美多州暂停数据中心建设，德州项目或损失超80亿美元

This is Kamala Shelling and you're listening to Switched On, the Bloomberg NEF podcast. Watching data center build out in the US has been a bit like watching a train gather speed as it heads down a mountain. No matter how fast you think it's going, a few minutes later, it'll be going even faster. Let's consider a couple numbers. BNF currently forecasts that data centers could require 194 gawatt of power come 2035. That would be equivalent to a fifth of all electricity consumed in the US that year.

On its own, that statistic would be eye watering. But what's even more impressive is that the 194 gawatt figure is 83% higher than the 2035 forecast BF published just a few months before. For a while, it seemed like data center momentum was unstoppable. Then, seemingly overnight, things changed. In the last month, governors in Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania have hit the brakes on data center build. And the ramifications could be huge.

These states account for around a quarter of the country's data center pipeline, and the delays could take a hefty bite out of developer pocketbooks. Derek Fleckl, BNF's senior associate in North American policy, has been tracking these developments, and he joins me in the studio today to talk about two of his recent stories. Pennsylvania's data center pushback raises pipeline risk and Texas data center pause could cost projects billions.

BNF clients can find these and other relevant research by heading to bnf data centers go on the Bloomberg terminal or at bnf.com. If you'd like to learn more about how BNF connects the dots of the energy transition, visit us at about.bnf.com. And if you'd like to speak with a member of our team about becoming a client, email us at sales.bnf bloomberg.net. But for now, let's talk data centers with Derek. Derek, welcome back to Switched On.

Thanks for having me back. Good to be here.

So, Derek, I started this podcast by talking about data center build as a train. And I think even just a few weeks ago, if you'd asked me, can anybody stop this? I would have said, no, that train has left the station. It's picking up momentum. There's no stopping data center build. And then suddenly, three governors of three major states have put a pause. So can you start by just telling us what exactly is happening?

Well, I do think there's a little bit of things change very slowly and then all at once happening. There's been this sort of gathering momentum of concerns about data center projects. It's coming from a lot of different places, right? Concerned about AI in general, real or perceived impacts on water and electricity utilization. The electricity caused impacts or potentially uh more real than the water ones. Their modern data centers are pretty efficient on that ladder score.

And obviously electricity costs, their impacts are going to be kind of mediated by the regulatory and political environment. And also just concerns about like secrecy, visual impacts, all the usual sort of not in my backyard stuff. But what's happened is that it's become extremely universal and intense. About 70% of Americans would oppose having data centers built near them. And so we have seen politicians begin to kind of respond to this gathering and increasingly organized intense negativity.

This happened in a few places. New York was kind of an early harbinger where the governor Kathy Hokll signed an executive order to do a one-year moratorium on further data center development. Uh this was basically a way of getting around a more radical and permanent moratorium passed by the legislature. But then you also had more radical moves like the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, basically pausing all data centers indefinitely for an audit.

And then shortly after that, the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, taking some formerly voluntary guidelines called the grid standards and then making them a condition of any data centers getting built at all as well as removing them from a fast track for permitting. So what you're kind of seeing is politicians react to this political pressure. And it should be noted that this is in the middle of an election year, right?

So even governors who are seen to be pretty likely to win their re-election like Abbott in Texas or Shapiro in Pennsylvania, they have some concerns that this might be a reason to drop them off the ticket. Or in Shapiro's case, they're looking at a presidential run later. So everybody wants to be on the right side of this issue and sort of stand up as a populist against the uh the big tech companies. At least that's the perception they're trying to cultivate.

70% of Americans being against something in an election year is a massive statistic. And I want to come back to the political context and why all of this is happening right now. But first I want to just dive into a few numbers with you. So for starters, are these pauses actually going to have a noticeable impact on bill?

Sure. So it depends on where you're talking about. Uh New York is technically the 11th state in terms of data center pipeline out of 50. But these are highly concentrated. So New York's doesn't matter that much. Texas however is the top state in terms of pipeline. Has about 20% by itself. So the potential impact of that is pretty large. Let's imagine that this pause simply delays all of the data centers planned for the next 3 quarters until the second quarter of 2027.

If that were the case, you have to then think about what the actual rental revenue is for a data center. If it's AI, it's about 10x what it would be for a, you know, traditional collocation data center. Can be over a billion US dollars per gigawatt per month. So in that terms, if you imagine about 60% of the Texas uh data center pipeline for the next three quarters is AI, you're looking at over $8 billion revenue impact.

Wow. So in Texas alone, we're talking a fifth of the US data center pipeline. And you said 8 billion of impact.

If that's merely delayed for 1 to three quarters, right? That's a completely separate question from

So that's not even delayed for a year. That's delayed for 9 months tops.

Right? Now, obviously, this is sensitive to assumptions about, you know, revenue and what percentage are AI, but like as a benchmark, it's pretty big. Just to round things out, I point out that Pennsylvania is it's in the top five uh data center states in the US. It's the third largest one in PJM, which is the biggest data center market collectively. And PJM's had a lot of impact like issues with the capacity market with uh increasing charges based on a disjuncture between really large data center load expected and an inability to build enough power for and infrastructure for that.

So there could be some ripple effects throughout that market as a result of Pennsylvania as policy moves.

So one of the really striking things to me about this list of states that we have is that Pennsylvania and New York both have Democratic governors who tend toward policy slowing build making sure things are happening the way the state wants them to happen. Texas on the other hand is a very red state and has always had a very lacifair approach to business to build out of infrastructure and businesses. So what exactly has happened in Texas specifically that would push Greg Abbott to demand this pause?

Well, something that's very powerful in Texas is local property owners and there are sort of concerns for the character and local impacts in their community. There there is a strong like sort of prodevelopment orientation, but uh you can see that a lot of places in Texas, they're sort of concerned about uh the infrastructure that would need to be built, right? you know, $33 billion in transmission, which is mostly going to West Texas, the permit, and a lot of it might even be associated with oil and gas, which is traditionally more favored.

That's become quite controversial. There's a lot of individual counties that have begun