Ep. 033 - 300 Data Center Bans, 3 Projects Delayed: Moratoriums Explained (Datacenter, Energy)

I’m joined this week by Maya and Reyk from our data center energy and industrials team. We’re going to talk about data center moratoriums: what they are, our methodology for tracking them, some examples of local and state moratoriums, what has to go wrong for them to actually delay a project, and 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 having us.

1. What Is a Moratorium

Happy to be here on my first podcast.

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

Yeah. A data center moratorium is essentially a temporary legal pause that’s usually enacted by a local government. It can also be enacted by a state government, and it generally halts approval, permitting, and construction of new data centers. Almost every one of these is a freeze on accepting new applications, so it doesn’t affect existing data centers. These can last anywhere from months to a year, can often be revoked or replaced by new regulation, and can also be extended.

We’ve seen that moratoriums in the US are overwhelmingly local, at the county, city, or township level. But we’ve also seen state-level action start over this past summer, mostly through executive orders rather than legislation. 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-plus-megawatt to multiple-gigawatt facilities being built. A pause buys time to write data center-specific rules and assess infrastructure needs. It’s also a quite low-cost way for elected officials to answer local opposition.

Makes sense.

2. Eight Conditions to Delay

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 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 of an actual moratorium.

Over the past year and a half—so it’s a quite recent phenomenon—more than 300 towns, cities, and local governments have voted to pause data centers. 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 and June of this year.

It kind of looks like it’s declining. Do you think there’s a change in the political tides, or are you just running out of local governments that can actually enact these moratoriums? What do you see?

I think it’s a bit early to say. There could be a new peak. The chart tracks enacted moratoriums, and June had 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 that were adopted late last year or early this year were for 6 months and are slowly expiring.

What’s the methodology you’re using to track these? If you’re tracking 300-plus, and there are many more townships or cities to track around the country, how do you actually keep track of all of them?

Following all of these announcements, when moratoriums seemed like they were popping up all across the US, I decided I wanted to understand how much capacity was actually at risk of delay. Most people, it seemed to me, were counting these moratoriums but were not mapping them onto the data center sites.

I started by building a data center moratorium database. I recorded, I think, 400-plus local instruments, actions, and proposals.

Oh, we have a guest.

Unannounced guest.

A third continent has entered the podcast. We’ve got Jeremie calling in. Where are you?

In Bangkok. Sorry, I don’t want to interrupt. You were saying, Maya. It seemed interesting.

You were saying—

I was in the flow there. Yeah. I was talking about how I built the data center moratorium database, tracking more than 400 local instruments across 17 states in the US and each one through the whole life cycle, from proposed to either enacted or rejected, as well as expired, lifted, and so on.

I also included permanent bans and restrictions that were written into zoning codes because those constrain development in the same way as a moratorium, just without an expiry date. 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 entries.

I tested each active restriction against the relevant projects. 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 are 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 a project to actually be delayed, and for all of those factors to align at the same time. That doesn’t happen that often, actually.

In practice, at the local level, that meant passing 2 screens. First, I looked at every campus in the model sitting inside a restricted jurisdiction, and that gave me about 77 campuses above 20 megawatts. That was about 20 gigawatts in total.

The second screen was looking at each of these 77 campuses individually: what type of moratorium the jurisdiction they’re planned in has, whether it legally reaches the parcel or whether there’s a carve-out, whether the project already holds the zoning permits and power, or whatever else the moratorium gates. In the end, 74 of the 77 fell out, and only 3 remained. That’s 7.6% of what is inside a restricted boundary. Those projects were an AWS project in Ohio near Commercial Point, the NorthPoint campus in Pennsylvania, and a CoreSite expansion in Colorado.

Okay, so let’s take a step back. At a high level, there are hundreds of projects and thousands of individual buildings that you guys are tracking in the US. The result of all this talk about moratoriums—which, I think, you’re tracking at 300-plus total across the US—

That are enacted as we speak.

Yeah. They’re affecting 3 projects that you can find.

All of this stuff on the chart is actively affecting 3 projects.

