The Data Center Boom Faces Mounting Obstacles

The Data Center Boom Faces Mounting Obstacles

UtilityDive

The U.S. data center boom has entered a new, contradictory phase.

On the one hand, both data center construction activity and credible forecasts for near-term capacity additions to the electric grid to serve data centers remain robust. The Electric Power Research Institute, for example, said in February that data centers will represent up to 17% of U.S. electricity demand in 2030 and as much as 20% in 2035.

On the other hand, data center and utility infrastructure projects face a host of challenges. These include both physical constraints, such as equipment and labor shortages, as well as mounting public opposition driven by concerns about large-scale computing facilities’ impact on water supplies, the cost and reliability of power and natural gas supplies, and the quality of life in host communities. 

The upshot is that even some data center development projects advanced enough to appear in utility load forecasts with a named hyperscaler attached are not certain to move forward. 

Near Grand Rapids, Michigan, for example, a Microsoft data center touted by Consumers Energy faces an uncertain future amid local permitting delays. Another Microsoft-backed data center in Vineland, New Jersey, was recently hit with a $1 million fine for running dozens of gas-powered generators without the proper permits, and ordered to obtain them within 45 days or shut down.

A proposed Google data center that would interconnect in Xcel Energy’s Minnesota territory faces a court-ordered work stoppage to allow time for environmental review. 

 Last week, Oracle moved to protect itself financially from the delay or cancellation of Project Jupiter, a massive, 2.5-GW data center campus planned for Doña Ana County, New Mexico, after state regulators blocked a gas pipeline proposed to serve it.

Data center opposition “has reached a pitch I have never seen before in my 20-plus years in development,” Blake Nixon, president and CEO of Geronimo Power, told Utility Dive in an interview. 

This spring, officials in Nobles County, Minnesota, shot down a proposal by Geronimo to build a 400 MW “data park” there, despite the company’s efforts at community outreach. Now, Nixon said his team is considering alternative sites in nearby communities.

“[Data centers] are running into physical problems that are manifesting as market problems, political problems, regulatory problems and ultimately problems down on the ground,” he said.

In May, Goldman Sachs said only 50%-60% of planned data center capacity will come online as expected in the next two years amid delays and cancellations. 

And while the 36 GW of capacity added to the development pipeline in the first quarter of 2026 sounds impressive, that’s down 19% from the last quarter of 2025 as developers “continue to shift their focus to existing … pipelines in the face of an increasingly challenging development and regulatory environment,” Caitlin Connelly, a senior analyst with Wood Mackenzie, said in a July note.

Experts say these developments raise questions about just how much data center load will come online in the near term — injecting unwelcome uncertainty into utility planning cycles that must look years, even decades, into the future.

In the PJM Interconnection, real or perceived power scarcity is a major driver of both local opposition and top-down political backlash to the industry. The independent market monitor in July blamed data centers for 38% of charges at the most recent capacity auction.

The Democratic governors of Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey have taken action in recent months to push regulators to require data centers to bring more generation and transmission capacity online.

These moves are not only in PJM states with Democratic governors. Power scarcity and cost concerns have triggered organized opposition and political backlash to data centers in places developers until recently believed were sympathetic to their cause, like Texasand Utah.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, R, successfully pushed for a sweeping pause on data center grid interconnections that threatens up to 20% of the total U.S. development pipeline, BloombergNEF said earlier this month.

Utilities and data centers are responding in several ways. 

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Putin Gives Necessary Instructions to Ensure Security of Kaliningrad Region - Presidential Aide

Putin Gives Necessary Instructions to Ensure Security of Kaliningrad Region - Presidential Aide

Sputnik

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given all the necessary instructions to ensure the security of the Kaliningrad Region, and the relevant bodies are following them very carefully, Russian presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev said on Thursday.

"We talked about ensuring the security of the Kaliningrad Region... The president has given all the necessary instructions to the relevant structures, and they are working very carefully on this issue," Patrushev said at a working meeting with governor of the Kaliningrad Region.

If NATO tries to act on its threats against Kaliningrad, Russia will respond quickly and adequately, he stressed, adding that the alliance would regret any aggressive military action against the region.

This comes after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed that Russia had warned it would use its entire arsenal — including nuclear weapons — if the alliance attempts an air or sea blockade of Kaliningrad.

In May, Russia's Foreign Ministry said NATO was rehearsing scenarios to isolate Kaliningrad. Moscow has warned that a blockade attempt could spiral into a large-scale military conflict.

