Friday, 28 August 2026

A power supply contract tied to a planned OpenAI hyperscale data center in Effingham County took effect without a direct vote from the Georgia Public Service Commission itself, CleanTechnica reported.

The facility is sized at 3.2 gigawatts, according to CleanTechnica. That figure places the single site in the range of a large conventional generation fleet rather than a typical commercial load.

CleanTechnica characterized the arrangement as a secret contract, with the commission stopping short of putting the deal to a recorded decision. The mechanism by which the agreement cleared the regulator was not a commission vote.

Load requests of this scale have become the central pressure point in state utility regulation, because the capacity must be procured, contracted, and allocated among ratepayers and the new customer. The 3.2 GW planned in Effingham County is the specific number at issue in the Georgia proceeding.

Generating stations with no link to the wider power system fall outside the Clean Air Act's Acid Rain Program, under guidance issued by the EPA, Grist reported. The agency wrote that the program does not cover plants "not connected in any way to the larger electricity grid".

Two governors have already pushed computing developers toward that configuration. In Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro set a moratorium covering, in his words, "any AI data center that does not bring, develop, and pay for their own power," according to Grist. Greg Abbott stopped new data centers in Texas from taking connections to the state grid.

Ohio is the site of the largest announced project. OpenAI has said a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas plant will be built there by the U.S. Energy Department at a data center location, Grist reported.

Texas holds two more. Amazon has a 7.65-gigawatt gas plant in planning, and Nexus has put forward a 6-gigawatt plant, per the same Grist report.

VoltaGrid, a microgrid developer, has filed a permit application for a 90-megawatt facility in Georgia that would supply a Serverfarm data center, according to Grist.

The Acid Rain Program is the Clean Air Act mechanism applied to sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from electricity generating units. Under the guidance, whether a plant touches the grid decides whether the program reaches it, leaving islanded generation at a single campus outside its scope. The Pennsylvania condition requiring developers to supply their own power and the Texas refusal of new grid connections both send AI capacity into that off-grid category.

Anthropic will pay USD 45 billion for the first of three buildings at Nscale's planned Monarch campus, covering 460 MW, after Microsoft and Google both walked away from talks for the same compute capacity, Semafor reported.

The Monarch campus is aiming to come online next year, according to Semafor. The contracted building accounts for 460 MW of the site's capacity.

Microsoft exited the negotiation over the summer, Semafor reported, as it reviewed its data center portfolio and the share of on-site power generation within it. The company's assessment of how much generation sits behind the meter at its own facilities, rather than drawn from the grid, was part of that review.

Google's talks with Nscale collapsed for separate reasons, Semafor reported: an internal review of the company's computing needs and its capital expenditure management.

Anthropic has signed several other large compute contracts in recent months, per Semafor, including a USD 50 billion agreement with Fluidstack and a USD 45 billion agreement with SpaceX.