Tuesday, 4 August 2026

Energy Vault said on July 27 that construction has begun at its powered AI infrastructure campus in Snyder, Texas, built for Crusoe Cloud, according to Power Magazine.

The announcement, reported by Power Magazine, marks the start of site work at the Snyder location. The campus is designated as powered AI infrastructure and is being developed for Crusoe Cloud as the customer.

Power Magazine describes Energy Vault as a global energy infrastructure company that supports power grid reliability alongside next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing infrastructure. That dual positioning places the developer between grid services and the compute buildout now drawing utility-scale power commitments.

Meta has left RE100, the global corporate initiative whose members commit to using 100% renewable electricity, according to Electrek. The exit comes as the company bankrolls new gas-fired power plants to feed its expanding artificial intelligence data centers.

The gas commitments are concentrated in Louisiana. At Hyperion, Meta's data center in Richland Parish, the original power plan called for three new gas plants totaling about 2.26 GW, Electrek reported.

Entergy Louisiana announced a second agreement in March 2026 under which Meta will fund seven additional combined-cycle gas plants totaling more than 5.2 GW, according to Electrek. Taken together, the Louisiana buildout reaches 10 gas plants and roughly 7.5 GW.

The same Entergy package includes Meta funding for up to 2.5 GW of renewables, Electrek reported. That is about a third of the gas capacity attached to the utility's Louisiana arrangements with the company.

Meta joined RE100 as Facebook in 2016, pledging to cover its entire operation with renewable electricity by 2020. Combined-cycle plants, which recover exhaust heat to drive a second turbine, are dispatchable in a way that solar and wind are not, and the Entergy agreements pair them with the smaller renewables tranche rather than substituting for it.

Two conservation organizations have challenged the federal green light for a data center on public land in Boulder City, Nevada.

According to CleanTechnica, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter filed an administrative appeal contesting federal approval of the Townsite Data Center.

The facility would carry 167 megawatts of capacity and was proposed by Skylar Capital Management, CleanTechnica reported.

Baker Hughes has won an order from Dynamis Power Solutions for 76 NovaLT16 industrial gas turbines destined for mobile power generation units serving data centers and oil and gas sites across North America, according to World Oil.

World Oil put the combined capacity at approximately 1.3 GW. The scope covers the NovaLT16 turbines packaged together with generators, gearboxes and control systems.

The booking was split across two reporting periods. Baker Hughes said the turbines themselves were booked in the second quarter, with the associated generators and gearboxes booked in the third quarter.

Dynamis will fit the units into its DT17 hypermobile power platform, which World Oil describes as designed to deliver rapidly deployable, natural gas-fired power for industries that need reliable electricity where permanent grid infrastructure is unavailable or constrained.

That framing places the order in the segment of the power market where load arrives faster than interconnection queues can clear it. Data centers and upstream oil and gas operations both sit in that category, and both appear in the stated end-use mix for the mobile units.

Developers added 36 GW of new data center capacity to the U.S. pipeline in Q1 2026, a 19% drop from Q4 2025, according to a Wood Mackenzie report cited by Solar Builder.

The slowdown in fresh announcements sits alongside a much larger pool of projects already disclosed. Cumulative U.S. disclosed data center capacity stands at 331 GW, with roughly 40% under active development, per the same report.

Commitments are firming further down the funnel. Large load capacity backed by signed construction or electricity supply agreements totals 195 GW, equal to 26% of 2025 U.S. peak load, Wood Mackenzie said.

Earlier-stage activity moved in the opposite direction from headline additions. Capacity in advanced discussion phases jumped from 37 GW in Q4 2025 to 107 GW in Q1 2026.

Texas holds the largest cumulative planned capacity of any state at nearly 100 GW, according to the report. Ohio remains the second-largest market.

On the supply side, disclosed around-the-meter deployments split closely between fuels. Gas makes up 40% of projects and 48% of total site capacity, while renewables and storage account for 41% of deployments and 38% of capacity, Solar Builder reported from the Wood Mackenzie findings.

Advanced nuclear developer Aalo Atomics has signed a strategic partnership with energy-first AI infrastructure company Crusoe to build a nuclear-powered "AI Factory" data center, according to Power Magazine. The companies announced the agreement on July 30.

The two firms plan a demonstration at Idaho National Laboratory in 2027 that pairs nuclear generation directly with AI data center load, Power Magazine reported.

Under the arrangement, Aalo's advanced reactor development program at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) would be combined with Crusoe's modular AI data center platform. That structure puts reactor development and compute buildout on the same site rather than connecting them through an existing grid interface.

The partnership sets up a test of co-located generation and computing load, with Aalo supplying the reactor side and Crusoe the modular data center hardware.

A power plant project built to serve a data center in Georgia is under investigation over claims that construction started before the required air permits were issued, according to Inside Climate News.

The scrutiny lands as regulators weigh a separate question with wider reach: whether privately operated power plants can lawfully supply electricity to data centers at all, Inside Climate News reported.

That legal question sits upstream of the permitting dispute. The permitting inquiry concerns the sequence of one project's construction and its air approvals. The regulatory review concerns the underlying model, private generation serving data center load, which would apply beyond a single site.

Low-cost electricity from the Bonneville Power Administration and its network of dams has drawn data center operators including Microsoft and Amazon to central and eastern Washington over many years, according to Inside Climate News.

The same reporting notes that hyperscale data centers sometimes draw as much power as an entire city, and that this scale of consumption is fueling concerns about the effects on communities of color.

Bonneville's dam-based generation is the anchor of that appeal, Inside Climate News reported, with the utility's cheap power long attractive to the companies behind large computing sites in the state's central and eastern counties.

Data centers and the electricity they consume have become a central dispute in the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin, which takes place on August 11, according to Canary Media.

Canary Media described the primary as hotly contested, with the computing facilities and their energy sourcing among the issues dividing candidates.

The salience is new. Local leaders and journalists told Canary Media that most Wisconsin residents thought little about data centers a year ago.

Amazon is building a USD 10 billion data center in Hamlet, North Carolina, a project touted as the largest economic development project in state history, according to Inside Climate News.

The build includes hundreds of diesel generators, Inside Climate News reported. Diesel units are standard backup for large computing campuses, supplying power when grid supply is interrupted.

Residents say they were left out of the decision-making process, according to Inside Climate News. The outlet described the arrangement behind the campus as secretive in its account of how the deal came together.

The USD 10 billion figure is the investment attached to the Hamlet site itself, placing it above every other economic development commitment recorded in North Carolina, per the same reporting.