I mean, yeah. So that’s—

3. Behind the Meter Wins

Yeah, I can explain why. First of all, most of those moratoriums—I think I had it in the article at around 80% of live restrictions—have no capacity at all in them. That means those ordinances are overwhelmingly preemptive. They’re towns and cities legislating before a project exists, or after a campus is already approved.

Makes sense. So, we’ve got Jeremie 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 at a high level on moratoriums. When you hear something like this—moratoriums are everywhere in the news right now, but they’re actually only affecting 3 projects by our tracking right now—obviously, that can change. Are developers taking this seriously? How are people thinking through the political side of trying to build data centers right now?

I think many folks don’t realize we’re starting to get into a moment of oversupply of early-stage projects. It really depends on how you forecast and how you think about forecasting some of these future sites.

We don’t call them delays because we think, hey, those sites that may have actually been canceled, delayed, postponed, or whatever—those were never projects that would have had a material impact the way we forecast the market, because they were already very speculative. We look at the permits, we look at the filings, we look at the physical evidence, and there just wasn’t enough. When those get delayed, there’s essentially not much impact in the grid market forecast, which will stay 2029, and there are plenty of other options in reality.

One of the big takeaways from these moratoriums, especially the Greg Abbott letter in Texas, is that there’s a lot of pushback if you connect to the grid and risk increasing power prices for residents, and so on and so forth. However, if you go off-grid and bring your own power, and you don’t interact with the system at all, then there’s no risk whatsoever that power prices go up because of you.

As such, it becomes an easier, more de-risked project to pursue behind-the-meter. From a market perspective, what that means is that there are many more sites that are suitable for these massive investments, because there are many more options that have gas available, that have plenty of land available, and that are in West Texas or wherever, where you can get permits and burn that sort of amount of fuel without any issues.

Therefore, 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 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. Those are becoming kind of premium despite their high number.

That’s why our forecast sort of isn’t moving, and we’re not currently worried about the trajectory of the data center build-out in the US. We would be worried if we started seeing really material state-level moratoria that imposed 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—we would probably be worried. But for now, we’re fine, essentially.

Or if a moratorium is imposed legislatively at the—

Oh.

Jeremie, let me talk here, buddy. Oh, he dropped off.

He left. If an actual moratorium is passed through the legislature, that would be quite different from having a governor enact an executive order that is revocable and can expire once the governor is voted out. It’s easier to revoke.

Jeremie touched upon the ERCOT moratorium in Texas. I just wanted to finish with the local moratoria and explain all these factors that have to happen at the same time for a project to actually be delayed.

First, it obviously has to reach the parcel, and county moratoria generally apply only to unincorporated territory. That means 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 enacted and still in force; it has to overlap with the project’s timeline.

That’s very important: the project can’t be too far ahead. Many projects that were affected had the affected approval in hand before the freeze, even without shovels in the ground. They also can’t be too far out, like a 3- to 6-month pause that expires years before a project planned for 2028 or beyond.

It also has to cover the use. Many instruments apply only above a certain megawatt threshold or project size, or only to crypto mining, for example. The project also still needs the affected approval. For federal land, federal approvals or other pre-existing rights can provide a separate permitting pathway.

Another factor is that the developer can’t redesign around it by changing the size of the campus, its configuration, or the power arrangement to get around the moratorium. The project has to still be active; it can’t be canceled, withdrawn, or delayed for another reason. Then no carve-out can apply.

There’s one prominent example that we touched upon in the note: the carve-out for SpaceX in Texas, which maybe Reyk wants to touch upon.

Reyk, what’s your take?

I think the SpaceX stuff is really interesting. It’s a good counterexample to how easy it is to get out of these moratoria, but it’s also one way of watching somebody weasel out of it.

SpaceX bought this plot in South Texas that was part of the City of Brownsville’s jurisdiction, and they were in the courts for a long time, trying to say, “Listen, let us get this plot. Let us do whatever we want with it.” They were also talking about a moratorium beforehand.

