city in some more detail on some given projects.

Yeah, so we have to look at, I think, each moratorium individually, especially the state ones, because a lot of it is also, in our opinion, political signaling, especially with the upcoming November elections, which I can also delve deeper into a bit later, looking at each state moratorium. Oh great. We have the, yeah, those are the, so the local moratoriums.

But just some examples of maybe some states where some political posturing might be necessary for people who are trying to get elected in November. Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Indiana. These are the places that roughly have data centers today. You're not seeing a lot of places that don't have data centers go and take this seriously on a political perspective, right?

Yeah. So here you can see the top 4 states, which account for roughly half of the local instruments in the US. So Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia. The fact that, so first of all, these cluster in the Midwest and the south of the US, and this is mainly where the buildout has been the fastest. But the amount of local moratoriums being adopted doesn't necessarily correlate or lead to a state-level moratorium. So in Michigan, There were 45 that are currently enacted, the majority of which was adopted in late last year and 2026. And the trigger of that was the data center tax exemption that the governor signed in, I think it was late 2024. And that set off a rush of proposals across the state. Yet we see no zero, we see no pipeline exposure. Um, so the largest projects keep moving forward.

There's like, and there's also like one thing I kind of want to highlight, um, which is like, this is fairly cheap political signaling sometimes. Not to say that like, this is, you know, the sole purpose of it, maybe some of the Politicians are trying to repel data centers, but very cheap political positioning because we actually included in the article, we administered a poll to the American electorate, right? Where it was like, okay, we surveyed, I think, some sample of the American electorate and we asked all of our own questions about AI and everybody's opinions on AI. We have a full dataset outside of this. We're going to keep doing this through the election cycle, most likely, and probably afterward too. This is going to be more and more important as time goes on. But I think the most interesting thing was in some of the results of our dataset, you found that some people were actually net positive on AI while being net negative on data center, or in aggregate, this was the case. Which was like very odd if you were kind of one of the people who thought data centers were this physical manifestation of like AI anxiety, right? Where it's like, I'm very afraid of AI. Like there's this big white box I can point to that kind of physicalizes my problem with what's going on. No, right? Like it was just, we don't really like that data center there. Like reasons cited were like, I think number one was Power. And then the second one was water. And so like, it didn't actually have to do much with AI. And so for the candidates running in these elections, like, this is a really good point to harp on, right? Like, many, many people are not happy with data centers. And this is a nice touchpoint for everybody to kind of campaign on, to be like, oh, look, I'm going to ban them. You know, like I just put out this moratorium. It's not actually doing anything, but like, You know, come on, check it out. Like, I'm anti-data center just as much as you guys. And so we do kind of like expect this to continue as well, right? Like through election or through, yeah, through November. And then maybe on, I think on and after that, we're going to have to see how stuff plays out, but probably don't anticipate slowing down too much, or at least like not, at least like on quote unquote second derivative, just not growing as fast. But Yeah, it's going well for the politicians to do this, I guess is my point. And they have incentives to keep doing this. Yeah.

And with the ongoing AI doomsday scenarios shaping broader public opinion, I don't see this improving in the near term. And it's become, as you said, Raik, like a major campaign issue.

Yeah.

And, and it's cutting across party lines. Both Republicans and Democrats are coming out as being anti-data center.

Yeah.

Even if they were previously pro-data center, as we've seen in like in Pennsylvania.

Yeah.

I mean, this is clear political signaling, I think, in the, in this place, but maybe one of the most interesting specific examples of this is just how uninformed the electorate is in terms of what data centers actually are. Like it's basically a gray building. It's not very loud. You know, it consumes a lot of power, but in your example, if you're bringing your own power, I don't know exactly what people have concerns with. One example that I saw on X was when Steven Balaban, the CEO founder of Lambda, was talking about how he wants to just debunk misinformation about data centers. And somebody replied to him in the comments saying, oh, you'd never put a data center in my backyard. They're ugly. They detract from the landscape. He specifically says, you wouldn't put it in this red area down here. And Steven responds and says, I believe this. I mean this in the nicest way, but that building in the bottom red is actually Stream Data Centers Minneapolis 2 site. So you actually live beside a data center already and you didn't realize it. That was a funny one. I saw the other day.