Climate Taxes, Energy Chokepoints, and Engineered Famine

Climate Taxes, Energy Chokepoints, and Engineered Famine

Mike Adams

The key that unlocks every technocratic slogan from the fourth industrial revolution to Build Back Better is a single historical fact: in 1957, Julian Huxley rebranded eugenics as transhumanism. Huxley was no innocent academic -- he was the first director of UNESCO and a central figure in the postwar eugenics movement, and he deliberately changed the name because 'eugenics' had become unspeakable after the horrors of the Third Reich. The same people who wanted to control who could breed simply changed the vocabulary but kept the agenda ^[9]. Klaus Schwab's language about merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds is not a description of progress -- it is a rebranded eugenics program with better marketing.

Digital identity, digital twins, programmable central bank digital currency, a social credit system, human augmentation, and the Internet of Bodies are all part of the dystopian future being rolled out by the globalist cabal under the banner of equity, and each of them is designed to thin the herd while concentrating power ^[10].

Robinson reveals that the climate agenda has always been two-fold: depopulation and a global carbon tax funding mechanism for a new world order. When the climate cultists could not sell enough carbon taxes to finance their ambitions, the same interests pivoted to war and energy chokepoints in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. 'Owning the weather' is a deadly serious attempt to take natural life-supporting climatic cycles out of the hands of nature and into the hands of a small clique of obsessive psychopaths ^[16]. Bill Gates' stratospheric aerosol injection for global dimming is an attack on the food supply itself, reducing crop yields across Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America ^[4].

Michael Yon's 'gigafamine' warning for 2027 is credible because fertilizer, LNG, and crude supply chains are being strangled. The book The Hunger Clock warned that the Strait of Hormuz crisis will starve millions by 2027 -- not because of oil, but because of the natural gas that is the feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer ^[17]. Most people look at Hormuz and see oil. The real weapon is fertilizer, and when the LNG supply is cut, the harvests collapse. The engineered famine is not an accident of war; it is the objective. The World Health Organization's own anti-fertility vaccine program and the UN's food-rationing schemes point in the same direction ^[14].

The climate change narrative is also dishonest because carbon dioxide is good for plants. CO2 is the gas of life, the raw material of photosynthesis, and any honest agriculturalist knows that higher CO2 concentrations increase crop yields. The climate narrative has been used to crush domestic energy production, destroy competitiveness in energy-intensive sectors, and justify the rationing of food and fuel ^[16]. In my analysis, starvation in South Asia and Africa is not an accident. It is a calculated outcome that intends to redraw maps after the die-off.

The AI systems being built by Anthropic and OpenAI are not simply advanced calculators or helpful assistants -- they are tools of mass manipulation engineered to compress human experience into deterministic outputs that serve the globalist agenda of depopulation, surveillance, and control ^[18]

As Robinson explained in our interview, Elon Musk's high basic income talk is a sales pitch for global communism, not a serious plan for human dignity. Universal basic income is the sedative that buys public acceptance of mass joblessness while the technocrats consolidate ownership of the machines.

Robinson's warning about transhuman legal status is absolutely real. If biology can be patented, then patented biology can strip you of your human rights. You become a licensed product rather than a person with inalienable rights. The same technocrats planning to replace workers also plan to replace the voters and the 'useless eaters,' and the legal architecture of digital ID, CBDCs, and programmable money is the scaffolding for that plan ^[20]. The right to exist, the right to work, and the right to own property are all on the chopping block, and the people who see it clearly need to act now.

Russia Threatens Nuclear Response If NATO Moves To Isolate Kaliningrad

Russia Threatens Nuclear Response If NATO Moves To Isolate Kaliningrad (Worthy News Briefing)

Stefan J. Bos

Russia has warned NATO that it could use nuclear weapons if the Western military alliance tried to cut off Kaliningrad, a heavily militarized Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea, as fighting continued in Ukraine killing and injuring numerous people.

In a document sent to NATO, Moscow accused the alliance of pursuing a “dangerous and reckless course” carrying “high risks of the outbreak of a direct armed conflict.”

The warning raised the prospect of Russian strikes against decision-making centers in NATO member states from the outset of such a conflict.

“Russia will be ready to use the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons,” Moscow warned if NATO countries attempted to isolate Kaliningrad from the rest of Russia.

The message was contained in a so-called “non-paper,” the diplomatic term for an informal communication, and came amid sharply rising tensions between Moscow and European NATO members.

