About 40 local ballot measures across 13 states targeted data centers, and Latitude Media, citing Ballotpedia, counted 24 already approved with most of the rest on track. DCD tallied at least 14 bans or limits passed in Ohio alone. Analysts say the fight now shifts from how fast a campus can connect to who pays.
Freeport-McMoRan's board approved a $4.5B brownfield expansion at Bagdad, Arizona, aiming to more than double mining and milling rates to over 400M lb of copper a year by mid-2030. The mine has run a fully autonomous haulage fleet since 2025, and the company claims more than 4,000 construction jobs. Copper for the grid and AI buildout is coming from a mine that has operated since 1945.
Stakeholder comments on EO 14421, issued Aug 26, urge DOE to judge software and remote-access risk by function rather than country of origin before rules due Dec 24. Wood Mackenzie and RMI flag that transformers are already short and that bulk-power imports run more than $22B to $30B a year. Securing the grid this way runs into a market that cannot buy enough equipment as it is.
Duncan, South Carolina startup Aformic raised a $6.95M seed led by Veteran Ventures and claims more than $34M in orders, with hundreds of AMRs and autonomous forklifts live at Toyota, 3M, Oshkosh Defense and others. It will use the money to build robots for AI data-center construction and maintenance. The order and fleet figures are the company's own, but the labor bottleneck it is chasing is real.