Yeah. I mean, like driving past them too, like if you go through like Virginia and like Ashburn where they have, it's like a data center alley or whatever, it just looks like a bunch of warehouses. And like, I don't know if they're, you know, as we like discussed in a few articles already, if they're genuinely using, you know, different cooling methods where it's like kind of zero water use or whatever, the water consumption's not really a problem. Like even In the SpaceX agreement by Starbase as well, they committed to give back more water than they were going to consume, right? That's going to be through some filtration processes, whatever it may be. Power side is a different story, obviously, but I think a lot of hyperscalers are working to make this work, or you just go behind the meter. But yeah, it's really topical right now, and so I think it's just going to keep being topical.

Maya, what's your take on the—

I just want to add one thing to that. I think another sign that this is mainly political signaling is that, I think I mentioned that earlier, that these executive actions bypass the legislature. So it installs a pause that those governors can control and revoke, and it denies the pro-moratorium camp, a stronger regulatory or permanent instrument. Regulatory, yeah, a permanent instrument.

Okay. So you don't think that— my view of moratoriums was they were like a framework to then be converted from temporary to full-time and maybe expanded in scope over time. But you think that there's potential these are Temporary and controllable so that they can be removed or modified as it's convenient for—

Yeah, they usually, they usually last like 6 months, a year. There were a few that were 18 months, but it's for the government to buy itself time to put in place zoning regulation, regulation that wasn't there. Before all of those data centers started to, to pop up, before the project developers came to those local governments and asked them and put forward a proposal to develop a data center.

It makes sense. So can you maybe talk through what an affected developer might be thinking right now? Like you go through all the list and then there's 3 that are actually in the wrong county, the instrument is in place, the permitting that they have is set up and they're like about to break ground or they're halfway through construction and they're being affected by this. Do you think that they're going to, even in those small specific cases, do you think they're going to try to work through the political process or do you think they're going to cancel the project and take their ball and go home or go somewhere else?

Well, for all of the developers that are about to break ground, or that are under construction, they generally, I mean, they have their permits already, so they're not going to be affected by the moratorium. It's really important to stress that those moratoriums, they only affect projects which don't have the, their, their permits in hand. So like the New York moratorium, it affects environmental permits. A lot of those local moratoriums, it's also environmental or permit, building permits or zoning permits. So it's quite early stage. And if a developer is really, like, time is an issue and they want to have their project on the ground as soon as possible, There are other ways to, to go about this that will perhaps develop somewhere else or pull a SpaceX move or, yeah, there's, there's ways to, to go around this.

Interesting. How about the, the statewide stuff? So local moratoriums may be different to approach versus statewide ones, which lead to delays as opposed to cancellations or legal posturing, moving around, maneuvering?

Yeah, so they rarely, they don't usually lead to cancellations because we don't view projects that are essentially canceled as cancellations because those tend to be projects that are highly speculative and that that wouldn't have happened in the first place, right? So for, yeah, perhaps we can go a bit more in depth in like the New York moratorium and the Texas moratorium, how they differ, how they're also similar. So the New York one was the first ever statewide moratorium. In the U.S., it was adopted in July, and it pauses state environmental permits for new data centers of 50 megawatts or more until July 2027. And that gives this the state that gives the state. of New York time to write a, what they call a generic environmental impact statement. And we find that it touches about 1.4 gigawatts of planned capacity, all of which is 2028 or later. And we think it actually delays roughly 800 megawatts of capacity. From 6 to 10 months.

Yeah, that's so interesting because it's literally 2 years from now that we're talking about, 1.5, 2 years from now. I mean, that's forever in the future in data center world, right?

Right, right. And we see also that there's, I can go quickly over those projects that are delayed. Stream data centers is is special because it's the only one that had an application that was pending when the moratorium was enacted, while all the others hadn't submitted their environmental application yet. So they were in pre-application.

