Data center developers turn to legacy industrial sites as permitting tightens

Blackstart Digital's agreement to buy IBM's Almaden campus is the month's clearest case of a data center developer buying power that already exists, with more than 500 acres and a 25MW substation the company intends to expand. The price was not disclosed and the deal has not closed, but the campus carries two advantages a greenfield has to earn: zoning that is already settled and a substation that already exists. Blackstart plans to leave more than 500 acres undeveloped, holding land in reserve, avoiding the entitlement fight that developing it would require.

The permitting environment has stopped being predictable: New York has imposed a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, and the industry's answer there has been behind-the-meter generation, fuel cells and storage, according to Data Center Dynamics, while contractors say Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas have each constrained data center permitting since August. Those accounts matter less for any single rule than for the shared shape of a longer path from site to shovel. The acoustics research of Kasey Fowler-Finn, a Saint Louis University biologist, opens a second front, recommending 1,500-foot setbacks over 4.5-foot walls on the finding that the 63-hertz hum of cooling systems passes through ordinary walls, which makes distance the practical mitigation and leaves a developer little to engineer against beyond the setback itself.