Tag: brownfield redevelopment

  • Everyone Watches NY’s 50 MW Data Center Pause. The Lasting Risk Is Local Zoning.

    Everyone Watches NY’s 50 MW Data Center Pause. The Lasting Risk Is Local Zoning.

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    A small town on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York is preparing a law that would ban data centers, the warehouse-sized buildings full of computers that run websites, apps and artificial intelligence.

    The trigger is a company called TeraWulf, which wants to build one on the grounds of an old coal power plant. About 200 people packed a town meeting, and most asked for a ban, citing noise, water and electricity bills.

    New York has temporarily paused some state permits for large data centers. A town ban would be different: it would stay in place until a future town board chose to reverse it.

    The Town of Lansing, New York, has moved toward an outright prohibition on data centers, Fingerlakes1.com reported. At a September 29 special meeting attended by roughly 200 people, the Town Board directed town attorney Megan Doherty to draft a local law banning data centers, so board members can review the language before deciding whether to formally introduce it and schedule a public hearing. No ban has been enacted and the town’s zoning has not changed.

    The debate centers on TeraWulf’s Lake Hawkeye proposal to redevelop the former Milliken power plant site, which has been under town review for nearly a year. Town Supervisor Ruth Groff said she favors a total ban, and several other board members said they want to see prohibition language drafted rather than pursue another temporary moratorium. TeraWulf asked the town to keep its existing review process open.

    Executive Summary

    Lansing’s board has not rejected TeraWulf’s project, but it has shifted the question from how to regulate data centers to whether to allow them at all. The catalyst was New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s Executive Order 62, issued July 14, which bars the state Department of Environmental Conservation from issuing discretionary permits for data centers of 50 megawatts or more until the state Department of Public Service completes a broader environmental review. That state pause does not halt local reviews, leaving Lansing to spend money and staff time on a project whose state requirements may later change.

    The significance reaches beyond one proposal. Town officials said nearly 40 New York municipalities have adopted data center moratoriums since the start of 2026. A moratorium buys time; a zoning prohibition closes a town to every developer until it is amended. If Lansing follows through, a former power plant site with concentrated high-voltage transmission lines, the kind of grid access large facilities seek, would be off the table regardless of who proposes to build there.

    For developers, utilities and landowners holding retired generation sites, the episode shows that grid access and a willing seller do not settle siting. Local land-use law, set by a handful of elected board members, can decide the outcome before any state standard is written.

    A Temporary State Pause, a Potentially Lasting Local Ban

    Executive Order 62 is, by design, a holding pattern. It stops one state agency from issuing discretionary permits for data centers of 50 megawatts or more (a megawatt is a unit of electrical capacity; facilities at that scale draw power comparable to a sizable town) until regulators study electricity demand, water use and quality, air quality, noise and effects on disadvantaged communities. In parallel, Empire State Development has been told to build a framework to help municipalities negotiate economic benefits and mitigate harms. Both tracks point toward data centers being permitted under higher standards, not excluded.

    Lansing’s draft points somewhere else. A zoning prohibition does not wait for state standards and does not depend on project size unless the town writes it that way. Doherty told the board a future board could amend the zoning if technology, circumstances or state law change, so the ban would not be permanent in a legal sense. In practice, though, reversing a ban requires a new political decision, while a moratorium expires on its own. That asymmetry is why the local layer now carries more durable risk for developers than the state pause that drew the headlines.

    The figure town officials cited, nearly 40 New York municipalities adopting moratoriums this year, shows how many local governments are already using land-use tools to respond. Lansing does not by itself establish that those towns will move on to bans. It does show the path exists, and that a board can travel it in a single meeting once the cost of continued review looks higher than the cost of saying no.

    Why Regulating Looked More Expensive Than Prohibiting

    The board’s reasoning was largely practical. Members discussed allowing smaller facilities while barring hyperscale ones, the very large campuses typically built for major cloud and computing tenants, with a 10-megawatt threshold raised as one possible dividing line. Groff was skeptical, citing concern that permitting smaller facilities could give developers an opening to seek variances for larger ones. Other members questioned whether an elaborate regulatory structure would invite years of enforcement disputes and legal bills.

    Councilmember Judy Drake, who spent much of the meeting weighing economic development and the town’s tax pressures, framed the cost question directly: if most of the board ultimately supports a ban, paying attorneys to draft a moratorium and regulations first may only spend more town money before arriving at the same result. Councilmember Joseph Wetmore said he had spent about a year looking for regulations that could make a data center compatible with Lansing and found that balance increasingly remote.

    That logic matters for the industry because it does not turn on any single project’s merits. A small town weighing enforcement capacity and litigation exposure may conclude that a bright-line prohibition is cheaper to administer than performance standards for noise, light and water, especially while state rules are still being written.

