Site Selection, Power Procurement & Permitting

Site selection now screens first for where 100 MW to multiple gigawatts can be energized in 24–48 months; every other criterion is a tiebreaker among sites that clear that gate.

Grid interconnection — queue position, studies, network upgrades, and the long-lead transformer — is the critical path of an AI data center, and it runs years longer than construction.

Power runs 25–60% of lifetime opex, so the price, shape, and curtailment terms signed at siting move lifetime cost more than any engineering decision made after the chips are bought.

The supply structure — grid-only, grid-plus-bridge, behind-the-meter island, or co-located hybrid — fixes your energization date and cost certainty, and its basis, shape, and regulatory risks outlive the GPU generation it powers.

When the grid cannot energize a campus on schedule, on-site generation becomes the primary supply decision, and the bridge-vs-permanent call governs prime mover, fuel firmness, emissions exposure, and stranding risk.

Fiber diligence turns on physics — roughly 5 microseconds of one-way delay per route-kilometer — which bounds how far apart campuses can train as one machine and how far an inference metro can sit from its users.

Water gates a site second only to power: it sets the cooling architecture and the permit timeline, and your drought-year curtailment rank, not average-year supply, decides whether the asset keeps running.

Soil, seismicity, flood line, and title rarely pick the winning site, yet a missed liquefaction zone, an under-rated slab, or a 500-year-floodplain parcel can quietly cost 18 months and tens of millions.

Grid interconnection and the air permit for backup generation routinely outrun construction, so the slowest approvals have to start before you own the land — otherwise a finished campus sits dark.

Incentives decide which buildable site you pick; the 10-year abatement banked against a 20–30 year asset is the most reversible line in the pro-forma, and 2026 began the clawbacks.

Community consent now gates approval alongside power and water: lose the rezoning and you strand an interconnection slot and land you have already begun to underwrite.

Geopolitics now gates siting in 2026: whether your jurisdiction may receive top US accelerators, whose law can reach the bytes, and whether that answer survives a change of administration.

The market you pick pre-loads power, permitting, cooling physics, and sovereignty before you score a parcel; the scoring playbook keeps a tempting cluster from passing a gate it already failed.