Pennsylvania Draws a Line on Data Center Power

Eighty-one cities and counties — that's the count, according to a database the National League of Cities put out this week, of local governments that now have some kind of moratorium on data center development. And today we've got the biggest state-level swing yet, from a governor who spent the last year rolling out the red carpet. Today on Concrete Compute: Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro just yanked every data center project out of the fast lane and told new ones over twenty-five megawatts to sign a binding contract to pay their own way — so who blinks first, the governors or the hyperscalers? Before that, in the headlines: Duke Energy's poorest customers are about to get hit twice, a viral poll claims Americans hate AI data centers more than nuclear plants, and a new federal bill wants a penny-per-kilowatt-hour tax on every data center in the country. Welcome back to Concrete Compute, your daily brief on the AI infrastructure buildout. It's Thursday, August 20, 2026. Let's get into it.

Six-point-eight percent — that's how much North Carolina regulators are now set to let Duke Energy Progress raise rates over the next two years, after the utility's original ask of eighteen-point-one percent ran into pushback from the state's Attorney General and consumer advocates, according to Attorney General Jeff Jackson's office. For the utility's poorest customers, that increase lands on top of a second hit: Duke's Customer Assistance Program, which gives roughly forty-three to forty-six thousand low-income households up to a forty-two-dollar monthly bill credit, expires December thirty-first with no replacement announced. Duke could ask regulators to make the program permanent — advocates like Claire Williamson at the North Carolina Justice Center say it should — but the company hasn't. To be fair, this rate case covers broad grid investment, not a data-center bill specifically, and Duke's own messaging blames recent spikes mostly on summer heat. But when a state is also wiring up gigawatts of new large-load demand, the question of who actually pays for the buildout doesn't just go away.

Now here's a number that stopped me: sixty-two percent opposition to twenty-seven percent support — that's how one poll cited in a viral thread on X says Americans feel about AI-specific data centers, worse than how they feel about nuclear power plants. The thread comes from @peterwildeford, Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network, writing: quote, 'Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant built in their community than a data center, this may be the worst corporate public-relations fumble of all time,' end quote. He amplified commentary from Christopher Rufo framing this as a messaging failure for the industry, while other repliers pushed back, arguing the poll's 'AI-specific' framing inflates the numbers compared to data centers broadly. @Public_Citizen weighed in on X too, writing: quote, 'Yet the Trump admin continues to give tax breaks to the Big Tech giants building them,' end quote — tying the backlash to the broader fight over subsidies. Worth saying plainly: this poll is relayed secondhand through a thread, not a published methodology we've verified ourselves. But paired with the eighty-one moratoria the National League of Cities counted, and a governor rewriting the rules in Pennsylvania, the vibes are not exactly anecdotal.

A new bill in Congress wants to tax data centers the way you'd tax a heavy industrial power user. Datacenter Knowledge reports Oregon Democrat Andrea Salinas introduced H.R. 10102, the Data Center Community Reinvestment Act, which would place a one-cent-per-kilowatt-hour federal excise tax on any data center pulling more than one megawatt, with the revenue split across five federal housing, conservation, and infrastructure funds — projected, by the bill's own sponsors, at about one-point-seven-six billion dollars a year. It echoes Virginia, which already taxes data center electricity at one-point-one cents per kilowatt-hour and expects around six hundred million dollars a year for its general fund. Now, we're working off a single report on this one, so we haven't independently confirmed it elsewhere, and it's worth remembering this is a bill introduction, not a law — it's been referred to committee, nothing more. The analyst quoted in that piece, Neil Osnato, makes the sharper point: a flat consumption tax doesn't distinguish between two data centers using identical power but imposing wildly different costs on the grid, depending on where they sit and when they draw. Cost causation, not just consumption, is the fight underneath this fight.