    The Grid-Ready Brownfield Problem

    The Milliken property illustrates the trade-off. Town planning staff described it as a significant brownfield, meaning previously industrial land with contamination of varying degrees. A large coal ash pile remains a state-regulated landfill regardless of what happens elsewhere on the parcel, and other areas may need remediation before reuse. What the site has in its favor is infrastructure: high-voltage transmission lines are concentrated in northern Lansing around the former plant, which is why energy-related developers find it attractive.

    Planning staff said parts of the site could potentially host solar, with state brownfield programs helping fund cleanup. Tompkins County Legislator Mike Sigler argued that TeraWulf’s project had been anticipated to generate about $10 million in taxes and other community funding, much of it benefiting the Lansing school district, and that the site could stay dormant without an industrial developer willing to take on the brownfield. Town officials did not adopt those estimates, so the economic case on both sides remains unquantified on the public record.

    TeraWulf’s position is a process argument. Pace Rally, its vice president of project development, said the company has done substantial additional technical work and is making meaningful changes to the site plan, and asked that the project be evaluated on the facts. A ban would end that evaluation. The release also notes the prospect of a legal fight over a project already under review for nearly a year, which is the clearest near-term risk for both the town and the company.

    Background

    Lansing is a town in Tompkins County on the east shore of Cayuga Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region. The former Milliken Station, a coal-fired power plant, has sat dormant since it closed, leaving behind contaminated land, a regulated coal ash landfill and a concentration of high-voltage transmission infrastructure in the town’s north end.

    TeraWulf is a publicly traded digital infrastructure company that operates in New York and has been associated with bitcoin mining and computing facilities that depend on large, low-cost power supplies. Statewide, data centers have come under heavier scrutiny in 2026: dozens of municipalities have adopted moratoriums, and Governor Hochul’s Executive Order 62 paused certain state permits for large facilities while New York develops higher standards for the industry.

    Sources

    Source: Lansing moves toward data center ban as TeraWulf debate reaches turning point (Fingerlakes1.com), reporting on the Lansing Town Board’s September 29 special meeting on TeraWulf’s Lake Hawkeye proposal.

  • Submer’s €1bn Flix Bet: An AI Cooling Firm Sees the Value in Land and Power

    Submer’s €1bn Flix Bet: An AI Cooling Firm Sees the Value in Land and Power

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    A Barcelona company best known for keeping computers cool is spending about €1 billion to build and run its own huge computer warehouse for artificial intelligence.

    Submer plans to put it on the grounds of an old chemical factory in the Spanish town of Flix, which stopped operating in 2023. Catalonia’s regional president turned out for the announcement.

    What makes it interesting: a company that used to sell equipment to building owners now wants to be the owner. It has not yet said how big the site will be, when it opens, or who will use it.

    Submer, the Barcelona-based company that built its name in immersion cooling, plans a €1 billion ($1.14 billion) AI data center on the site of the former Ercros chemical plant in Flix, Catalonia, Data Center Dynamics reported. The facility will be built in two phases and operated by Rubix Data Centers, the AI data center division Submer launched in June, which aims to lease it to a single tenant running AI workloads.

    The project was unveiled on Saturday, July 11, at an event attended by Salvador Illa, president of the government of Catalonia, and Miquel Sàmper, the regional minister of business and labor. Submer has not disclosed the facility’s planned capacity or construction timeline; renders appear to show four data halls arranged around a central building.

    Executive Summary

    The headline number is €1 billion, but the more consequential fact is who is spending it. Submer’s business has been supplying cooling systems to other people’s data centers. With Flix, it becomes a developer and operator in its own right, following last year’s launch of the InferX AI cloud platform and June’s launch of Rubix Data Centers.

    Submer CEO Patrick Smets framed the move as a deliberate climb up the value chain: “we will expand across the full stack, from land and power to cloud and Edge.” Rubix, led by former Stack executive John Eland, leads its pitch not with cooling technology but with a claim of 8GW of power available across vacant sites in the Americas, EMEA and APAC. That ordering signals where the company believes durable value in AI infrastructure now sits.

    What the announcement does not yet establish is the project’s scale, power supply, financing or customer. Until those are disclosed, Flix is best read as a statement of strategy and site selection rather than a funded, contracted build.

    From Selling Cooling to Owning the Building

    Submer’s trajectory over roughly a year tells the story: an immersion cooling specialist (immersion cooling submerges servers in a non-conductive liquid to carry heat away more efficiently than air) launched an AI cloud platform, InferX, then a data center division, Rubix, and now a €1 billion campus. Each step moves the company closer to the end customer and further from being a component supplier.

    The economic logic is straightforward. An equipment vendor is typically paid once per deployment, and its fortunes depend on how many facilities its customers build. An operator that leases a facility earns recurring rent for the life of the lease and controls the asset that everything else depends on: the site, the building and its power supply. Smets’ own phrasing, “from land and power to cloud and Edge,” puts land and power first. Eland made the same point from the operator’s side: “We intend to operate the facility we are building here, so we are not simply passing through Flix.”