SpaceX’s only way out was basically to force—not force, but really push for—what was called deannexation, which is essentially removing this parcel from the jurisdiction’s boundary. This was a whole ruckus in Brownsville. There were protests; people were in the courthouses saying, “We don’t want this to happen. Why do we even need to do this?”

Everything was happening on a weekend. I think it was a Saturday, and it was a 6-hour town hall. Everyone was asking, “Why are we even here? Why do they need to rush this so much?” SpaceX was saying, “We don’t care. We need to deannex this property right now.”

They ended up going through with it after the 6-hour session. They deannexed the property, and then Brownsville went ahead with the moratorium a few days later. So now, technically, the 444-acre parcel that SpaceX has is completely out of the jurisdiction. It’s back in Cameron County’s jurisdiction, which does not have a moratorium, and so they’re safe.

It’s this really weird thing. I haven’t seen this yet, at least. It’s a very clever way to play the moratorium game: “I’m not in your jurisdiction anymore. You can’t get me.” Now they’re safe to build whatever they want there. Some of our subscribers know what they’re building there, but it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

This is a 444-acre parcel right near Starbase, right?

Yeah, right next to Starbase.

Yeah.

I just wanted to say this is what I mentioned earlier. It’s really important to make the difference between county jurisdiction and city jurisdiction, because that matters a lot. A city is not subject to a county moratorium, so at the individual-project level, that will matter a lot.

4. Cheap Political Signaling

Can you give examples of some more differences between local and state moratoria? When I see the map that just has a big red shade over Texas and says there’s a statewide moratorium, or I see some announcement in the news, it’ll obviously seem like, “Oh, Texas is going to stop data center building.” But clearly, a ton of projects are going forward for all the reasons that you just explained.

So maybe go between state and local, and the difference between county and city, in some more detail on some given projects.

We have to look at each moratorium individually, especially the state ones. A lot of it is also, in our opinion, political signaling, especially with the upcoming November elections, which I can delve deeper into later.

Looking at each state moratorium—oh, great, we have the—yeah, those are the local moratoria.

But just some examples: political posturing might be—

Necessary for people who are trying to get elected in November. Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia—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 from a people perspective, right?

Yeah. Here you can see the top 4 states, which account for roughly half of the local instruments in the US: Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia. The fact that these cluster in the Midwest and the South is mainly because this is where the build-out has been the fastest.

But the amount of local moratoria being adopted doesn’t necessarily correlate with or lead to a state-level moratorium. In Michigan, there are 45 that are currently enacted, the majority of which were adopted late last year, in 2026. The trigger was the data center tax exemption that the governor signed in late 2024, and that set off a rush of proposals across the state. Yet we see no pipeline exposure, so the largest projects keep moving forward.

One thing I want to highlight is that this is fairly cheap political signaling. That’s not to say it’s the sole purpose—maybe some politicians are trying to repel data centers—but it’s very cheap political positioning.

We included a poll in the article. We administered it to a sample of the American electorate and asked questions about AI and people’s opinions on AI. We have a full data set outside of this, and we’re going to keep doing this through the election cycle, most likely, and probably afterward, too, because this is going to be more and more important as time goes on.

The most interesting result was that some people were net positive on AI while being net negative on data centers. That was very odd if you were one of the people who thought data centers were the physical manifestation of AI anxiety—a big white box you could point to that physicalizes the problem with what’s going on.

It wasn’t really about AI. The reasons cited were, number one, power, and then water. For candidates running in these elections, this is a really good point to harp on. Many people aren’t happy with data centers, and it’s a nice touchpoint for everybody to campaign on: “I’m going to ban them. I just put out this moratorium. It’s not actually doing anything, but I’m anti-data center just as much as you guys.”

We do expect this to continue through November and afterward.

We're going to have to see how stuff plays out, but we probably don't anticipate it slowing down too much, or at least not on the “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 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, Reyk, a major campaign issue.

Yeah.

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 Pennsylvania.

Yeah. I mean, this is clear political signaling, I think, 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. 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 Bibin, the CEO and founder of Lambda, was talking about how he wants to debunk misinformation about data centers. 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. You wouldn't put it in this red area down here.”

Stephen responds, “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 didn't realize it. That was funny. I saw that the other day.

