Thursday, October 8, 2026
Google has signed power deals with Black Hills in Wyoming and Constellation in the PJM grid, and JERA, Dell and RHAELM plan a behind-the-meter AI campus in Japan. But Oracle's force majeure notice on Project Jupiter in New Mexico is a reminder that fuel, permits and land can stall even well-funded builds.
In the second quarter, when West Texas crude averaged $95.65 a barrel, the current-dollar economies of Alaska, New Mexico, Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming and West Virginia grew faster than any others. Measured in real terms, West Virginia, Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota shrank, along with Kansas and Nebraska. Real mining output fell in every big energy state. The oil price raised the value of what they produced, not the amount.
Brent crude averaged $114 a barrel in September, up from $71 in February. Natural gas at Henry Hub averaged $2.95 per million British thermal units, a few cents below September 2025, while buyers in Europe and Asia were paying $24 to $27. The United States is producing record amounts of gas, and its export terminals are already running flat out.
The Group of Seven agreed on Friday to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude from emergency stocks over four months, coordinated by the International Energy Agency. The statement gives no split between diesel and crude, names no countries, and describes the release as implementing existing commitments. US diesel stocks are at their lowest for late September in four decades of weekly records.
Shell and its four partners have taken the final investment decision on LNG Canada's second phase, which will double the Kitimat plant from 14 to 28 million tonnes a year. Neither the joint venture's release nor Shell's gives a capital cost, and Shell says commercial operation will begin in the early 2030s.
President Trump said on Saturday he had rejected Iran's seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Brent crude rose more than 3 per cent in Asian trading on Monday to about $107. IMF PortWatch recorded 78 transits of the strait between 1 and 20 September, 19 of them tankers. In the same 20 days of 2025 it recorded 1,731.
Gaza's Health Ministry says the World Health Organization will stop supplying diesel to more than 20 hospitals and health centres from 19 September because of a funding shortfall. The WHO has not commented. Gaza's hospitals have run on generators since the power was cut in October 2023, and the generators were already running on oil changed a quarter as often as they should be.
Brent above $100 arrives in a household budget faster than almost any other price. Headline inflation is expected near 3.4 percent while core is forecast to ease toward 2.4, and that gap is the whole question — because a family does not buy the core index.
American forces struck further Iranian tankers, and attacks have been reported on Saudi oil facilities. Brent passed $100. For a year this conflict was fought over a waterway and the vessels crossing it. Hitting production and export infrastructure is a different category of target, and it does not reverse.
PwC puts annual data centre capital expenditure at roughly $800bn in 2026, rising toward $1.8 trillion a year by 2050. A boom has a peak somewhere in it. A run rate that roughly doubles over 24 years is a description of infrastructure, and infrastructure is financed, sited and regulated differently.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard says it hit three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and three US-affiliated ships, hours after American forces disabled three Iranian tankers. CENTCOM has not confirmed it and no damage has been reported. The notice issued alongside the claim needs no confirmation.
More than $45m has gone into political advertising mentioning data centres since January — $22m behind Republicans, $21m behind Democrats — and both sides are making the same case about tax breaks and electricity bills. Seventy-seven percent of Americans told Reuters/Ipsos they are worried about what the buildings do to their power bill.
An American carrier and a guided-missile destroyer evaded ballistic missiles fired by the Revolutionary Guard on Saturday. No US personnel were hurt. The response was not aimed at the launchers. US forces struck three Iranian oil tankers — two disabled, one abandoned by its crew and left inoperable.
Six transits a day where there were eighty-five. Meanwhile the day rate for a very large crude carrier has passed $200,000 on the Gulf-to-Asia run, up more than 440 percent in a year, and tanker owners are booking the best earnings since the last supercycle. The same event did both things.
Eleven more ships were added this week to a blacklist now naming 56 vessels — crude carriers, gas tankers, clean product ships. The clause that matters is the last one: any vessel that takes cargo from a listed ship, ship-to-ship, joins the list. That is not area denial. It is a sanctions regime, run from the other side.
US Central Command says it has cleared Iranian sea mines from the transit routes through the Strait of Hormuz. Two monitoring bodies still warn of drifting and uncharted mines outside the swept lanes, and analysts say the greater danger was always the missiles and drones on the shore. Clearing a channel is not the same as opening a strait.
Warships have been escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz for months. War-risk premiums went from one to three percent of hull value before the war to between seven and a half and ten percent, and the escort did not bring them down. Security and risk are priced by different institutions, and they do not net.
When Suez closed, ships went around Africa. It cost more and took longer, and it worked. The Gulf offers no equivalent, which is why traffic through Hormuz has fallen by most of itself rather than moved somewhere else.
An executive order can stop the next transformer at the border on the day it is signed. The equipment already energised across the grid is governed by a different phrase in the same document, and that phrase has no deadline attached.
The pitch for putting data centres in orbit opens with free power and ends there. Power was never the part that could not be solved, and the constraint that replaces it is worse.
Subsidy programmes brought cell manufacturing to the continent on a schedule. The electricity those factories need arrives on a different one, set by transmission queues nobody budgeted political attention for.
The long-term contracts that financed the world's liquefied natural gas terminals assumed buyers who would take the volume for decades. Those buyers are now asking to be let out, and the terminals still have debt to service.
More generation capacity is waiting for permission to connect to the grid than is currently operating on it. The bottleneck is not construction or capital but a study process nobody designed for this volume.