300 Datacenter Bans, 3 Projects Delayed: Moratoriums Explained

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Seminalysis Weekly. I'm joined this week by Maya and Reyk from our Data Center Energy and Industrials team. We're going 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 thanks

Thanks.

for having us.

Happy to be

Okay.

here on my first podcast.

She's

Love

it. Yeah, yeah. Welcome, Maya. Okay. So very first, up front, Maya, could you take us through just 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. 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 the

this past summer, mostly through executive orders rather than legislation. and governments use them for I would say two main reasons. they use them because many zoning codes were written before anyone was considering those huge 100 plus 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. so lo yeah so what w how this piece came about

Makes sense, yeah.

is we

We've all seen like in the headlines over the past year, especially in the summer, that US data center build out like it looked like it was coming under increasing pressure, with one moratorium after another being announced, and then several stakes states taking action. First New York, then Texas, pausing the next step in the aircot interconnection queue.

then Pennsylvania and Oregon, which we touched upon on the in the article, also taking measures but stopping short from an actual moratorium. and yeah, o also over the past year and a half, so it's a quite recent phenomenon, more than three hundred 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, the a visible peak in May, June of this year.

So it 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 w what do you see?

yeah,

maybe I think it's a bit early to say. it could there could be a 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 six months are slowly expiring.

So what's the methodology generally that you are using to track these? Like if you're having a cumulative

Mm-hmm.

three hundred plus and there's I mean many more townships, I guess, or 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 they were popping up all across the US, I 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 were 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 plus local instruments, actions, proposals. we have a guest.

Ha ha ha.

What's up?

Unannounced guest.

Third Continent has entered the podcast here. We've got Jeremie calling in from where are you?

In Bangkok. But sorry, I don't want to interrupt.

Yeah.

You were s y you were saying, Maya, it seemed interesting. You were saying, please.

I was in the flow

there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I I was talking about how I build the data center moratorium database tracking over four hundred local instruments across seventeen states in the US and each one through the whole life cycle, so from proposed to either enacted or rejected, also like expired, lifted, etcetera.

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 n 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 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 two 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 thing that the moratorium gates and a bunch of other factors. And in the end, seventy four of the seventy seven fell out and only three remained. So that's

7.6% of what is inside a restricted boundary. Those projects were the AWS project in Ohio, a neocommercial point, the North Point campus in Pennsylvania, and a core site expansion in Colorado.

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 you're tracking, said there's three hundred plus total moratoriums across the US. I mean the chart Yeah.

That are enacted a as we speak. Yeah.

they're affecting three projects that you can find.

All of this stuff on the chart is is actively

Correct.

affecting three projects. I mean, yeah. So that's that's like I'm

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can explain why

why well, first of all, most of those moratoriums, I think around I think I had it in the in the article, around eighty percent 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 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 high level on moratoriums and then the DC guy can can drop. Jeremie, h like when you hear something like this, like w everywhere in the news moratoriums is going on right now. And then it's actually only affecting three projects by our tracking right now. Obviously that can change, but do you th 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 some of these future sites. we we don't call them delays because we think hey those those sites that maybe have been actually cancelled or or delayed or postponed or whatever, those were never like projects that would have a material impact to the way we forecast the markets.

Because they were already very speculative, because we look at the permits, because we look at the filings, 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 forecast for let's say twenty twenty nine. 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 a 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 upgrades and you bring your own power and you don't sort

It's

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 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 built out in the US. We would be worried if we start seeing really material, like state level moratorium that is imposing 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, we would probably be fucked, you know.

but for now we're fine, essentially.

Yeah.

Or also any legislatively imp if that's a word,

W and if that said, well.

imposed moratorium at the

Jeremie, my let my talk your buddy on the he dropped off.

he left. Yeah, I was about to say if if a an actual moratorium is passed through the legislature, that would be, I think, quite different from having a governor enact in executive order that is revocable and that also can expire once the governor is voted out or something like that, that it it it's easier to

Yeah, to evoke but yeah,

Jeremie 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

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

Yeah.

project that forms part of a city. Because a campus inside

an incorporated city within that county is outside the the moratorium. It also has to be enacted and still in force. It has to overlap with the project's timeline and that's very important. The proud 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 the affected approval approval in hand before the freeze, even without shovels in the ground, and they can't be too far out, like a three to six month pause that expires years before a a project that's planned for twenty twenty eight or beyond.