    That is the substance behind reading Flix as a bet on land and power rather than on cooling hardware. The company has not said whether Submer’s own immersion systems will be deployed at Flix, which underlines the point: the announcement is about owning capacity, not showcasing a product.

    Why Power Is the Asset Rubix Leads With

    For AI data centers, the scarce input is increasingly not buildings or servers but a site with a large, deliverable grid connection. That is why Rubix’s headline claim is 8GW of available power across vacant sites, a figure measured in gigawatts, or thousands of megawatts. Framing a data center business around power first reflects how the market now prices development opportunities.

    Former heavy-industrial sites such as the Ercros plant are attractive candidates in principle, because industrial users often required substantial electrical infrastructure and the land is already zoned for industrial use. Ercros also operates a solar farm on the site today. But Submer has not said what grid capacity is available at Flix, whether it is already connected, or how the solar installation fits into the project’s power plans. Those details will determine how quickly and how large Flix can realistically become.

    The 8GW figure deserves the same even-handed reading. It is a claim about power available across vacant sites, and Rubix has not broken it down by location, by grid status or by how much of it is contractually secured versus identified. As a signal of ambition it is clear; as a measure of deliverable capacity it is not yet substantiated.

    The Single-Tenant Model Cuts Both Ways

    Rubix aims to lease Flix to a single tenant for AI workloads. This build-to-suit approach is common for large AI campuses: one creditworthy customer on a long lease can anchor the financing for a very large build, and two-phase construction lets capital be deployed in step with demand.

    The flip side is concentration. Until a tenant signs, the €1 billion figure describes an intended investment rather than a committed one, and the facility’s design, timing and financing will likely hinge on that single counterparty. Without a disclosed capacity, it is also impossible to judge whether €1 billion is a large or modest sum per megawatt relative to comparable AI builds.

    A Supplier Becoming a Peer, With Political Backing

    Moving into operations can create tension with existing customers: data center operators that buy Submer cooling may now find the same company bidding for AI tenants. How Submer manages that overlap between its cooling business and Rubix will be worth watching.

    On the other side of the ledger, the project arrives with visible public support. The presence of Catalonia’s president and its business minister at the launch, and Submer’s framing of the project as part of the “reindustrialization of Flix,” suggest the regional government sees AI infrastructure as a use for idled industrial land. That backing can matter for permitting and grid access, though no specific commitments from the administration were announced.

    Background

    Submer, based in Barcelona, established itself as a specialist in immersion cooling, a technique that submerges servers in a non-conductive fluid to remove heat more efficiently than traditional air cooling, an approach that has gained attention as AI chips grow denser and hotter. Over the past year the company has expanded beyond cooling, launching the InferX AI cloud platform and, in June 2026, Rubix Data Centers, a division that develops and operates AI data centers and is headed by John Eland, formerly of data center operator Stack.

    The Flix site was home to a chemical plant run by Ercros until industrial operations ceased in January 2023. Ercros now operates a solar farm on the site. Redeveloping former industrial land for data centers has become a recurring theme as developers look for sites with industrial zoning and access to power.

    Sources

    Source: Submer plans €1bn data center at former chemical plant in Catalonia (Data Center Dynamics) — Submer’s Rubix division will build and operate a two-phase AI data center on the former Ercros site in Flix.

  • Ohio Site That Once Drew 3% of U.S. Power Shows Why Brownfields Ease AI’s Siting Fight

    Ohio Site That Once Drew 3% of U.S. Power Shows Why Brownfields Ease AI’s Siting Fight

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    A large piece of southern Ohio that once made fuel for nuclear bombs is being turned into what officials call the world’s largest artificial intelligence computing center. The Japanese investment firm SoftBank is paying for it.

    Across the United States, neighbors are protesting projects like this over power, water and noise. Here, many locals are cheering. The land is already industrial, the power lines were built for a plant that once used as much electricity as New York City, and the area badly needs jobs.

    The hard part is still ahead: building a gas power plant and 18 small nuclear reactors to run it.

    Spotlight on America reported in a June 19, 2026 story published by The National Desk that Pike County, Ohio, is embracing plans for what officials call the largest AI data center in the world. The project will be built on the site of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS), a Cold War-era uranium enrichment plant, and renamed the PORTS Technology Campus.

    At a March 20 announcement attended by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Assistant Secretary of Environmental Management Tim Walsh and other officials, backers described a campus combining the data center with a $33 billion natural gas power plant and 18 small modular reactors (SMRs), compact nuclear units built to standardized designs. SoftBank is funding the project, with a budget cited at $1.5 trillion, and SB Energy co-CEO Rich Hossfeld said 35,000 workers will build it.

