Farmland opposition to solar didn't emerge from nowhere, and it isn't purely local. A handful of forces have converged over the past few years to turn prime farmland into one of the highest-risk categories a developer can option.

On July 20, BlackRock began marketing a bond sale of more than $12 billion to help finance a single data center campus: Meta's project in El Paso, Texas. JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are running investor calls this week, with pricing expected early next week. If it closes near that size, it will rank among the largest single-site financings ever assembled for digital infrastructure. For developers watching from outside the hyperscaler tier, the headline number is less in

PJM is running out of room. So is every other grid where data center demand is highest. Developers are responding with floating server farms, orbital compute, and mines repurposed into hyperscale campuses. Our new whitepaper benchmarks four unconventional data center formats against conventional builds and finds that the ones with the best shot at scale aren't the flashiest. They're the ones engineered to work with the grid and the community around them, not against either.

Meta confirmed this week that its Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is growing to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, pushing the company's regional investment past $50 billion (CNBC; Blockspace). The project began in December 2024 as a $10 billion, roughly 2 GW campus on a 2,250 acre former farm between Rayville and Delhi. Eighteen months later it is one of the largest data center buildouts in history, and a useful case study in how land, power, and rur

For hyperscale campuses, colocation facilities, and edge deployments alike, subtransmission is the variable that determines whether a site can actually be powered.