Infrastructure investor I Squared Capital has a new data center company: Saragon, launched with ten former Cogent switching facilities across nine markets — Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Baltimore, Houston, Nashville, and Stockton — about fifty-three megawatts of installed capacity and two hundred fifty-nine thousand square feet of colocation space, backed by up to a billion dollars in committed capital. Cogent sold the ten facilities to I Squared's newly formed entity for two hundred twenty-five million dollars in cash, according to Cogent's own SEC filing. New CEO Steve Orlando says the plan is to chase AI inference and hybrid-cloud demand across that footprint. Worth flagging: this is already-installed capacity changing hands, not new construction, and that billion-dollar figure is committed capital for future growth, not money that's been spent or matched to a signed AI tenant yet. It's a reminder that not every AI infrastructure story is fresh concrete — plenty of the action right now is financial engineering on top of switching sites built decades ago for a very different internet.

Bitdeer AI — the AI-cloud arm of Bitcoin miner Bitdeer Technologies — has switched on an Nvidia GB300 NVL72 cluster in Malaysia, at a facility called A102 that will offer nine and a half megawatts once fully operational. Half of that capacity is locked in under a five-year offtake deal worth four hundred million dollars total, with revenue kicking in starting the first quarter of twenty twenty-seven; the company says it's still negotiating the rest. CFO Michael Potter says the company's active AI-cloud pipeline now tops two billion dollars. Worth noting: the story doesn't name the customer or the contract terms behind that four-hundred-million-dollar number, so only half the facility's economics are actually locked down. It's another data point in the crypto-miner-to-AI pivot playing out globally, and notably it's landing in Malaysia, not the U.S., where land and power are getting harder to secure. Power and permitting are getting scarcer everywhere — which brings us to the state that just decided to make developers prove they can get their own.

Our main story today: Pennsylvania just changed the rules for every AI data center in the state, and the question of who blinks first — the governors or the hyperscalers — just got a lot more concrete. Quick reset if you're coming to this fresh: back in February, Pennsylvania rolled out something called the GRID Requirements — Governor's Responsible Infrastructure Development standards — a voluntary set of rules asking data center developers to pay their own grid costs and lean on new clean power instead of the existing grid. The state also had a Fast Track permitting program, set up in twenty twenty-four, that let developers jump the line. We flagged yesterday that Shapiro's argument wasn't anti-data-center, it was anti-speculation — too many developers parking proposals in the pipeline with no real plan to build. Today, that argument gets tested against something with actual teeth. On Tuesday, Shapiro signed an executive order making it official. Going forward, the state's Department of Environmental Protection will only fast-track a data center's permit review if the developer has signed a legally binding consent order committing to those GRID standards, and if the project already has local approval in hand. Every existing project gets pulled out of the Fast Track program — no grandfathering. The order also bars state agencies from signing non-disclosure agreements with data center developers, and tells utilities that if the grid ever hits an emergency, data centers get their power cut first. The threshold is any project over twenty-five megawatts of peak demand — a modest single building in this industry, not a mega-campus. Developers who sign have to source power from new generation in the same PJM zone as the facility, and a rising share has to be what's called firm clean power — baseload-style clean energy like advanced nuclear, solar paired with storage, or batteries, not power that vanishes when the wind stops. That requirement starts at ten percent on January first, climbs to fourteen and a half percent within three years, and hits thirty-two percent by January first, twenty thirty-five. Shapiro didn't mince words on why, aiming to stop what he called 'predatory' backers and 'bad proposals from infecting our commonwealth.' He put a number on it that stuck with me: there are only about five projects, he said, that have even received permits to go forward — quote — 'the problem is there's a hundred projects or so that are wreaking havoc on our communities that are never going to be built,' end quote. His target isn't the data center that gets built — it's the hundred phantom proposals clogging the line behind it. And this isn't happening in a vacuum. The National League of Cities unveiled a database Wednesday counting at least eighty-one cities and counties nationwide with some kind of data center moratorium. Pennsylvania didn't invent this backlash — it's riding it. Here's the number that tells you the real stakes: PPL Electric's own August seventh investor presentation shows just over eleven gigawatts of potential data center load already locked into signed electric service agreements in Pennsylvania, more than six and a half gigawatts already under construction, and a total advanced-stage pipeline of thirty-one-point-eight gigawatts. FirstEnergy's Pennsylvania utilities have data center contracts totaling nearly a gigawatt. Nobody yet knows how many of those agreements survive contact with this order — which is exactly why Jefferies analysts said Wednesday this move should further close the door on independent power producers like Talen Energy, Vistra, and PSEG Power selling electricity from their existing plants straight to data centers on long-term contracts. One deal looks safe, though: Talen's existing agreement to sell power from its majority-owned Susquehanna nuclear plant to an Amazon data center.

