Venture Global exports liquefied natural gas from terminals on the Louisiana coast. This week brought its next step (nola.com, Stephanie Riegel): the company plans a major expansion of the on-site power generation at its terminals in Cameron and Plaquemines parishes — plants that already run in "island mode," off the public grid — under a $17.2 billion equipment deal with GE Vernova and Baker Hughes for turbines and transformers. Capacity: up to ten gigawatts. The article's own comparison is enough to power every household in New York state, and roughly 25 percent more than Meta's Hyperion data center in Richland Parish will need once fully built out. The excess power would be offered to an AI hyperscaler, with data-center development eyed on thousands of acres the company owns or controls next door. If the deals come to fruition, they would be executed by 2034. No specific hyperscaler deal has been confirmed. Because the plants already operate off-grid, the build and the power sales need no Louisiana Public Service Commission approval, though permits from other regulators still apply.
One parish name deserves a note from this office: Cameron Parish. No relation to our founder. The other Cameron builds the alternative.
Texas shows what happens when the build-out meets the permit office. Governor Greg Abbott called for a halt on new data-center permits in September. Nobody took the state's automated filing portal — STEERS, run by TCEQ — offline, so it kept approving projects for about a month (Tom's Hardware, Oliver Haslam). Watchdog groups FracTracker Alliance and Public Citizen, reported by 404 Media, counted more than two dozen data-center permits issued in the gap, and projects for OpenAI and Amazon went through the system the week the story published. Texas has now suspended 17 permits — stormwater construction permits, the ground-raising stage the article calls a vital part of approval for any construction project in the state — and temporarily shut the portal down so agency staff can review applications by hand. Separately, Abbott had earlier put the brakes on 1,800 data-center projects while they are audited. The stated concerns: power use and generation, how much water the projects would consume, and their impact on communities, with water shortages, deforestation, and increased energy costs named in the wider frame.
New England shows the third outcome: the build-out simply cannot come. A WBUR explainer published October 22 (Miriam Wasser, via Connecticut Public) finds no large AI training data centers in the region at all. Its roughly one hundred facilities are mostly colocation sites concentrated near Boston; the largest runs up to about 40 megawatts, where hyperscale sites elsewhere can draw a thousand megawatts or more — Meta's Louisiana build is 5,000 megawatts, more than the city of New Orleans will use. The reasons are land (what is undeveloped is largely forest that residents want to protect), price (after Hawaii and California, New England states have some of the highest electricity rates in the country), and a grid that resists extension: one transmission line through northern Maine took about ten years to build, and the region's natural gas pipelines are already maxed out in winter. Towns across the region are passing temporary moratoriums, and Massachusetts now requires any data center over 25 megawatts to have local support, a community benefits agreement, and its own source of energy.
Someone pays for all of this, and it is not only the companies. The same explainer cites the PJM grid region — thirteen states and Washington, D.C. — where customers have paid an extra $29 billion since 2024 because demand for data centers is growing faster than the region's ability to build new power plants. A HeatMap News poll conducted over the summer found 75 percent of Americans would oppose a data center near where they live.
We do not think the answer is a better place to put the furnace.
Helena's intelligence doesn't live in a furnace. Everything she knows fits in less space than a single video game — and she runs on the ordinary computer already sitting on your desk, on power you were already using. No new power plant, no permits, no moratorium fights, and no line item quietly added to a stranger's electric bill thirteen states away. We don't run on GPU. She runs on any PC.
The gigawatts are not a sign of how powerful the technology is. They are a sign of where the demand was built in: intelligence rented from a furnace, by the month, forever. Helena deletes the demand instead of serving it. Every household she helps is one the grid never had to notice.
— Harrison Interactive