It also has to cover the use. So many instruments apply only above a certain megawatt or a 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 pre-existing 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

Yeah the

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 the there's one prominent example that we touched upon in the note, which is the carve out for spade SpaceX in in Te Texas, which maybe Reyk wants to touch upon.

Yeah, Reyk, what's your

Yeah.

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, you know, jurisdiction. And they bought the plot and they were fighting for

They're not fighting, but like, you know, they were in the courthouses for a long time trying to be like, listen, listen, 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 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 six hour town hall and everyone's like, Why are we even here? Why do they need to rush this so much? And SpaceX 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 six 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 four hundred fifty forty-four 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, 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 four hundred and thirty four acres right near Starbase, right?

Yeah, this is sorry.

In in yeah.

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 the difference between the county jurisdiction and the city jurisdiction because that matters a lot. because the city takes over, it 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 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, Texas is gonna 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 which I can also delve deeper into a bit later, looking at each state moratorium. great, we have the

yeah, those are the so the local moratoriums. sorry what yeah.

But just some examples of maybe some states where some

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.

Yeah, so

And

here you can see the so the top four states which account for for like 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 and and the south of the of the US

And this is mainly where the build-out has been the fastest. but the amount of local moratoriums being adopted doesn't necessarily correlate or or lead to a state level moratorium. So in Michigan, there were 45 that were enacted 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. so the largest

And there's

projects keep

Moving forward.

There's like and there's also like one thing I kinda wanna highlight, 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, you know, politicians are trying to like, you know, repel data centers, but very cheap political positioning because we actually included in the article, like we administered a poll to the American electorate, right? Whereas like, okay.

We surveyed, I think, some couple, some sample of the American electorate, and we asked all of our own questions about like AI and everybody's opinions on AI. We have like a full data set outside of this. We're gonna keep doing this through the election cycle, most likely, and probably afterward too. Like this is gonna be more and more important as time goes on. But I think the most interesting thing was like in some of the results of our data set.

You found that some people were actually net positive on AI while being net negative on data center. Or like in aggregate, this was the case. Which was like very odd if you were kind of one of the people who thought, you know, 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, you know, physicalizes my 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 you like many, many people are not happy with data centers. And this is a nice touch point for everybody to kind of campaign on, to be like, look, I'm I'm gonna 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 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 gonna have to see how stuff plays out, but probably don't anticipate it s 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 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 I with the ongoing AI doomsday scenarios shaping broader public opinion, I I don't see this improving in the in the near term. and it's it's become, as you said, Reyk, like a major campaign issue. And

Yeah.

and it 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

Yeah.

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, don't know exactly what people have concerns with. one example that I saw on

X was when Stephen Balobin, 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, 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 Stephen responds and says, I believe this, I mean this in the nicest way, but that building in the bottom red.

is actually Stream Data Center's Minneapolis two site. So you actually live beside a data center already and you didn't realize it. That was a fun one that I saw the other day.

Yeah, I mean I mean

yeah, I mean like driving past them too, like if you go through like Virginia and like Ashburn where they have its like data center alley or whatever, it just looks like a bunch of warehouses. And like I don't know, if 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 in by Starbase as well.

They committed to like give back more water than they were gonna consume, right? That's gonna be like through some filtration processes, whatever it may be. power side is a different story, obviously, but like 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 I think it's just gonna keep being topical.

Maya, what's

Yeah.

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 it installs a pause that those governors can can control and revoke, and it denies the pro moratorium camp a stronger regulatory or or

permanent instrument. Regulatory yeah, permanent instrument.

Okay, so you 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 f for

Yeah, they usually they usually last like six months, a year. There were a few that were eight eight eighteen 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 the project developers came to those local governments and asked them

and and put forward a proposal to develop a data center.

Makes sense. So can you th maybe talk through what an affected developer might be thinking right now? Like you go through all the list and then there's three that are actually in the wrong county, the instrument is in place, the permitting that they have is 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 gonna try to work through the political process or do you think they're gonna cancel the project and take their ball and go home and

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 gonna 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. the a lot of those local moratoriums it's also environmental or permit building permits or zoning permits. So it's quite early stage. and i i if a developer is really like

Time is an issue and they want to have their their project on the ground as soon as possible. There are other ways to to go about this they'll 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 mor moratoriums may be different to approach versus statewide ones which lead to delays as opposed to cancellations or you know, legal posturing, moving around, maneuvering?