So let's get into the actual argument, because there's more than one story being told about this same executive order. On X, @GovernorShapiro laid out his own reasoning directly to constituents, writing: quote, 'I've read your comments, letters, and texts. I've heard from so many of you all across Pennsylvania. You're concerned about how AI data centers could change the character of your communities and affect your bottom line. So we took a hard look at data center development in our Commonwealth. And now, we're taking action,' end quote. That's a governor speaking the language of neighborhood anxiety, not industrial policy. Katie Blume, political and legislative director at Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania, backed that framing up, describing the current pipeline to Utility Dive as, quote, 'gold rush speculation,' end quote, and predicting the order will do some real weeding, because developers who aren't serious, she said, quote, 'are not going to want to spend five years in the permitting process,' end quote. But the industry's own trade group pushed back hard. Dan Diorio, executive vice president for state policy at the Data Center Coalition, said in a statement that data centers, quote, 'take compliance and accountability seriously, building only where they are authorized to do so under local, state, and federal rules and regulations,' end quote, and warned that, quote, 'it's important that rules are not changed midstream impacting ongoing investment in verified and responsible data center projects,' end quote. Read between the lines and that's an industry saying: we followed your rules, and you just moved them. Then there's the purely partisan layer. Shapiro's Republican rival in the governor's race, Stacy Garrity, has accused him of reversing course after a year spent courting this exact industry into the state. Take that as a campaign attack, not an independent read on the policy — but it's also not wrong that Pennsylvania spent twenty twenty-four building a Fast Track program for the same developers it just yanked out of it. And then there's the line that made me actually laugh: the official X account @barronsonline posted the headline, quote, 'Pennsylvania's New Data-Center Rules Aren't All Bad for Power Companies,' end quote. Which is the piece I keep coming back to. This order doesn't slow the buildout so much as it re-routes who profits from it — pushing developers toward new-build clean generation and away from long-term contracts with existing power plants, which is exactly the kind of new demand utilities like PPL and FirstEnergy have been underwriting billions in transmission spending against. Now, a few things complicate the clean 'crackdown' story here. First, this is an executive order, not a law — the underlying GRID standards passed the state House but stalled in the Republican-led Senate, so there's real legal-challenge risk if any of this gets tested in court. Second, some critics on the left say this actually falls short, because GRID was voluntary to start with, and this order still lets developers opt out of the fast lane rather than banning speculative projects outright. And third — this one matters — reporting has surfaced emails showing the administration previewed this plan to Amazon and the Data Center Coalition before signing it. That doesn't make the order fake. It does complicate the picture of Shapiro blindsiding an industry that never saw it coming. My read: Shapiro isn't picking a fight with the buildout — he's picking a fight with the speculative middle of it, the gap between five projects that actually hold permits and the hundred that are just squatting in a queue. That lines up with my own standard for these deals: developers should cover their own dedicated grid costs, and communities should get a real say before any fast-track benefit kicks in. But the enforcement mechanism here is a consent order signed voluntarily, which means the developers who were never serious about building in the first place can simply not sign, and walk away having lost nothing. Time for the Hype Check. I'm putting this one at a six. The order is real, it's signed, and the twenty-five-megawatt threshold and the firm-clean-power ramp are specific enough to actually bind somebody. But a 'legally binding consent order' only binds the developers who choose to sign it — and until we see how many of Pennsylvania's live projects actually take that deal instead of just building somewhere friendlier, this reads like a strong opening move in a negotiation, not a settled outcome.

If Pennsylvania's live data center projects start actually signing those consent orders over the next few months, that tells us this order had real teeth — and if developers just walk away instead, that tells us the fast lane was the only thing keeping them here. Follow Concrete Compute wherever you listen so you don't miss how that plays out. This has been Concrete Compute, an AI-voiced podcast, created and built by a real human using today's cutting-edge technology. Nothing you heard on this show is financial advice. I'm Brian Lampert, and I'll catch you all tomorrow — take care!