I mean, driving past them, too—if you go through Virginia and Ashburn, where they have Data Center Alley or whatever, it just looks like a bunch of warehouses. If they're genuinely using different cooling methods, where it's kind of zero-water-use or whatever, the water consumption is not really a problem. Even in the SpaceX agreement at Starbase, they committed to giving back more water than they were going to consume, right? It's going to be through some filtration processes, whatever it may be.

5. The SpaceX De-Annexation

The 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 this?

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 this earlier—these executive actions bypass the legislature. So it installs a pause that those governors can control and revoke, and it denies the moratorium camp a stronger regulatory or permanent instrument.

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

Yeah, they usually last 6 months to 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 regulations—regulations that weren't there before all of those data centers started to pop up, before the project developers came to those local governments and put forward a proposal to develop a data center.

Makes sense. So, can you maybe talk through what an affected developer might be thinking right now? You go through all the list, and then there are 3 that are actually in the wrong county. The instrument is in place, the permitting that they have is set up, and they're about to break ground or are halfway through construction, and they're being affected by this.

Do you think that, even in those small, specific cases, they're going to try to work through the political process? Or do you think they're going to cancel the project, 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 have their permits already, so they're not going to be affected by the moratorium. It's really important to stress that those moratoriums only affect projects that don't have their permits in hand.

The New York moratorium affects environmental permits. A lot of those local moratoriums also affect environmental permits, building permits, or zoning permits. So it's quite early-stage.

If a developer is really—if time is an issue and they want to have their project on the ground as soon as possible—there are other ways to go about this. They will perhaps develop somewhere else or pull a SpaceX move. There are ways to go around this.

Interesting. How about the statewide stuff? Local moratoriums may require a different approach than statewide ones, which lead to delays as opposed to cancellations, or legal posturing, moving around, and maneuvering.

6. New York vs Texas

Yeah. 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 wouldn't have happened in the first place, right?

Perhaps we can go a bit more in depth on the New York moratorium and the Texas moratorium—how they differ and how they're also similar. The New York one was the first-ever statewide moratorium in the US. It was adopted in July, and it pauses state environmental permits for new data centers of 50 megawatts or more until July 2027.

That gives the state of New York time to write what they call a generic environmental impact statement. 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 by 6 to 10 months.

Yeah, that's so interesting.

Literally 2 years from now—we're talking about 1.5 to 2 years from now. I mean, that's—

Forever.

In the future—

In data center world.

Right.

Right. Right.

And we also see that there's—I can go quickly over those projects that are delayed. Stream Data Centers is special because it's the only one that had an application 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 TeraWulf in the green there—I mean, this is a public company, so they're claiming there's no change right now. Do you think that's real, or is this doable?

I mean, doable, right? I think when looking at their—I don't know, they kept moving the site back regardless. I think it used to be late 2027 or early 2028. Now, in their investor documents, it's been 2029 for a bit.

And so, I mean, it's 2029, right? That's a century away for me. I only know the next 12 to 18 months. Anything beyond that is early-stage or fictional at this point.

Yeah. Yeah. They vibe-coded or quad-coded data centers on a previous one.

People just like a website and say, “I have a data center. You should invest with me.”

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

Exactly. Okay. So maybe we talked about Texas a little bit earlier. Skipping that, you guys talked about Pennsylvania, Oregon, and other states that are posturing like they're going to have a statewide moratorium, but now they're not going to. 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, both Pennsylvania and Oregon were facing the same political and public pressure, but they chose not to impose a blanket pause.

In Pennsylvania, the governor's order is a conditional permitting regime. That essentially means that it slows unvetted projects, but it doesn't stop vetted ones.

Essentially, what the order does is instruct 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 nondisclosure 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. What it does is lengthen and broaden the pre-permit diligence.

This has the greatest impact on speculative projects, so serious, well-vetted projects still get through. And then in Oregon, this one has even fewer consequences, I would say. It's the most recent one; it was adopted earlier this month. There, the governor paused data center projects on state-owned land for a year.

And this again has no impact on our forecast.

