Power & grid
Brazil's new ten-year energy plan budgets 3.7 GW for big loads. The data center queue alone is 26.2 GW.
EPE's PDE 2036, opened for consultation on 8 October, takes large data centers from about 3 TWh to about 30 TWh a year. That is real growth and still about one gigawatt planned for every seven requested, and the R$ 127.1 billion transmission budget is sized to the plan, not the queue.
Google just ordered 890 megawatts of nuclear uprates at 11 reactors. The same turbine and transformer queue is now 15 percent of what America built in 20 years.
A 20-year Google PPA with Constellation funds $4.3 billion of upgrades across six PJM sites, six days after Amazon signed a 190 MW uprate at Calvert Cliffs. The binding inputs are turbines, generators, transformers and enriched fuel, and Brazil still sends uranium to Russia to cover part of Angra's fuel.
Michigan just priced what it costs a hyperscaler to walk away: fifteen years of bills
Regulators approved DTE Electric's 20-year contracts for Google's 1 GW Van Buren Township campus on October 1, with an 80 percent minimum bill and a termination payment worth at least 15 years of minimum charges. Brazil asks large loads for three years of grid charges. China skips the question by wiring the generation to the server.
Washington found 23 gigawatts inside power lines that already exist. The order is aluminum, not copper.
DOE selected 31 SPARK projects on September 24: $1.9 billion federal against $3.35 billion of cost share, more than 1,500 miles of line rebuilt and nearly 21,000 miles instrumented. PPL's Pennsylvania award names the conductors. Brazil's planner listed the same instrument as an option and has costed conventional new build instead.
The cheapest new nuclear megawatt in America is a turbine, not a reactor. Google just subscribed to 96 of them.
Georgia Power filed a tariff on September 21 that lets a hyperscaler pay for uprates at Vogtle and Hatch and take the carbon credits. The physical order is turbines, pumps, motors and transformers. The whole half-century American uprate program produced 8,030 megawatts, less than Georgia Power's own six-year load forecast.
Texas Just Closed the Door Data Centers Were Using to Get Around Texas
Abbott's September 21 letter orders TCEQ to issue no permits sought by data center projects, with no end date and only an October 19 reporting deadline. The August order reached the ERCOT interconnection queue. This one reaches the island-mode projects that were built specifically to avoid it.
Google and Nvidia reopened a dormant 2014 trade group. The asset they bought was regulatory standing.
The AI Energy Management Alliance launched September 16 with three founders and eighteen launch partners, built on the shell of a demand response body that had gone quiet. It lobbies for flexible load in place of network upgrades. That is not a neutral swap: wires and flexibility order different materials on different decades.
Brazil's data center connection queue is 26.2 gigawatts. The transmission that has actually been costed unlocks four.
EPE's own numbers: requests jumped from 19.8 GW to 26.2 GW in the sixty days after Redata was published. The only package studied, costed and recommended is R$ 1.6 billion in São Paulo, and it opens about 4 GW.
Georgia cleared 3.2 gigawatts for OpenAI in 42 days without saying what will generate it
The Public Service Commission let a fully redacted contract close on a staff review that ended one day before commissioners next met. Georgia Power says the typical household saves $15 a month from 2029. The fuel behind the 3.2 GW has not been disclosed.
Big Tech's turbine workaround is a marine engine. HD Hyundai just sold 1,000 MW of them.
Two gigawatt-scale engine deals landed in four days. Reciprocating engines won this cycle by beating the gas turbine queue. Wärtsilä's newest US order delivers in 2029 and 2030, which is where the turbine slots already were.
The AI Buildout Has the Money. It Cannot Buy Enough Transformers.
Google lifted 2026 capex to as much as $205 billion this week. The binding constraint is no longer capital, it is copper, electrical steel, and the transformers made from them. Brazil sits on both ends of that squeeze.
Virginia and New Jersey put a price on data center power on the same day
Governor Spanberger signed a $0.011 per kilowatt-hour data center electricity tax on June 30 that hit Data Center Alley on July 1. New Jersey lawmakers sent a 50-megawatt take-or-pay bill to Governor Sherrill hours later. Two mechanisms, one signal: the state cost of AI-driven power is now inside the Overton window.
PJM tells AI data centers to run on diesel as record peak looms
Secretary Wright signed a second Section 202(c) order Tuesday, letting PJM shift 50 MW-plus data centers onto backup generators through July 3. The grid operator forecasts a July 2 peak that would break the 2006 record.
Chevron and Microsoft skip the grid. Project Kilby puts 2.67 GW behind the meter in Pecos, Texas.
A 20-year PPA, a co-located gas plant in the Permian, GE Vernova turbines, and Engine No. 1 as financier. The hyperscaler power model just changed.
The gas turbine is the new GPU. GE Vernova booked 100 GW and the queue closes through 2029.
Q1 2026 data center equipment orders at GE Vernova exceeded all of 2025. Lead times push 2029 to 2030. Meta and Microsoft signed multi gigawatt behind the meter gas deals this spring. The watt gap has a supplier.
100 GW of gas turbine backlog. Three-year wait. The AI buildout rediscovers the F-class.
GE Vernova's gas turbine backlog hit 100 GW in Q1. Data center electrification orders alone ran $2.4 billion, more than all of 2025. New slots get delivered in 2029. The Williams-Meta Socrates plant just got cleared in Ohio on June 9. Gas is the lock-in.
13 GW of hyperscaler nuclear PPAs. Less than 20 percent of demand. The fuel chain is the real story.
A June 2 Carnegie paper audits every hyperscaler nuclear deal and gets to 102 TWh a year against a mid-range data center demand of 560. The next bottleneck is enrichment, where DOE just put $900 million into Piketon and Brazil's Resende sits idle on its second phase.