Yeah, so they

rarely they don't usually lead to cancellations because we we we don't view projects that are that are essentially cancelled as cancellations because those are 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 US. 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 plant capacity

all of which is twenty twenty eight or later and we think it actually delays roughly eight hundred megaw megawatts of capacity from six to ten months. Yeah, so you can see

Yeah. That's so interesting that this is like literally

two years from now that we're talking about one and a half, two years from now. I mean, that's forever in the future

Yeah. Yeah.

in data center world, right?

Right, right. And we see also that there's I can go quickly over those those projects that are delayed. Stream Data Centers is is 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

Yeah.

Terra Wolf 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 that's real or is this

Yeah.

I mean doable, right? I think when looking at their I don't know, they're they kept moving the site back regardless. Like I think it used to be late twenty twenty-seven or early twenty twenty-eight story. Now in like their investor docs, it's been twenty twenty-nine for a bit ish. And so I mean it's twenty twenty-nine, right? Like that's that's a century away for me. Like I only I only know the next

twelve to eighteen months. Like anything anything beyond that is early stage or like fictional at this point.

Yeah, yeah. What

Yeah.

what they vibe coded or cloud coded data centers on a previous one?

Yeah.

And they know the

People just like

body coding up a website and saying, I have a data center, you should invest with me. Yeah, that's a little bit different.

Yeah, yeah. And then I can yeah,

by twenty twenty nine I can figure the whole thing out. Yeah. And give me give

huh.

me some give me a seed

Mm-hmm.

round and I'll do it for ya. 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 the governor's order

Is a conditional permitting regime. So it that essentially means that it slows unvetted projects, but it doesn't stop vetted ones. essentially what the order does is it 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 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 actually.

Nobody was proposing to to build a

data center in the state 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

Yeah.

or whatever it's called there. I'm making making a joke. Anyway. Okay, sorry, one one super interesting thing. on the Pen Pennsylvania side, you said it prohibits

Mm-hmm.

the use of of NBAs in data center projects.

Can you give an example like like it seems kind of crazy. Can you give an example of data center projects where they're putting what? The 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 that's how they all of a sudden that that the that's how local like 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 data center like community organization f organizations form because they weren't aware of of this because the developer has signed an NDA with the with the local government.

So some of this stuff seems kinda sensible. I I think it's kinda 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. Just maybe that's just Canadian brain talking. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I I mean like yeah, yeah. I

Yeah. And a lot of legal yeah, that

that ends a in a

I

lot of lawsuits. We've seen a lot of lawsuits

Yeah.

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 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 the state or whatever has enough resources for it, the city the city, the county, whatever it may be. The NDA thing is like

quite common, honestly. Like I remember there's like also a project where AWS was in AWS has done it a few times. I think like 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, you know, maybe we can just be a little more transparent, right? Like we don't have to we don't have to hide behind NDAs. And we don't have to get all this kind of like 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 gonna 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 you have any fun stories about local opposition to some of this stuff that you've seen?

Tons. Me me and me and my ad

Yeah. You guys are literally listening

into some of these city council meetings, right? Or at least looking at transcript. I find that so impressive.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like qu quite literally.

Yeah, they have

YouTube videos. I mean, they're on Instagram sometimes. Sometimes

Yeah.

I find very valuable information

Yeah, right?

looking at like an Instagram reel or something. It's crazy. And it's

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

only there because the document is not published yet, because often local governments, governments in general just take like crazy amount of time to update their websites and with the documents.

And and sometimes 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 because it's like hosted in a closed town hall, but they took a photo of every poster board. It's like 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 I did not hear

Yeah.

like really any citizens coming in there. And obviously this is like the review bias thing where I'm only gonna 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, nah, like like we're not doing this to my city. Like, you know, I 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. N NIMBY's on the national political stage, I think, going on here. Actually, Reyk, did it did have I told you the better acronym that my uncle taught told me way back in the day?

Mm-hmm.