Controversial to build a data center in the state park up on—I don't know. I'm trying to think of one. They weren't proposing data centers by Cannon Beach, at 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 the use of NDAs in data center projects. Can you give an example? It seems kind of crazy. Are they putting the state under an NDA, or the local government, or something?

Yeah, no, that actually happens a lot. Many of the hyperscalers do this. That's how local people and 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. That's when anti-data-center community organizations form, because they weren't aware of the project and the developer had signed an NDA with the local government.

Some of this stuff seems sensible. I think it's silly to put city council members under an NDA so they can't tell the citizens they represent what's going on in the town. I don't know.

No, that ends in a lot of lawsuits. We've seen a lot of lawsuits on both sides.

Yeah, I think we don't want to say all of it's political signaling, as Maya brought up earlier, and that's a good point. A lot of these people and governments are getting blasted with data center applications and may not know how to check them thoroughly. They may not know how to verify whether the state or the city, county, or whatever it may be, has enough resources.

The NDA thing is quite common, honestly. I remember there was a project where AWS had done this a few times. I think there was one in Ireland where they were found out to be behind a project, and then everybody blew up and nobody was happy about it. Maybe we can just be a little more transparent. We don't have to hide behind NDAs or get all this political backlash.

We can be open about what's going on here. The data center isn't burning through that much water, and it's probably not going to annihilate your electricity prices. It should be okay.

7. City Council Alpha

Yes, that makes perfect sense, guys.

Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about your experience looking into the city council meeting minutes? Do you have any fun stories about local opposition to some of this stuff?

There are tons.

You guys are literally listening in to some of these city council meetings, right? Or at least—well, they have YouTube videos. They're on Instagram sometimes. Sometimes I find very valuable information—

Looking at an Instagram reel or something.

Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. It's only there because the document hasn't been published yet. Local governments—and governments in general—often take a crazy amount of time to update their records.

Sometimes there's also crazy alpha in these little areas. In the right anti-data-center Facebook group, you'll get the entire project layout and plan because it's hosted in a closed town hall. Someone took a photo of every poster board, and it's amazing.

But no, I mean, going through the county meeting minutes, you can go through some of these sessions.

Overwhelmingly, the vibe is that everybody hates these projects. I did not hear really any citizens coming in there and supporting them. Obviously, this is the review-bias thing: I'm only going to leave a review if I love it or if I hate it.

Everybody in that county or city meeting is viscerally against the project. They're saying, “No, we're not doing this to my city. I've had a farm here for a century.”

It's kind of impressive that, despite all of that, these things keep going through. The pushback is overwhelming sometimes.

Yeah. NIMBY is on the national political stage, I think, with what's going on here. Actually, Reyk, did I tell you the better acronym my uncle told me?

My uncle—rest in peace, Uncle Bruce—was working on energy systems in Ontario. He was specifically working on a nuclear power plant that they were trying to move around and all this stuff. He ended up going through all these political processes and dealing with people who opposed it.

He started calling them BANANAs instead of NIMBY: “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. Light-industrial buildings are pretty quiet, and people are using them to post on their Facebook pages about their opposition to the projects.

It's a good point. It's not like, when I'm looking at these county meeting minutes or listening to people in these meetings pushing back against the projects, they're saying, “Make it a little bit smaller,” or, “Give back to the community a little bit more.”

It's not that. It's, “Not here. Go somewhere else. I don't care where it is. You can't do anything to change my mind. You need to go away.” BANANA is more applicable. 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.

Yeah, and the developers are still trying to woo the local population by coming out with those huge community-benefits packages: building a school, building roads, and trying to convince people that a data center is a good thing.

You don't seem convinced that these care packages—the important infrastructure they give everybody—are actually going to work or change anybody's mind.

It's not working. I think they have to address the concerns of the population at the root—the environmental concerns and the noise concerns—not put a bandage on them by proposing all of those community benefits.

Yeah, that's my opinion.

I'm really curious to see how this will go. There have been projects in the past that have done good community work. It's not foreign; it's actually been somewhat commonplace for the hyperscalers. They'll say, “We're planting a million trees,” or, “We're adding another piece of water-utility infrastructure to your city.”