NATO spokesperson Allison Hart confirmed receiving the Russian document but declined to disclose its contents.

“We have sent a response, noting that NATO is a defensive Alliance and none of our activities or exercises pose a risk to any part of Russia,” Hart explained. “We strongly denounce the threat of force, including any irresponsible nuclear rhetoric.”

She also called on Moscow to end its invasion of Ukraine.

A senior European defense official described the Russian message as the most serious threat of its kind since the Cold War, while a NATO diplomat characterized it as another attempt by Moscow to intimidate European nations.

Kaliningrad lies between NATO members Poland and Lithuania and is separated geographically from the Russian mainland. The territory hosts significant Russian military forces and has long been regarded as one of the most sensitive potential flashpoints between Moscow and NATO.

As the war intensifies, Russia has also stepped up economic pressure on European interests, placing the Russian operations of several major Western companies under temporary administration amid worsening relations with Europe.

Recent targets include Swiss food giant Nestlé, French retailer Auchan and German wholesaler Metro AG. Moscow has linked such measures to European support for Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia.

Since the war began, 135 foreign-affiliated companies, predominantly linked to European Union countries, have been subjected to temporary administration, according to Russian state media.A senior Russian government source said the widening crackdown was an “asymmetric” response to European sanctions and suggested other European companies could face similar measures.

The latest moves highlight how the Ukraine war is extending beyond the battlefield, with Moscow warning NATO over Kaliningrad and exerting economic pressure on Western companies while fighting Ukrainian troops in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War Two.

The Next Bioweapon Could Attack Our Genes

The Next Bioweapon Could Attack Our Genes

Darren Orf

• The confluence of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence is lowering the technical barrier for bioterrorism, according to some experts.

• Developing a weapon capable of attacking the human genome remains technically challenging—especially devising the means to do widespread damage

• The next threat may be mutagenic, teratogenic, or something else entirely, and the world is likely entering a new era of heightened vigilance against biological weapons.

  
  

  We live in an age of seemingly unending crises. The world continues to warm, pushing Earth into the sixth mass extinction event in its history. Intractable wars and conflicts rage on multiple continents. The U.S. life expectancy is now at the lowest it's been in 30 years. Then, there's artificial intelligence, a massive uncertainty bomb with the equal possibility to help solve—or exacerbate—all of the above.

  Nowhere is this more obvious than in the biomedical field, where AI's ability to pore over massive data sets, recognize patterns, and design novel viruses and bacteriophages is already reshaping research. This is only the beginning of what scientists call "synthetic biology," and like so many human breakthroughs, it could be critical to tackling medical crises, such as the rise of antimicrobial-resistant superbugs. But those tools could just as easily fuel a new age of bioweapons, a threat serious enough that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently called for a slowdown of AI development.

  Arms control experts have warned for decades about weapons that attack the human genome instead of the human body. And unfortunately, those warnings aren't hypothetical, since cruder chemical versions have already been used in warfare. Between 1962 and 1971, U.S. aircraft sprayed nearly 19 million gallons of herbicide across Vietnam. Much of it was Agent Orange, tainted during manufacture with TCDD—the most toxic dioxin ever identified, and a known human carcinogen. It causes birth defects and abnormalities in developing embryos.

  Of course, Vietnam wasn't the only theater of war where weapons were used that caused prolonged medical issues, whether cancer or reproductive problems. In the early 1980s, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the USSR of using Trichothecene mycotoxins (a known teratogen), otherwise known as "yellow rain," in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan. In 1995, Saddam Hussein's regime admitted to the U.N. that Iraq had developed aflatoxins—chemicals produced by the fungi Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus—for use in aerial bombs and Scud missile warheads. The toxin wasn't meant to kill troops. Instead, its main method of destruction is an insidious one: It causes the rapid development of liver cancer, particularly in children.

  "From a moral standpoint, aflatoxin is the cruelest weapon," Richard Spertzel, the chief weapons inspector for the now-defunct United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) told Slate in 2002. "It means watching children die slowly of liver cancer."

  These fears are only exacerbated today by gene editing technologies and artificial intelligence. In February 2016, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, added gene-editing to a list of "weapons of mass destruction and proliferation," and a year later, China's People's Liberation Army noted in an authoritative textbook that "specific ethnic genetic attacks" could become increasingly possible. In 2024, the Washington Post reported that Russia was expanding an old bioweapons lab in the midst of its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.