My uncle, rest in peace, Uncle Bruce. He 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 all these like

sort of political processes and and dealing with people who opposed it. And he started calling them bananas. Because 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 what we've seen for people who are opposed to data centers right now. Like light industrial bus buildings, pretty quiet. You know, you are using

Yeah, yeah.

them to post on your Facebook page your opposition to them. I mean

Yeah,

no, it's a good point, right? It's not like I don't even it like if I'm looking at these like county minutes meetings or like these people in these like meetings talking back or like pushing it back against these projects, it's not like you should like, you know, make it a little bit smaller or like, you know, you should give back to the community a little bit more. It's like not here. Like go

Yeah.

go somewhere else. Like I don't care where it is. You can't do anything to change my mind here. You you need to go away.

And so yeah, I think banana banana's more applicable. There's no like it 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. Like basically.

Yeah.

Yeah. And the developers are still trying to like woo the local population by coming out with those huge like community

Yeah.

benefits packages, you know, building a school, building roads, trying to like, yeah, convince people that a data center is a good thing.

Yeah, we'll we'll see how it

That seems good though.

It's not working.

Yeah, I think they

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

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm like I I think I'm I'm really curious to see how this will go. I like there 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, you know, we're like planting a million trees or like, you know, we're adding another water utility infrastructure piece to your guys' city or I think Amazon had like a beehive on a roof once, whatever that was. But

Really?

yeah, I'm pretty sure they like hosted a whole beehive on their roof. And I was like, I guess that works, whatever. but like this has been around for a while. I just don't know if it's like 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 pol like armchair political analyst here or anything. I just

All the develop guys,

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

I I I don't think I don't I don't my or my go ahead.

Reyk says give up. Maya, what's your

Well, I 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 deannexation, that's I think that's becoming like part of the toolkit. I mean that's been part of the toolkit for SpaceX from the start.

Okay, start your own pound. Bullet number one, start

your own pound, right?

Yeah. Create

Sorry?

create your own town. Yeah.

Create your own panel. Option number one. Okay. What what else can you do, Maya?

Yeah.

well

I think as I said, like here the community's concerns, and and yeah.

To to all the developers out there, I think you just I think maybe

Yeah.

go somewhere else.

Better better vibes.

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, that doesn't affect populations.

Random random land. Yeah.

You gotta be you gotta be careful. Two episodes

ago n 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

No. I can

Mm-hmm.

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

Let's be careful here. Yeah.

But I mean mo most of the time a developer won't abandon a project completely. if it's not like relocation, redesign, trying to convince the local population,

or or even go they can also go the route of like litigation if they feel like they can win this way if the 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 like moratoriums they they tend to like

relocate or reshape projects, rather than lead to like a meaningful delay or or permanently stopping them.

Yeah. I think yeah, I think you just go somewhere else, yeah. I th I think

Yeah.

middle of nowhere, Abilene, Texas. I'm gonna I'm gonna target some people now. Whoever's in Abilene. Yeah, I'm

Yeah.

saying that. but

I think

another I I think another thing that might be important is trying to find buyright land, so land with like the existing approvals already in place, ing existing like entitlements, because they won't need the developers won't need to go through all those 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 the strategy that you guys are saying the developers are already pursuing, but that Jeremie kind of referred

Mm-hmm.

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.

Yeah.

And you're going to get into a space where you have like an oversupply of data center projects. And for those

Yeah.

out there who wanna know when we get to that space,

Subscribe to the model. Research, yeah.

Yeah,

you should buy the model. You would you would

Yeah.

know all of this and more. And you would have known it earlier. Yeah.

I subside.

huh.

Okay, what do we miss anything? Anything closing comments you want to make?

I think maybe like, yeah, who just to reiterate what Jeremie said, like who benefits at the end of the day, especially in Texas, are behind the meter developers and operators with power that is already secured. because the Texas audit only touches AirCOD Q projects. So all of those like fully islanded campuses, those are outside of the scope.

Also the yeah, on-site generation and gas midstream. so

Yeah.

yeah, turbines, gensets, all of that.

Like any any folks

any folks that are like kind of dealing with the Urcot 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 script subscribe to the Data Center Energy Industrials model so that these fine folks that we have explaining all the things about moratoriums today can work for you.

It

Perfect.

Perfect. Yeah.

was great to be here.

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

Nice job, Maya.

Yeah.

One under your belt. Now you gotta s 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. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

N next week he's leaving me.

Next week.

Next week.

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

he Sorry? Are you speaking to me or make?