I think Amazon even had a beehive on a roof once. Whatever that was. I'm pretty sure they hosted a whole beehive on their roof, and I thought, “I guess that works.” But this has been around for a while. I just don't know if it's going to solve the opposition problem. I don't know what does.

8. Advice for Developers

I'm not trying to play armchair political analyst here, but as we wrap up, for all the developers listening to this podcast and trying to figure out how to get their projects through, give me your 3-step plan for getting the political opposition to calm down a bit.

I don't think—I don't think—Maya, go ahead.

I would say, first, if you're SpaceX and you have this kind of leverage, you can pull a maneuver like the Brownsville de-annexation. I think that's becoming part of the toolkit. It has been part of SpaceX's toolkit from the start: create your own town.

Sorry.

Create your own town.

Yeah, create your own. Option number 1. Okay, what else can you do?

Well, I think, as I said, hear the community's concerns. To all the developers out there, you either have to go somewhere else, hard-ball it and start your own town, or come with some better vibes when you're putting these things up.

Or maybe go into the middle of Texas—of nowhere—in an unincorporated county, on some random land. You have to be careful, though. Two episodes ago, Nico came on and we were talking about the middle of nowhere, and he said something about middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin. Somebody got in our Spotify comments and said Wisconsin is not the middle of nowhere.

I thought about that while saying this. Maybe some people in Texas will be mad if I say that, so let's be careful here.

Most of the time, a developer won't abandon a project completely. If it's not relocation or redesign, they'll try to convince the local population. They can also go the route of litigation if they feel they can win that way.

For example, if a project is already underway and then a new regulation comes into place, we've seen that a lot as well. Overall, moratoriums tend to cause projects to relocate or be reshaped rather than lead to a meaningful delay or permanently stop them.

Yeah, I think you just go somewhere else.

Middle of nowhere, Abilene, Texas. I’m going to target some people now. Whoever’s in Abilene.

I think another thing that might be important is trying to find brownfield land—land with existing approvals already in place and existing entitlements—because the developers won’t need to go through all those requirements. That’s probably better than trying to develop on a greenfield site that needs rezoning.

Yeah. I think maybe this is the strategy that you guys are saying the developers are already pursuing, but that Jeremie kind of referred to when he dropped in: 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 the others that do are going to end up with enough to actually build what they need. You’re going to get into a space where you have 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.

You should buy the research. Yeah.

Yeah. You should buy the model. You would know all of this and more. You would have known it earlier. Yeah.

Okay, what did we miss? Any closing comments you want to make?

I think, just to reiterate what Jeremie said, the people who benefit at the end of the day—especially in Texas—are behind-the-meter developers and operators with power that is already secured. The Texas audit only touches ERCOT queue projects, so all of those fully islanded campuses are outside the scope. Also, on-site generation and gas midstream—turbines, gensets, and anyone dealing with the ERCOT uncertainty and craziness.

You’re probably going to see some people switching to just BTM because it’s easier, right? I don’t need to wait to be told that I’m not making Batch 0. I’m just going to go ahead and find a gas pipeline and call it a day. It might be a little bit more expensive, but my timeline will probably be shorter, and there’ll be less of a hassle on the financing side. So BTM is 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, subscribe to the data center energy industrials model. These fine books that we have explain all the things about moratoriums today and can work for you.

Perfect. Perfect.

It’s great to be here.

Good to be here. Always a pleasure. Jordan, nice job. One under your belt. Now you’ve got to come back and join when Reyk’s not here so that you can beat him. We can start stacking more on this guy.

Okay. Next week.

Next week.

Leaving me?

You’ve got another article coming next week. What are you doing?

Sorry. Are you speaking to me?

You’ve got another article coming next week. We’re going to talk about next week: Moratoriums, round 2.

Yeah, I’ve got some more policy and regulatory things coming up.

We’ve got nothing in the newsletter pipeline, but we’re cooking some crazy political stuff. I think that’s the goal.

Okay, guys. I’ve got to jump, but it’s been a pleasure.

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