00:05:43 · Jordan Nanos, Maya Barkin
[00:05:43] S1: Yeah, that'd be helpful. I've got on screen the table showing that this is bipartisan. There's Democrats and Republicans that are in favor pauses or conditions. So, maybe you can define what a pause is versus Yeah. A [00:05:56] S2: Sure. So, by pause, we essentially mean a moratorium, which is a halt on the processing and issuing of permits at different levels. It could be a building permit, an air permit, a zoning halt, for example. And the difference matters because it's the difference between a projects... Between a project that's more expensive and in the case of conditions and a projects... And a project that gets stuck because conditions make a project more expensive and a pause makes it... Can delay it. So if new conditions are put in place, a developer can fund the grid update, they can redesign the cooling, they can sign the community agreement, and they can keep going. It might be slightly slower and costlier, but it has a plan to approval. And we also saw a lot of that coming anyway, like the water use studies, developers offering household bill credits to cover the infrastructure that they add, also AWS and Google dropping NDAs and being more transparent in their process. But a pause is different because the work just can't proceed for projects that don't have all of the permits in hand.
00:07:40 · Jordan Nanos
[00:07:40] S1: Makes sense. I think this map tells the story here, right? Like, if we look at 2028, it's pretty clear that it's not everywhere in The US, but these are the big states where we're tracking the biggest additions of capacity in 2028, in most cases, where people have this in their backyard, for example. Can you talk about, you know, like maybe dig in on Texas specifically a bit and just say, what is the real difference between what's going on right now in 2027 versus what's going on in 2028 when you look at the difference between candidates like Greg Abbott and Gina Hinojosa here?
00:08:21 · Maya Barkin, Jordan Nanos
[00:08:21] S2: Sure. So in the map that you showed, so we looked at different scenarios. We looked at... This is the number one where the states where it's still a toss-up or it's not entirely clear who would win, this is the scenario where the pro moratorium candidate wins. And so you can see here that 30.3 gigawatts of planned twenty twenty eight capacity could potentially be at risk. Of course, that's not the capacity. We're not saying that this could be the capacity that's delayed. It's just the capacity that is exposed, the capacity that is planned for 2028 in those states. And then we looked at the second scenario, if scroll to the next map. Right. This is where the conditions only candidates would win. And here, the gigawatts of plant capacity that are exposed goes down to 5.7. And then looking at the polls, which is the third map... So this is the most likely scenario of what is to happen. We see that it's not that as dramatic as the first map shows because only 5.7 gigawatts of plan twenty twenty eight capacity is most likely to be at risk. [00:10:03] S1: Makes sense. So when we look at like the potential outcomes here, one thing that strikes me, Wayne, maybe I can bring you in on this, is like the bipartisan So, nature when you were looking into some of these local races or any of the local politics, I think I was particularly surprised to find that this doesn't cut across party lines about whether people are in favor of conditions versus a full on moratorium.
00:10:30 · Wayne Ma, Jordan Nanos
[00:10:30] S3: Right. You know, when I when I was, like, look researching this, right, I thought, oh, probably Democrats are all on one side. Maybe they wanna pause. Republicans just want conditions. But it turns out that's not the case at all. I mean, I think a part of it is just because there's such a huge anti data center backlash that it doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat, if you're an ordinary resident and the data center is being built by you, it's gonna upset you either way. Right? I mean, there's a lot of anxiety over AI taking people's jobs. There's lots of misinformation out there about how much water they use or how much electricity they use or whether they're gonna raise your your tax bills or your power bills. And so I think that this is something that both Democrats and Republicans have kinda, like, tapped into in their campaigns. And so, you know, what we're seeing is that it doesn't really matter if you're a Republican or Democrat. You know, some people... You know, it used to be that, you know, states wanted the economic development. They wanted the investment. Right? They had all these tax rebates and tax incentives to bring data centers in. And now it seems like all of that's kind of going away regardless of whether... What partner you are on. [00:11:33] S1: Makes sense. Exactly. Jeremie, what's your what's your take there? Oh, yeah. Sorry. My
00:11:33 · Jordan Nanos, Maya Barkin
[00:11:33] S1: Makes sense. Exactly. Jeremie, what's your what's your take there? Oh, yeah. Sorry. My [00:11:38] S2: No. I just wanna... Jeremie, you can go ahead. But I just wanted to give an example of Texas or another state where... It's actually most states where, as Wayne said, both candidates are actually in favor of tougher conditions, if not moratorium, at least tougher conditions around building campuses in their states. [00:12:03] S1: Makes sense. Yeah. What's your take talking to people themselves?
00:12:09 · Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros
[00:12:09] S0: Mean, look, like the global conditions have like changed so much. Right? Because a few years ago, let's call it the supply demand balance was so different, where counties would offer big tax breaks, would try as hard as they can to attract data center developers. And that actually kind of makes sense because if you look at the data center, it's this big warehouse. It's not that large of a construction project. It consumes energy, it consumes water, but it's not as much as other heavy industrial use cases. But the value of the building is really large, right, because the data center itself is expensive and the servers inside are even more expensive. Sort of the ratio of project value to project size and sort of industrial scale is quite interesting and one of the highest, I think, in terms of value per sort of industrial footprint, let's say. And so as long as these data centers, I guess, there weren't that many, things were overall fine and people wanted them in the territory. And so you would offer tax breaks. Now there's so many of them, and they're becoming so large that it's becoming complicated, and obviously they have a few issues, they can make a lot of noise. The country, especially in some states, have more and more water issues, and there's a bunch of data centers in the past that would not really look at water as an issue, and so they would have these open loop cooling systems that would be very energy efficient with water inefficient. And so as you go from just the scale of like a few gigawatts built per year to in 2027 in The US, 40 gigawatts. So we're effectively at something like 10 to 20x the size of the annual build out in something like five years. Everything is different. There's obviously so many of them. And because of the supply constraints that we have now, the balance of powers has dramatically changed, right? And so it's like, we don't necessarily want them now, but if they come, they gotta do things right. And they're also more and more valuable. GPUs are much more valuable per megawatt or per acre or per square feet. And so you can effectively make them pay a lot of money.