    Executive Summary

    The PORTS Technology Campus pairs a record-scale AI data center with its own dedicated generation — a $33 billion gas plant and 18 SMRs — on federal land the Department of Energy is already spending $14 billion to $18 billion to clean up. Local leaders describe the site as a “perfect fit” because it inherits water and grid infrastructure built for one of the largest industrial electricity consumers in American history.

    The project matters beyond Ohio because it arrives as opposition to data centers spreads from Maine to Washington. Pike County shows why some sites draw far less resistance: the land is already industrial, some nearby residential parcels are unsafe for homes but acceptable for industry, and the county badly needs jobs. What the welcome does not settle is whether the new generation can be financed, licensed and built on a timeline that matches the computing load.

    Why a Cold War Site Defuses the Usual Data Center Fight

    The objections filling hearing rooms from Columbus to Scranton are specific: data centers draw water and electricity residents rely on, strain local grids, and add noise and exhaust from backup generators like those running in Northern Virginia. Pike County’s site answers several of those objections before they are raised, because the region’s heaviest industrial footprint is already there. The Portsmouth plant, according to Steve Shepherd of the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative, used about 3% of the nation’s electricity — roughly what New York City used — and consumed 30,000 to 40,000 gallons of water a day, which he said matches what the new campus is expected to need.

    Land is the second mechanism. Elsewhere, a data center often means rezoning farmland or open space next to homes. Here, the land is a federal industrial reservation being cleared with Department of Energy money, and nearby residential parcels that a recent report found carry unsafe levels of radioactive contamination are, according to local official Jennifer Chandler, acceptable for industrial use. A dozen of those properties have already been bought for the campus footprint. The project does not displace a use residents value; for some families it may offer a way off land they should not be living on.

    The third mechanism is economic. Pike County ranks third-lowest in Ohio for per-capita income, and a 35,000-worker construction effort reshapes a rural economy. Together, these give substance to Shepherd’s claim that the site is “a model for the country”: legacy industrial sites with existing transmission corridors, water systems and industrial zoning face fewer of the objections now stalling greenfield projects. The limit is that few sites anywhere carry infrastructure sized like this one.

    An Inherited Grid Is Not an Inherited Power Supply

    The 3% figure describes what the plant drew during its operating life, not what the grid can deliver today. Existing transmission corridors and substation sites are a genuine head start — securing rights-of-way is among the slowest steps in any grid project — but the electricity itself still has to be generated. Uranium enrichment at Portsmouth ended in 2001, and whether the lines that served it remain usable at this scale has not been published.

    That is why the plan pairs the data center with dedicated generation. Building a $33 billion gas plant and 18 reactors on site is the most direct answer to the grid-strain objection, because the campus would not compete with households for existing supply. But it shifts risk rather than removing it. A gas plant of that cost needs pipeline capacity and produces its own emissions, moving the air-quality question from backup generators to a primary power station.

    The reactors carry the longest lead time. SMRs are still early in commercial deployment in North America, and each project requires federal licensing before it can operate; 18 units is a fleet, not a pilot. If computing capacity comes online before the reactors do, the gas plant or the regional grid would have to carry the load in the meantime. No capacity figure for the gas plant or the reactors, and no sequencing plan, accompanied the announcement. That, not local acceptance, is the test Pike County has yet to pass.

    Superlatives Without Megawatts

    The announcement leaned heavily on scale: “the largest AI data center on earth,” a facility “bigger than any facility ever built in world history,” a budget cited at $1.5 trillion. Those claims may prove accurate, but none came with the measures the industry uses to compare projects — megawatts of computing load, number of buildings, phase dates or named tenants.

    The dollar figures illustrate the gap. The $33 billion gas plant is a small fraction of $1.5 trillion; the remainder would presumably fund reactors, buildings, computing hardware and supporting infrastructure over many years, but no breakdown was offered. For suppliers of turbines, transformers, cooling systems and chips, a headline figure without a schedule signals intent, not an order book.

    None of this diminishes the site’s real advantages. It means the project is best judged on the disclosures still to come rather than on the size of the tent on announcement day.

    Background

    The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, in Pike County, Ohio, was one of three US gaseous diffusion plants built to enrich uranium during the Cold War. Enrichment ended in 2001, and the Department of Energy is now spending $14 billion to $18 billion to decontaminate and dismantle the site. The Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative (SODI) is the local organization charged with redeveloping it.

    The project arrives as opposition to AI data centers grows nationwide, driven by concerns over water use, grid strain, noise and backup-generator emissions. SoftBank, a Japanese investment group, backs the effort alongside SB Energy, its affiliated energy developer.

    Sources

    Source: Amid nationwide backlash, an Ohio county welcomes the world’s largest AI data center — The National Desk’s Spotlight on America on the PORTS Technology Campus planned for Pike County, Ohio.