Stargate Just Blinked

OpenAI and Oracle just scrapped plans to expand their flagship Abilene campus from 1.2 GW to 2 GW.

The Abilene site is the crown jewel of Stargate, the project Trump announced at the White House last year as America's answer to the AI race. Eight buildings on 1,000 acres. Two already running Nvidia Blackwell racks. Six more due by mid-year.

The expansion was supposed to nearly double capacity. Instead, it's dead.

What happened:

The negotiations collapsed over financing and timing. But the real story is more interesting: OpenAI doesn't want the expansion anymore because the chips are moving faster than the buildings.

Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, the next generation after Blackwell, are already in production. They deliver five times the inference performance. OpenAI would rather deploy Rubin at a new campus than Blackwell at an expansion that won't have power ready for another year.

Winter weather this year also damaged parts of the liquid cooling infrastructure at Abilene, forcing several buildings offline for multiple days. Relations between OpenAI and site operator Crusoe reportedly got strained.

The fallout:

Nvidia stepped in with a $150 million deposit to Crusoe, reportedly to keep AMD out of the site, and is helping broker a deal to bring Meta in as a tenant for the unused capacity.

Oracle, which is carrying over $100 billion in debt to fund its Stargate commitments, called the Bloomberg and Reuters reporting "false and incorrect." But their statement only confirmed existing projects are on track. It didn't address the expansion.

The 4.5 GW master agreement between Oracle and OpenAI remains in place. Other sites are moving forward, including one in Wisconsin where steel beams went up this week. But Abilene's growth just got capped.

Why this matters for you:

Stargate was supposed to be proof that nothing could stop the buildout. Permits, grid constraints, citizen opposition, all obstacles to be bulldozed by $500 billion in capital.

Turns out the constraint isn't political. It's technical. Nvidia's GPU generations are turning over every 12 months. Data centers take 18-36 months to build. The infrastructure can't keep pace with the silicon.

This is the new reality: some projects will get built. Many won't. The pipeline is full of paper.

Sightline Climate tracks 190 GW across 777 large data center projects announced since 2024. Here's what they found:

At least 16 GW is slated to come online in 2026 across roughly 140 projects.

Only about 5 GW is currently under construction.

The other 11 GW? Still in "announced" stage with no visible construction progress, despite typical build timelines of 12-18 months.

In 2025, 26% of expected capacity slipped. Another 10% of projects pushed back commercial operation dates without notice.

Sightline's projection: 30-50% of capacity slated for 2026 will be delayed.

The geography is also narrowing. The Southeast and Midwest are absorbing the real construction activity. The West and Northeast are lagging.

ConstructConnect's data tells the same story from a different angle: January 2026 hit a record $25.2 billion in construction starts. But $12.2 billion was concentrated on the East Coast (New York to South Carolina) and another $12.2 billion in the Midwest (Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio). The remaining $800 million was spread across everything west of Minnesota.

The takeaway: If you're chasing data center work, the action is in a shrinking number of places. The projects that ARE happening are concentrating fast.

Detroit City Council voted 6-2 on Tuesday to ask Mayor Mary Sheffield to impose a two-year moratorium on data center permits.

The resolution calls for a comprehensive study on grid stability, water consumption, noise pollution, economic impact, and land use before any new permits are issued.

Council President James Tate Jr. and President Pro Tem Coleman Young II voted against, not because they oppose the moratorium, but because they thought two years was too long. Tate said six months to a year should be enough.

The mayor's office said Sheffield will "fully vet the request" upon receiving an official copy.

Detroit is the largest city yet to move toward a moratorium. Michigan now has 25+ local moratoriums in place or pending.

Also this week in Michigan:

East Lansing City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to adopt a six-month moratorium while it evaluates zoning ordinances. No active proposals exist in the city, this is preemptive.

Mason City Council voted Monday to repeal its data center ordinance after a citizen petition gathered enough signatures to suspend it. Residents didn't want regulations that might encourage data center development.

Fayetteville, Georgia (March 18)

Crow Holdings Development and CHI/Acquisitions withdrew their appeal of a January denial for a 300,000-square-foot data center on Highway 85.

The Planning & Zoning Commission rejected the project in January. The developers appealed. A town hall got packed. Then they dropped the appeal one day before the City Council was scheduled to hear it.

Councilman Emmett Spurlock: "I believe the people have spoken and CHI listened. If CHI made their decision to withdraw their appeal based entirely or partially on the town hall that we had, then it shows the power of the people."

The city had already enacted a moratorium on new data center development and amended its zoning ordinance on March 5 to make data centers no longer a permitted use.

Ardmore, Oklahoma

JRE Strategies withdrew its application for a 10 MW data center after the planning commission voted 7-0 against the rezoning request last month.

The city's Community Development Director: "The application is dead."

Monterey Park, California

City Council voted unanimously to extend its data center moratorium to January 2027 and called a special election for June 2, 2026, with a ballot proposition to prohibit data centers citywide.

The target: a proposed 225,000-square-foot data center by Australian company HMC StratCap that would use 45 MW of electricity per year, equal to the entire city's current consumption.

Adair County, Iowa

Board of Supervisors approved a moratorium on data centers, high-density computing facilities, and battery storage facilities in unincorporated areas. The moratorium has no set expiration date.

Columbus, Georgia

The Planning Advisory Commission voted to recommend a technology overlay district for data centers with a 500-foot setback, up from the originally proposed 75 feet. The PAC also recommended creating a separate oversight board to review every proposed data center.

This is the city where a $5.18 billion, 900-acre campus was pitched in February. That project now faces additional friction.

Lowell, Massachusetts

City Council voted 10-0 last week to impose a 360-day moratorium on expansion of existing data centers and construction of new ones, with an option to extend another 180 days.

The Institute for Energy Research published a report this week claiming there's no statistical correlation between data center concentration and electricity rate increases.

Their data: the top 10 data center states averaged 14.46¢/kWh in 2025, virtually identical to the 14.39¢/kWh average for all other states.

IER President Tom Pyle: "Politicians can try to sell a different story, but the numbers don't lie."

This is the counternarrative taking shape. Expect more of it as the industry responds to the moratorium wave.

Meanwhile, the Dallas Fed published a study estimating that under plausible assumptions about data center buildout and utilization, annual PCE inflation in 2030 would increase by 0.04 to 0.13 percentage points through electricity price effects.

The rate debate is just getting started.

Key dates in the co-location proceeding:

The December 2025 order established three new transmission service options for co-located loads and set a 50 MW threshold for behind-the-meter generation. The paper hearing will determine final rates, terms, and conditions.

This is the regulatory infrastructure being built to handle the next wave. Or the current wave, if it actually materializes.

This week:

Coming up:

The buildout isn't slowing. But it's concentrating.

Half the pipeline is paper. The other half is fighting for power, permits, and community acceptance in a shrinking number of places.

Stargate just showed that even $500 billion doesn't buy you immunity from physics. Chips move faster than concrete.

For contractors, truckers, and equipment sellers: the work is real, but it's not everywhere. The Southeast and Midwest are absorbing the lion's share. The projects breaking ground now are the ones that matter.

Know which ones those are.

The DC Pipeline delivers weekly intelligence on where the $2.3 trillion data center buildout is landing, and where it isn't. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe at newsletter.thedcpipeline.com.