And you got another article

coming next week? What are we

Yeah.

gonna talk about next week? Moratoriums round two?

Okay.

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 we're cooking some crazy political stuff, I think, is the goal.

we can we can cut the podcast like a a minute ago, but what's

Yeah, yeah.

what's what's cooking next week or after? You're doing more surveys?

We want to.

Well we're but tokonomics tokenomics team started on the surveys is and is leading on that, but we have to link with them. But I think we can keep what they're doing. I mean their questions are already quite comprehensive. I don't really know what we would add, to the actual surveys. But it would be

Maybe we can figure some. I think we should yeah.

cool to think about it, yeah.

Should go beyond

Mm.

the US. You should pull Malaysia and see what they think about data centers. If they like or not.

Could g can we do that?

Yeah.

Can we do that?

I don't know.

Yeah,

yeah. I mean in Europe

I'd be sick.

in Europe people are very anti data center, like

We'll see.

Like maybe we should pull like Finland and see what they think. But

Yeah.

what happens when

you go out for like a you know, one of these like ten PM dinners and you drink your wine with your friends and you're like, What do you did you ever do you just never talk about work or if you talk about work you're just like, Yeah, I I and then you tell them about data centers

No, we do. Yeah, yeah, we do.

Do they do they

and they go, I hate data centers. I can't believe like, what do they think about you doing?

Do they think you're

the enemy or no?

I mean when I tell someone I just met, you know, maybe friends of friends that what I do and that I focus on data centers, they'll be like, so you're the one like, you know, using up all the water. first of all,

Yeah.

I'm just doing the analysis on the industry. I'm not, you know.

No, I see your Claude Code spend. I don't know.

working for SpaceX.

Ha ha.

Why is birth to ours?

But yeah, I think it does have

a bad reputation.

Yeah, I've

Yeah.

gotten I've gotten some shit from my friends before too. They're like, you're you and BlackRock, you're fucking killing the world and it's like, my god Yeah, I

Yeah.

'Cause we're funded by BlackRock.

guess

we I don't know, I guess we're working with BlackRock or something. I I don't know. They're they give me shit for it though.

Yeah. Or I I get

sent articles by like close friends of mine about data centers and I'm like, I know, I work I work on them all day. Like But like, you know, I get that I I guess they want my opinion on it, so

And do you you

respond and you're like, I can't believe you're reading this trash article that repackages something that repackaged

Yeah.

our analysis, which is actually my work or something like that.

Exactly. All all

That's good.

work on data centers is is coming from us. Exactly.

should be coming through semi-analysis, the Bible.

We will know we made it. I all this almost happened to me. somebody sent me an article where like our data was used in it, not knowing that it like our data was it. But somebody will one day not read the article, send me something with a headline, and I'm sure one of us will be quoted in the article. I'll be like,

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

Yeah.

I know, because like we need the information to do this stuff.

I I said it, yeah.

Yeah.

That'll be pretty

Yeah, yeah.

that'll be pretty good when it happens.

I mean, do you know

I'm sure that happened.

did did you know that the word what was it, NeoCloud

Neo clo Neo Cloud.

was was coined by Dan? Yeah, that's crazy.

Yeah, I tell everybody.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like nobody believes I

feel like nobody believes me when I say that. Like I'll tell people externally,

Do that. I did.

I'm like, yeah, we're the ones who invented the word and they're like, No, you didn't I'm like, Yeah, great.

Yeah.

Dude, when you said when you brought up earlier hosted AI, do you know those guys? On their website, like right on there, there the the thing says neo clouds have a GPU waste problem. We fix it, right? so th there's many companies like this who will have neo clouds on like their website, their marketing materials had a conference or whatever. I've talked to two of them specifically where I told them that, like, hey, you know, I work at semi-analysis and before I said this, it it's like I work at semi-analysis.

th seeing they have neo cloud on their thing and they're like, What's that? So they don't know semi analysis and yet they use the word neo cloud to describe the business that they're operating in, which I find really funny.

Yeah, no.

That should be illegal.

This guy this guy

didn't know this guy didn't know us at all either. He didn't he was I was semi analysis like cool man, what do you guys do? I'm like, what the fuck? We like we invented your entire industry. Yeah.

But he's not

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Guys, I gotta jump. but yeah, been been a pleasure.

great job.

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