The Veto Follows the Data Centers Onto Federal Land

The $3 billion Townsite data center went onto Bureau of Land Management ground outside Boulder City, Nevada, for the same reason the administration keeps opening federal land to these projects: no one zones it, so no one local gets to say no. The city objected anyway — not at a council meeting but inside the Interior Department's own appeals board, the administrative court that reviews federal land decisions. The judge there found the BLM had recycled an environmental review written for a solar project rather than study a 167-megawatt data center. ^[1]

Appellants have made a persuasive showing that BLM violated NEPA and acted arbitrarily or capriciously when it determined that the data center project is 'substantially the same' as the solar plant project for purposes of its NEPA analysis. — David Gunter

That is the pattern in miniature, and it has now repeated at nearly every address the administration opened to outrun local consent. The veto does not disappear when the deed moves to federal land; it changes venue. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into a proposed Taylor data center over whether it sits on parkland the state holds in trust. ^[2]

If the Taylor data center development is unlawful, I will do everything in my power to stop it and hold those who have violated the law accountable. — Ken Paxton

This week conservation groups led by the Wilderness Society demanded a moratorium on all AI data centers on federal land, over the electricity, water, and habitat they consume. ^[3] And when Google took $15.1 billion to Finland rather than fight U.S. permitting, the president supplied the diagnosis himself. ^[4]

AI, and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History - Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet. It will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces during the Term of President DONALD J. TRUMP! — Donald Trump

Finland's opposition answered by demanding a national licensing scheme of its own, to stop the same electricity shortages and bill increases the neighbors complain about here. ^[4] The president's standing answer to the opponents of all this was:

You can’t fight it. You have to go with it. — Donald Trump

Every venue in this tour says otherwise. The fight did not end when the deed moved to federal land; it moved with it. Where no petition has yet reached a site, the same objections arrive anyway — pre-paid, as deal terms. The Army's lease program with Carlyle and CyrusOne requires independent power and net-zero water, the two resource complaints that killed local sitings, now written in as engineering the developer must self-supply. ^[5] The federal solicitations for the four nuclear-site campuses make the lessee bring its own baseload power and handle its own grid interconnection. ^[6] And the PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, proposed a rule requiring large data centers to secure their own capacity — a rule that pushed Google into a 3,590-megawatt self-supply deal with Constellation. ^[7] In plain terms: net-zero water is the water complaint, a self-contained grid is the ratepayer complaint — each now a line item the developer funds. ^[5] A caveat worth stating: most of the new capacity still gets bought and argued over town by town. ^[8][9] The federal sites are an escape valve for the projects that consent blocks, not a replacement for them. ^[10] Which leaves Paducah, the flagship. The $100 billion American Energy Hub on the old uranium enrichment plant was engineered to ask nothing of its host state — its own 4.6 gigawatts of generation, nothing drawn from Kentucky's grid or its ratepayers. ^[11] Governor Andy Beshear says he was never briefed, and he is still raising the environmental questions. The one piece of the project that touches the state's wires — the power service agreement — is still pending before the Kentucky Public Service Commission, the board that approves power deals and sets utility terms. The deed can move to federal land. The review and the wires do not.