Yeah, makes sense. And specifically, TerraWolf in the green there. I mean, this is a public company, so they're claiming there's no changes right now. Do you think that's real or is this—

I mean, doable, right? I think when looking at their, I don't know, they kept moving the site back regardless. Like I think it used to be late 2027 or early 2028 story. Now in like their investor docs, it's been 2029 for a bit-ish. And so I mean, it's 2029, right? Like, that's a century away for me. Like, I only know the next 12 to 18 months. Like, anything beyond that is early stage or like fictional at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They vibe-coded or Claude-coded data centers on a previous one. People just like buy up a website and saying, I have a data center, you should invest with me. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I can, yeah. By 2029, I can figure the whole thing out. Yeah. Give me, give me some, give me a seed round and I'll do it for you.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. So maybe we talked about Texas a little bit earlier, skipping that. You guys talked about Pennsylvania, Oregon, like other states that are posturing like they're going to have a statewide moratorium, but now they're, they're not going to, like, what, what does that look like?

Yeah, so I think those cases are interesting and this is why we also talked about them in the note. Essentially, they, both Pennsylvania and Oregon, they were facing the same political public pressure and, but they choose not to impose like a blanket pause. So in Pennsylvania, the governor's order is a conditional permitting regime. So that essentially means that it slows unvetted projects, but it doesn't stop vetted ones. Essentially what the order does is it instructs the Department of Environmental Protection not to take up a permit application until the developer has met certain requirements and secured local approval. And it also pulls data center proposals out of the fast-track permitting process and prohibits non-disclosure agreements for data center projects. But it isn't a moratorium because this Conditional permitting regime, which is how they call it, isn't a pause or a ban. It's more, what it does is that it lengthens and broadens the pre-permit diligence. And this has the greatest impact on speculative projects. So serious Well-vetted projects still get through. And then in Oregon, this one has even less consequences, I would say. It's the most recent one. It was adopted like earlier this month. And there the governor paused data center projects on state-owned land for a year. And this again has no impact On, on our forecast. Site control.

To build a data center in the state park up on, I don't know, I'm trying to think of, they weren't proposing data centers by Cannon Beach on the whatever, Hat Rock or whatever it's called there. I'm making a joke anyway. Yeah, sorry. One super interesting thing on the Pennsylvania side, You said use of NDAs and data center projects. Can you give an example? Like, it seems kind of crazy. Can you give an example of data center projects where they're putting what, the state under NDA or they're putting the local government under NDA or something?

Yeah, no, that actually happens a lot. Like many of the hyperscalers, I mean, we've seen that, that's how they All of a sudden, that's how local people, citizens find out about a data center very late in the process. All of a sudden, there's a huge data center in their backyard, and that's when anti-data center community Organizations form because they weren't aware of this because the developer has signed an NDA with the local government.

So some of this stuff seems kind of sensible. I think it's kind of silly to put city council members under NDA so that they can't tell their citizens that they represent what's going on in the town. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, that's just my way of talking.

Yeah, that ends in a lot of lawsuits. We've seen a lot of lawsuits on both sides.

And I mean, like, yeah, like, I think we don't, we don't want to say like, you know, all of it's political signaling or anything like Maya brought up earlier. And it's a good point, which is like a lot of these people or a lot of these governments are getting like blasted with data center applications and like, may, may not know how to check these thoroughly. They may not know how to verify if like this state or whatever has enough resources for the city, the city, the county, whatever it may be. The NDA thing is quite common, honestly. I remember there's also a project where AWS was in. AWS has done it a few times. I think there's one in Ireland where they were found out to be behind a project and then everybody blew up and nobody was happy about that. So it's like, well, maybe we can just be a little more transparent, right? We don't have to hide behind NDAs and we don't have to get all this political backlash. We can kind of just be open about what's going on here. Like the data center's not burning through water like that. It's probably not going to be annihilating your electricity prices. Should be okay. You know? Yeah.

Makes perfect sense, guys. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about your experience, like looking into the city council meeting minutes and do you have any fun stories about local opposition to some of this stuff that you've seen?

Tons. There's tons. Me and—

You guys are literally listening into some of these city council meetings, right? Or at least—

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, they have YouTube videos. I mean, they're on Instagram sometimes. Sometimes I find very valuable information looking at like an Instagram reel or something.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's crazy. And it's only there because the document is not published yet because Often local governments, uh, governments in general just take like crazy amount of time to update, uh, their websites and their documents.

