All the Data Center News That’s Fit to Print

1. Pulaski County, Arkansas – A major utility sued the biggest newspaper in Arkansas over reporting on a data center energy deal. It’s a crucial case to follow.

• The lawsuit Entergy filed last week against the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette centers on whether the newspaper was legally able to publish about an Entergy deal with Google around payments for a large solar farm to power a data center. It claims the information reported was a trade secret accidentally released by the state public services commission.
  
• In a statement to a local ABC station, the utility claimed Google’s “electricity contract may be confidential to newspapers,” and that the publication also erroneously reported on the solar farm financing. Entergy is seeking a temporary restraining order blocking the publication from reporting any more information in its possession that would qualify as theirs or Google’s trade secrets, and claims they believe more information is in the publication’s possession that may be reported in the future, according to federal court filings.
• So far, the utility has been unable to win the stoppage and U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky rejected their request on Wednesday. The case is proceeding and I will be checking in regularly for you on this one.
• Why is this case so important? This is easily the most aggressive communications response to public reporting on a previously-unknown deal related to a data center. At a time when non-disclosure agreements are a profound liability for the sector, I am surprised to see a utility go as far as a federal court challenge.

2. Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania – Speaking of hardcore legal strategies, have you ever heard of a data center developer asking every local official to recuse themselves?

• This week, town leaders in the town of Archbald rejected a legal request from a developer for quite literally every deciding voice to withdraw from considering their project. Instead, the developer Cornell Realty Management asked for an independent hearing examiner to oversee their project permitting application because the officials’ previous statements against development apparently could qualify as improper bias. They didn’t bite. Now the town has roughly 45 days to decide on the project.
  
• The overcrowded data center destination of Archbald is ground zero for the Keystone State data center backlash and has been highlighted numerous times in national media as a flashpoint in AI hyperscale development. Gov. Josh Shapiro visited the town in May as part of trotting out his then-voluntary standards for the sector. Since May, Shapiro’s sought to make those rules essentially a requirement for state permits, at least for now.
  
• I drove through Archbald a few weeks ago. The collection of data centers around you while winding its northern Pennsylvania foothills are impossible to ignore, as well as the sprawling sections of deforestation along a highway that crosses underneath power line after power line. I can understand why some residents there might be irritated by even more of this coming to town.

3. Loudon County, Virginia – Data Center Alley is giving us our first real glimpse of what data center legislating could look like if Democrats control at least one chamber of Congress.

• Rep. Suhas Subramanyam represents all of Loudon County, making him probably the most important elected member of Congress on the data center front. On Thursday, he introduced a slate of four bills targeting public concerns about data centers, including two separate bills requiring the Energy Department and National Institutes of Standards and Technology to craft best practices for the sector, respectively. One of the bills would make states create unique electricity price rules for data centers compelling them to pay more, known as “large load tariffs,” and the remaining proposal would require a national strategy related to defense issues and data centers.
  
• Subramanyam is a first-term congressman with little experience in the federal legislature to bolster any claims he’ll get these bills into law. But this is a huge issue for him and a lot of this seems to have legs with key Democrats. The bill going after DOE is cosponsored by Reps. Mike Levin, Mike Quigley, and Veronica Escobar, and his proposal to create a large-load tariff dovetails with a similar idea floated by Sen. Martin Heinrich. It all feels like kismet, and would represent a soft touch compared to any kind of land use restriction.
  
• I don’t think Democrats will pass any major legislation should they retake the chamber. But time and time again, when local residents aggrieved at large-scale development can’t get what they want from county or state leaders, they turn to their members of Congress to act. It’s happened with Republicans and renewables, and now it’s happening with Democrats and data centers.

4. Lane County, Oregon – The second largest city in Oregon is now turning down data centers, just as the governor starts saying no to anything on state land.

• This week we learned the city of Eugene rejected a request for a former semiconductor plant to be for a data center, claiming its zoning code for IT projects doesn’t include them at all. The old former plant to me is representative of the industrial techlash; it used to be a major employer locally until it was closed around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, and now it won’t be used for where investment in heavy industry is going today.
  
• Eugene’s denial demonstrates just how toxic data centers have become in Oregon when they once were courted as a form of economic development. Lane County itself scores above a 70 risk for both renewables and data centers in the Heatmap Pro database, which is primarily a reflection of how much protected acreage and large landowners are located in the large, bucolic, and forested county in western Oregon.
  
• On Tuesday, around the same time Eugene’s rejection was made public, Gov. Tina Kotek north of Lane County announced a pause on all state right-of-way and land use permit issuances for data centers. Kotek said the move focused on state land, which is technically true, and it’s a far cry from a statewide moratorium, which the governor claims state law doesn’t allow her to create on her own. However, she’s calling it a moratorium in the press.