The money is not the problem anymore. The electricity is.
The past week brought a run of power deals that show how far the AI industry will go to secure electricity. On Tuesday, Black Hills Corp said it had signed agreements to serve Google's planned data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and plans to invest $1.8 billion between 2027 and 2029 to build 564 megawatts of new company-owned natural gas generation, according to the company's announcement. The utility will supply up to 590 megawatts itself and manage about 2.1 gigawatts of third-party Wyoming resources through a private microgrid, part of a total resource mix of 2.7 gigawatts. Energy service is planned to begin in late 2027 and ramp to peak load in 2030, when Black Hills expects the project to provide about $150 million of net income, Reuters reported. Critically, Google bears all costs associated with serving the data center for the life of the project, so they are not passed on to other utility customers.
The same day, Google and Constellation Energy announced a 20-year agreement to add 890 megawatts of new nuclear capacity to the PJM grid by upgrading 11 Constellation reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, plus a 15-year supply agreement for a further 2,700 megawatts, Constellation said. That is 3.59 gigawatts in all, backed by more than $4.3 billion of new investment by Constellation. In Japan, JERA, the country's largest power generator,, Dell Technologies and RHAELM signed a memorandum of understanding last Thursday built around a project of up to 400 megawatts at JERA's Chiba Thermal Power Station, with total investment expected to exceed $15 billion across all phases. Apollo Global Management intends to serve as an investment and financing partner for RHAELM. The project would be behind the meter, drawing power directly from JERA's operating plant, which the companies say will deliver capacity years ahead of a conventional grid-connected schedule, with operations targeted around 2028, JERA said.
Signed Is Not Built
Signing a power deal and turning on a data center are very different things.
Investment research firm IO Fund pointed to Oracle's Project Jupiter in New Mexico, a 2.45-gigawatt campus that forms part of the Stargate initiative, as a case study. Oracle issued a force majeure notice to Blue Owl's STACK Infrastructure on 24 September, allowing it to protect itself contractually if the project fails to launch as planned in 2028. Oracle later said the notice does not, by itself, establish a project delay. The campus still faces hurdles involving its natural gas supply, air permit and land access, and a pipeline serving it has had its expected in-service date pushed to 1 February 2027. Securing power, IO Fund argued, is no longer enough: financing, permits, fuel supply and local approvals can each determine whether a massive AI campus actually comes online, Stocktwits reported.
IO Fund said that creates new risks for Bloom Energy, whose fuel cells are to power the Jupiter campus through a microgrid that still awaits its air permit, and Applied Digital, both of which depend on announced capacity becoming operating capacity on schedule. The market did not take fright: on Friday Oracle shares closed 3 percent higher, Bloom rose more than 4 percent and Applied Digital gained more than 5 percent. "Power, not demand, is becoming the bottleneck," IO Fund said.
Applied Digital's own quarter illustrates the tension. Revenue for its fiscal first quarter, to 31 August, rose to $341.9 million from $80.9 million a year earlier, more than four times as much and well above the $133.8 million analysts expected, Reuters reported. Much of the increase came from tenant fit-out services, the company said. But its net loss attributable to common stockholders widened to $221.0 million, or $0.76 a share, from $18.5 million a year earlier, as total costs and expenses jumped to $404.3 million on data center preparation, stock-based compensation and interest. The company had $3.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash against $6.4 billion in debt. Revenue is growing fast. So is the cost of building the thing that produces the revenue.
The Political Ceiling
There is also a political constraint forming above the physical one. Amazon's cloud division said on 2 October it would invest more than $1 billion over the next five years in US communities where it has data centers, and vowed to tackle their impacts on electricity and water usage, Reuters reported. In a statement under his name, AWS chief executive Matt Garman said more than 100 data center moratoriums were being considered across the country, and framed the buildout as a national competition: "the countries that lead in AI will shape it and get the most from it."
That framing is honest about the stakes and revealing about the worry. When Amazon commits more than $1 billion to education, job training and energy affordability in its host communities, it is a sign the buildout has a permission problem on top of its power problem. Amazon said it had already invested $276 billion in data centers between 2011 and 2025. The next phase needs not just capital and chips, but zoning boards, water rights and neighbors who do not vote for moratoriums.
The grid, the permit office and the county commission do not take purchase orders. Money can buy a lot of things. It cannot buy time.
In our view, what comes next is a sorting of the serious from the speculative. The developers with real utility partnerships, real permits and real fuel contracts will build. The ones with only press releases and power purchase agreements will discover the difference. Investors who learned to diligence chip supply chains now have to diligence interconnection queues, fuel supply and permits as well. The AI buildout will continue. It is likely to continue more slowly, more expensively and more politically than the announcements suggest.
The Black Hills terms are from Black Hills Corp's announcement of 6 October 2026 on GlobeNewswire and as reported by Reuters the same day. The Constellation terms are from Google and Constellation's joint announcement of 6 October 2026; the 3.59 GW total is as reported by Reuters and matches this publication's arithmetic (890 MW plus 2,700 MW). The Chiba project details are from JERA's announcement of 1 October 2026. The Project Jupiter details, the share moves and IO Fund's remarks are as reported by Stocktwits on 4 October 2026. Applied Digital's results are from its announcement of 7 October 2026 for the quarter ended 31 August, and the analyst estimate is from LSEG as reported by Reuters the same day. Amazon's commitment, its moratorium count and Matt Garman's remarks are from Amazon's statement of 2 October 2026; the $276 billion figure is as reported by Reuters that day. The analysis is our own.
Topics aidata centersenergyinfrastructure
