Power demand

Champlain Hudson energises and Cimarron Link and Southern Spirit progress, but planners say new lines still lag load growth and renewables

A 18 May emergency order lets the operator cut large loads before rolling blackouts; PJM warns the 2026 summer leaves little reliability margin

Data-center developers and European utilities lock in small modular reactors years before first concrete, betting on factory-built nuclear to feed compute and grids

The PUCT approved a new large-load process on 18 June; it allocates connections by transmission capacity and financing, not first-come-first-served

A developer sues the Imperial Irrigation District for ~260m gallons/yr from the drought-stricken river, one of a wave of suits, wells and settlements over data-center thirst

Wholesale power on the largest US grid nearly doubled year-over-year; states impose large-load tariffs while a foreign-influence subplot complicates the politics

Data-center load pushes the 2026 summer forecast past the 85.5GW record; ERCOT puts the odds of a June emergency at 0.09%

Related Digital breaks ground on three buildings on 250 acres; one of five new US sites pushing Stargate to ~7GW planned and >$400bn over three years

Data-center revenue ~$72.8bn; Vera Rubin ramps to full production by fall; guidance assumes zero China data-center compute, and the stock still slid

After the council rejected the Amazon-linked complex over desert water use, the city revoked a meter for improper use; Arizona regulators still cleared two project wells

Developers bypass grid queues with behind-the-meter gas: a 7.7GW West Texas permit, NextEra's 10GW, an Oracle–Bloom 2.8GW fuel-cell deal, and GE Vernova's 100GW turbine backlog

A $27bn Blue Owl-funded megacampus in Richland Parish triples its on-site gas to ~7.7GW, about seven times New Orleans' peak demand, via an expanded Entergy deal

Jensen Huang says orders are in and manufacturing is 'restarting'; BIS revised the license policy, but as of mid-2026 only a small number of H200s have actually shipped

A 50km spool that cost $300 now runs ~$2,500, the same bend-insensitive fibre feeds both FPV cables and hyperscaler racks

Nvidia invests in OpenAI; OpenAI commits to Oracle clouds; Oracle buys Nvidia chips, a self-referential money wheel as Oracle/Microsoft CDS spreads roughly double

Two Fairwater sites stitched by a dedicated AI wide-area network train one model in tandem, hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200/GB300 GPUs, 140kW racks, no UPS or gen-sets

Indiana's $11bn AWS megacampus runs ~500,000 Trainium2 chips for Anthropic; the partners now target up to 5GW, with Amazon guiding to ~$200bn capex in 2026

Meta's Talavera site would draw ~504m litres/yr mostly from the Tagus; Amazon seeks a 48% water rise in Aragón; Lleida banned data centers as drought collides with the AI build

First 1GW of Instinct MI450 deploys 2H 2026; the Helios rack targets ~3 AI exaflops with 72 MI455X accelerators, AMD's bid to break Nvidia's data-center grip

The 1.2GW Texas campus runs on Oracle Cloud with first GB200 racks delivered; Crusoe's $1.38bn Series E funds the expansion as SoftBank completes its $41bn into OpenAI