And sometimes too, there's, sometimes there's like also crazy alpha in these like little areas too. Like on like the right anti-data center Facebook group, you'll get the entire project layout and plan, 'cause it's like hosted in a closed town hall, but they took a photo of every poster board. It's like, oh, like amazing. But no, I mean, like going through the county minutes, yeah, you can go through some of these sessions and it's like, I mean, overwhelmingly what the, what the vibe is, is everybody hates these, right? Like I did not hear like really any citizens coming in there. And obviously this is like the review bias thing where I'm only going to leave a review if I love it or if I hate it. And so it's like everybody in that county minutes meeting or city minutes meeting is just viscerally against this project, right? They're like, not like, we're not doing this to my city. Like, you know, I had, I've had a farm here for like a century and like, yeah, that's kind of impressive that despite all of that, these things keep going through, to be honest. Like, if I don't know, like the pushback is overwhelming sometimes.

Yeah. NIMBYs on the national political stage, I think going on here actually, Rick, did it, have I told you the, better acronym that my uncle told me way back in the day.

What's that acronym?

My uncle, rest in peace, Uncle Bruce, he was like working on energy systems in Ontario and he was specifically working on some like nuclear power plant that they were trying to move around and all this stuff. And he ended up like, you know, going through all these like sort of political processes and dealing with people who opposed it. And he started calling them bananas. And instead of NIMBY, not in my backyard, it was banana, which is Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. I think that's a lot of what we've seen from people who are opposed to data centers right now. Like light industrial buildings, pretty quiet, you know, you are using them to post on your Facebook page your opposition to them.

Yeah, it's a good point, right? It's not like I don't even— like if I'm looking at these like county minutes meetings or like these people, In these meetings talking back or pushing it back against these projects, it's not like, you should make it a little bit smaller, or, you should give back to the community a little bit more. It's like, not here. Go somewhere else. I don't care where it is. You can't do anything to change my mind here. You need to go away. And so, yeah, I think banana is more applicable. There's no, it's not It's not because it's in my backyard, it's because you can't do it here. I don't want you to do it here. It's like, basically.

Yeah. Yeah. And the developers are still trying to like woo the local population by coming out with those huge like community benefits packages, you know, building a school, building roads, um, trying to like, yeah, convince, uh, people, uh, that a data center is a good thing.

Yeah, we'll see.

We'll see how it— you don't seem convinced that these care packages they give to everybody of all of this important infrastructure is actually going to work in changing anybody's mind. It's not working.

Yeah, I think they have to address the concerns of the population, like the environmental concerns, the noise concerns at the root and not you know, put a bandage on it by proposing all of those community benefits. Yeah, that's my opinion.

Yeah. I'm like, I think I'm really curious to see how this will go. I like, there have been projects in the past that have like done, you know, like good community work. It's not foreign. It's actually like, it's been somewhat commonplace for the hyperscalers to like Oh, we're planting a million trees, or we're adding another water utility infrastructure piece to your guys' city, or I think Amazon had a beehive on a roof once, whatever that was.

Really?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they hosted a whole beehive on their roof. And I was like, I guess that works, whatever. But this has been around for a while. I just don't know if it's I don't know if it's going to solve this problem with the opposition. I don't know what does. So like, I'm not trying to like play like armchair political analyst here.

As we wrap here, for all the developers that are listening to this podcast, trying to figure out how to get their project through, gimme your 3-step plan that they should use to get the political opposition to chill out a bit.

I don't think, I don't, my, Or Maya, go ahead.

Rick says give up. Maya.

Well, I would say first, first, first, if you have, if you're a SpaceX and you have this kind of leverage and you can pull a maneuver like the, the Brownsville, uh, de-annexation, that's, uh, I think that's becoming like part of the toolkit. I mean, that's been part of the toolkit for SpaceX from the start.

Build your own town, right?

Yeah.

Sorry.

Create, create your own town. Yeah.

Create your own town. Option number one. Okay. What, what else can you do about it?

