Data centre power deals collide with a backlash that is now measurable

Axios first reported the rebrand idea, and Tom's Hardware picked it up on 3 November. Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, told Axios the midterms would be "a bit of a movie trailer for what you're going to see in 2028." He described the safeguards the company wants as "speed limits." Tom's Hardware reported the terminology shift has been under discussion since August.

That is a comms problem. The electricity contract is the harder one.

On 1 November, the Guardian reported that National Grid will site its largest substation in the UK on Teesside, next to a planned AI datacentre. A day later, Mugglehead Investment Magazine matched that reporting and put the land deal at 73.3 acres. A substation of that size is not built for a speculative tenant. It is the physical precondition for a load that does not yet exist. It also tells you which projects the grid expects to serve.

The demand side is being counted more aggressively than the supply side. CBC reported on 2 November that Utah State University physicist Robert Davies estimated the Kevin O'Leary-backed Wonder Valley project in northwestern Alberta would run at a continuous 18 gigawatts at full operation. That is about 1.5 petajoules per day, and it would emit roughly 30 million tonnes of CO2 a year, more than four per cent of Canada's total. Davies prepared the analysis for the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. He said the heat rejection would be equivalent to "about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day." The nation filed for a judicial review in September of the project's exemption from a provincial environmental assessment. Alberta's environment ministry said in an Oct. 30 statement that it followed the established legal process in deciding no assessment was required.

Local votes are where the contracts land

Google cleared one such gate on Friday, 30 October. The Hermantown, Minnesota city council voted unanimously to approve a data centre of just over 200 acres and about 1.66 million square feet across three buildings, MPR News reported via Tom's Hardware. The vote followed at least two postponed meetings. Google scaled the project down and dropped an $80 million tax break request. The approval still faces lawsuits and a separate inquiry into electricity supply.

The pattern is not local colour. A database compiled by Prophecy Gov, an AI startup, turned 10,202 public comments at 417 local government meetings in 2026 into a searchable record. Tom's Hardware reported on 2 November that 90.5% of the comments were negative. Only 21% mentioned AI, water was the top concern, and 73% of meetings drew no supporters at all.

"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time," Sam Altman said on the Cheeky Pint YouTube channel, per Tom's Hardware on 1 November.

Altman's argument for centralised utilisation is the same logic that drives the load growth. It sits awkwardly beside the local objection that utilisation is precisely what neighbours do not want next door. Elsewhere the strain shows up in courts and in statehouses. Tom's Hardware reported on 2 November that a judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit over pollution from gas turbines serving an xAI data centre in Mississippi. The judge ruled the units are not exempt from the Clean Air Act. Time reported on 29 October that Ohio's data centre revolt is reshaping midterm races. Putin, meanwhile, has ordered Russian data centres to hold 10% of capacity for state IT infrastructure on 24 hours' notice, per Tom's Hardware on 2 November.

Not every headline is a fight. Electra and Mercedes-Benz said on 3 November that all 47 European Mercedes High-Power Charging hubs, 374 charge points, moved into the Electra network on 1 November. MB.Charge customers gain access to more than 800 Electra sites and over 5,000 charge points in ten countries, heise reported. The published prices do not yet settle what drivers pay at those sites.

One comparison is worth holding onto, from pv magazine on 3 November. UNEF estimates solar PV cut Spain's wholesale electricity costs by €17.02 billion between January 2025 and June 2026. It says day-ahead prices would have averaged €112/MWh instead of €60.2/MWh without it. UNEF's own caveats are that the figure covers only the day-ahead market and does not translate into bill savings. Supply, in other words, can move the number. Whether the data centre contracts are written to pay for it is a different question.