The Cases Writing the Rules The regulatory questions surrounding private power are no longer theoretical. Federal regulators, regional grid operators and state utility commissions are already confronting disputes over co-located generation, transmission obligations, large-load tariffs and the financial commitments required from data center customers. Amazon–Talen Puts Co-Location Before FERC The Amazon–Talen–Susquehanna dispute became the most prominent federal test of how far a co-located data center can separate its power supply from the regional grid while remaining connected to the grid’s reliability framework. Amazon Web Services operates a data center campus adjacent to Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. In 2024, the parties sought to expand the co-located load from 300 MW to 480 MW through an amended interconnection agreement with PJM. The proposed structure would have allowed the campus to receive more power directly from the nuclear plant while reducing the plant’s capacity interconnection rights on the PJM system. FERC rejected the amendment in November 2024, concluding that PJM had not justified the nonstandard provisions in the agreement. Importantly, the Commission did not prohibit co-location or dedicated generation. The dispute instead exposed a larger gap in existing transmission rules: how should a large load located beside a generator be measured, what transmission service does it require, what happens when the generator is unavailable, and how should the project pay for continued access to regional reliability? Those questions soon moved beyond the Amazon–Talen project itself. In December 2025, FERC found that PJM’s existing framework did not provide sufficiently clear and consistent rules for generators serving co-located loads or for transmission customers taking service on their behalf. The Commission directed PJM to develop defined interconnection and operating requirements along with transmission options ranging from conventional network service to firm and non-firm contract-demand structures. The central issue is deceptively simple: physical proximity

The biggest driver in today’s global economy is the data center, and in the process, data centers are generating and taking more heat than ever before. Heat — the generation of it and public concerns about it — is the most pressing issue facing the data center industry. In response, data center managers and engineers are viewing the problem in new ways, devising innovative, next-generation thermal control strategies that manage the problem more effectively. In the minds of IT managers and the public, data centers and AI are joined at the hip, along with increasing power demands and associated issues of environmental impact, water usage, and higher utility costs. As community activists, political leaders, and now even some prominent AI industry CEOs call for limits on AI development and data center construction, it’s imperative that the data center industry better manage the heat they’re producing — and taking. Sponsored Resources: Texas Instruments’ portfolio of data center thermal management systems spans the full coolant path. It’s been under active development at TI for decades and has evolved in response to the rising power, computing demands, and complexity of advanced data centers. Traditional thermal management techniques can’t keep up with AI’s intense computing requirements. For decades, air cooling was sufficient. Fans blew cool air across hot components and carried heat away, keeping data centers and AI servers operating reliably. But with AI training and inference pushing rack power beyond 20kW to 40kW, air alone can no longer remove heat quickly enough. In addition, air cooling is noisy and consumes too much energy. AI server racks are coming online now that draw 100kW of power, and they’re on their way to more than a megawatt in a few years. Each generation of servers grows denser, more powerful, and hotter as they move and compute massive volumes

“Operators need cooling infrastructure that can adapt as GPU platforms and rack densities evolve,” said Scott Smith, general manager of LiquidStack, in a statement. “CDU 2.X combines the performance and flexibility customers need today with the headroom to prepare for what comes next, allowing them to configure cooling around their facility and deployment strategy rather than designing the facility around the CDU.” A key feature is the platform’s support for different deployment configurations, including end-of-row and rack-adjacent installations. The idea is to give data center operators more flexibility in how they place their equipment with increasingly high thermal loads. The system offers configurable control-valve, power-feed and redundancy options, including dual-feed A/B configurations and automatic transfer switch support. These features allow operators to tailor the CDU to different facility architectures and resiliency requirements.

Nvidia introduced NVLink Fusion as part of a broader effort to make its interconnect technology available to companies developing custom AI processors. The approach allows third-party silicon to be incorporated into Nvidia-oriented data center architectures, potentially extending Nvidia’s influence beyond its own GPUs. A similar strategy is already being pursued with inference-chip developer d-Matrix. Apple also already operates specialized servers for its Private Cloud Compute system, which handles Apple Intelligence workloads that require processing beyond the user’s device. Scaling that infrastructure, however, reportedly creates bandwidth, cost, and performance challenges. A commercial AI server would allow Apple to extend its silicon strategy into the data center while giving customers direct access to Apple processors rather than Apple’s own cloud services.

Western Pennsylvania is becoming a test bed for one of the most consequential changes underway in data center development: the migration from simply finding grid capacity to building the power supply along with the data center. Two projects illustrate that transition particularly well. Aligned Data Centers is advancing the roughly $10 billion, 2-GW Project Phoenix campus at the former Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power station site in Shippingport, Beaver County. About 60 miles to the east, the former Homer City Generating Station is being transformed into the Homer City Energy Campus, centered on as much as 4.4 GW of new natural-gas generation and a proposed Amazon Web Services campus that could ultimately include 39 data center buildings. The projects share a number of similarities. Both reuse former coal-generation properties. Both already possess much of the infrastructure that greenfield data center developers spend years trying to obtain: high-voltage transmission, industrial zoning, water infrastructure, pipeline access, large parcels and proximity to the Marcellus and Utica natural-gas fields.But technically and commercially, they are also very different. Project Phoenix is essentially a data-center-led development using behind-the-meter generation, supplemented by a separate plan to repower the former coal station. While Homer City is the reverse: a power-generation project being constructed first, with the hyperscale data center development forming around the available power supply. This isn’t a competition, but it is a comparison on speed of delivery and the issues both development models face. Project Phoenix: Aligned Moves Into Pennsylvania Aligned calls Shippingport its first Pennsylvania campus and a regional flagship. The company formally broke ground on Project Phoenix on September 10, 2026, describing it as a 2-GW campus spanning three data center facilities and representing roughly $10 billion in regional investment. Aligned estimates the development will support approximately 3,000 construction jobs and 640 full-time jobs in

Type-5 support is aimed at data center integration. “It lets the tenant network prefixes be advertised directly into the physical fabric, so that really that’s basically how modern data center networks are built,” Carrez explained. “So really helps OpenStack fit into those environments without extra gateway layers that we’ve seen in use before.” Routable tenant addresses: The OVN BGP integration gains a route leaking option. An operator turns it on with the leak_routes attribute of a subnet. The extended OVN features follow the same approach. “OVN BGP features that let the tenant addresses be routable directly from the underlay, and that again is exposing how modern data centers are built directly into OpenStack,” Carrez said. Lower memory use: In deployments that use Open vSwitch, a monitoring daemon tracked keepalived state changes for HA routers. Hibiscus replaces the daemon with a shell script. The change applies to every HA router, so the savings add up across a deployment. “The 15 times reduction in memory footprint for the high availability router monitoring is, I think, really interesting,” Carrez said.