Uh, well, I think, as I said, like, um, hear, um, the community's concerns. Um, and, and yeah.

To, to all the developers out there, I think you just, I think we go somewhere else.

Either, okay, you either gotta hardball start your own town or you just gotta come with some better vibes when you're putting these things up.

Or maybe go in the middle of, you know, of Texas, of nowhere in unincorporated county, you know, random, random land.

You gotta be careful. 2 episodes ago, Nico came on and we were talking about the middle of nowhere and he said something about middle of nowhere Wisconsin, and somebody got in our Spotify comments and said, Wisconsin is not the middle of nowhere.

So, I just actually saying this, I thought about that. Maybe some people in Texas will be mad if I say it.

Let's be careful here. Yeah.

But, um, I mean, most of the time a developer won't abandon a project completely. Um, if it's not like relocation, redesign, uh, trying to convince the local population, uh, Or even go, they can also go the route of litigation if they feel like they can win this way. If for example, a project is already underway and then a new regulation comes into place, we've seen that a lot as well. But yeah, overall moratoriums, they They tend to like relocate or reshape projects, uh, rather than lead to like a meaningful, uh, delay or, or, uh, permanently stopping them.

Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you just go somewhere else. Yeah, I think, yeah, middle of nowhere, Abilene, Texas. Uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna target some people now, whoever's in Abilene.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm saying that.

Uh, but I think another thing that might be important is trying to find by-right land. So land with the existing approvals already in place, existing entitlements, because they won't need, the developers won't need to go through all those requirements. So that's probably better than trying to develop on like a greenfield site that needs rezoning.

Yeah. And I think maybe this is a strategy that you guys are saying the developers are already pursuing, but that Jeremy kind of referred to when he dropped in, which is like they're just starting a whole bunch of prospective projects. They're trying to figure out what goes through. Some are not going to get through, and then the others that do, they're going to end up with enough to actually build what they need. And you're going to get into a space where you have like an oversupply of data center projects. And for those out there who want to know when we get to that space, subscribe to The Model. Buy the research.

Yeah.

You should buy The Model. You would know all of this and more, and you would've known it earlier.

Yeah. Okay. What, do we miss anything? Anything Closing comments you want to make?

I think maybe like, yeah, who, just to reiterate what Jeremy said, um, like who benefits at the end of the day, especially in Texas, are behind the meter developers and operators with, uh, power that is already secured. Uh, because the Texas audit only touches ERCOT, uh, queue projects. So all of those like fully islanded campuses, those are outside of the scope. Um, also the, yeah, onsite generation and gas midstream.

Um, so turbines, gensets, um, like any, any folks, any folks that are like kind of dealing with the ERCOT uncertainty craziness and whatever, like you're probably gonna see some people switching to just BTMs. It's easier, right? Like I, I don't need to wait to be told that I'm not making batch zero. Right. I'm just going to go ahead and find a gas pipeline and call it a day. Like, it might be a little bit more expensive. My timeline will probably be shorter and there'll be less of a hassle on the financing side. So BTM probably going to do pretty well because of these issues.

Cool. Awesome, guys. Thanks for joining today. Learned a lot. And for everybody out there, once again, you should subscribe to the Data Center Energy Industrials Model. Said these fine folks that we have explaining all the things about moratoriums today can work for you.

Perfect. Perfect.

It was great to be here.

Good to, yeah, good to be here. Always a pleasure, Jordan.

Nice job, Maya. One under your belt. Now you gotta, you gotta, you gotta come back and join when Rake's not here so that you can beat him. You can start stacking more podcasts with this guy. Yeah.

Okay. Next week.

Next week.

You got another article next week? What are you doing?

We—

sorry, are you speaking to me or me?

You got another article coming next week? What are we going to talk about next week? Moratoriums round 2?

Yeah, I've got some more like policy regulatory things coming up.

We've got, we've got, we got nothing newsletter pipeline, but we've got a, we're cooking some crazy political stuff. I think that's the goal. Okay guys, I gotta jump, but, um, yeah, been a, been a pleasure.

This was awesome. Nice job, Maya. Nice job, Rick.