Four developments stacked today on the same axis — who pays for the AI-data-center buildout, and who gets to decide. The Ohio Supreme Court denied $75 million in customer refunds tied to House Bill 6 coal-plant subsidies. PJM Interconnection restarted its application queue with 800-plus projects after a four-year pause. The New York Times documented a durable cross-partisan realignment around data-center opposition, anchored in seven Michigan towns. And the Financial Times reported that the banks financing the buildout are now seeking to offload that debt, against a months-long FT thread documenting $120 billion in off-balance-sheet AI infrastructure financing.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously on April 29 that American Electric Power does not owe customers a $75 million refund for charges levied in 2018 and 2019 to subsidize two 1950s-era Ohio Valley Electric Corporation coal plants — one in Southern Ohio, one in Indiana. The justices affirmed that the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio was permitted to allow AEP to collect the subsidies, even after the Ohio Consumers' Counsel argued that PUCO staff had asked an independent auditor to soften draft language concluding the plants were not in ratepayer interest. The OVEC plants are tied to the largest bribery scheme in Ohio history; HB6 codified the subsidy into state law and was only repealed for OVEC in mid-2025. A study commissioned by the Ohio Manufacturers' Association found the subsidies cost ratepayers roughly $200 million in 2024 alone, while the underlying plant lost more than $100 million the same year.
Justice Pat Fischer, writing for the court: "The commission determined that OVEC's decision to employ a must-run strategy in 2018 and 2019 was prudent when viewed as of the time OVEC made its decision." Catherine Turcer, an AEP customer and government accountability advocate quoted in the same coverage: "We're talking about the difference between a couple $100 and $500. … $50 would definitely help most of us." Had the Ohio Consumers' Counsel won, customer refunds would have averaged about $50.
Source: Morgan Trau / News5Cleveland, republished by Ohio Capital Journal via States Newsroom.
PJM Interconnection — which manages the wholesale electricity supply for Pennsylvania and a dozen other states — announced last week that it is again accepting applications to build and connect new sources of power to the grid, the first such opening since 2022. The new queue contains 800-plus projects totaling roughly 220 gigawatts of proposed capacity, against the 180 gigawatts PJM currently oversees. Natural gas leads at 157 applications and 106 GW; storage follows with 349 projects and 67 GW; nuclear is third at 27 projects and 18 GW, including the first fusion-plant application PJM has ever received and a number of small modular reactor proposals. Of the 103 GW PJM had completed agreements for since 2020, only 23 GW have actually entered service; another 54 GW cleared PJM's process but never started construction, with developers citing permits as the primary delay. Of the projects waiting in the queue when PJM paused in 2022, 74 percent withdrew their applications.
David Mills, who became PJM's president and CEO on Friday after serving in an interim capacity since January: "That includes first-time innovative technologies such as small nuclear reactors and fusion, more storage projects than any other technology, a resurgence in natural gas and continued strong participation by renewables and hybrids. This is good news because we need all the generation we can get." Abe Silverman, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University's Ralph O'Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, on the change from “first-come, first-served” to “first-ready, first-served” with cluster studies: "PJM kind of got itself into an infinite loop. If project three had an unfavorable cost allocation … projects four through 400 would need to be restudied."
Source: Ian Karbal / Pennsylvania Capital-Star, with parallel carry by States Newsroom.
Sabrina Tavernise's reported essay this weekend opens at a Lyon Township, Michigan board meeting where residents lined up at the microphone to speak against a proposed hyperscale data center, citing football-field comparisons (a 1.8-million-square-foot hyperscale facility is roughly 32 NFL fields), playing recordings of data-center noise from another Michigan town, and asking whether endangered-bat-habitat preservation procedures had been followed. Lyon Township voted for Donald Trump in 2024. The Marquette University Law School Poll found roughly 70 percent of Wisconsinites now say data-center costs outweigh the benefits, with what the poll's director called “stunningly little difference” between Republican and Democratic respondents. At least 50 Michigan towns have passed measures to pause data centers; similar legislation has been introduced in at least 13 other states.
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette poll: "There was stunningly little difference for our normally extremely polarized state." Charlie Berens, a Milwaukee-based comedian, at a recent Juneau, Wisconsin meeting on a proposed data center: "This is the most bipartisan issue since beer."
The piece names cases this brief has been tracking and adds new ones: the Saline Township, Michigan attorney general's court challenge of two data-center contracts so heavily redacted that even the signatures were blacked out; an Indianapolis councilman whose home was hit by 13 gunshots last month after he voted to approve a data center, with an accompanying note reading "No Data Centers"; and Michigan-based former tech worker Michael Bommarito's activist handbook How to Fight a Data Center, which counted at least 16 major data-center projects in Michigan as of December.
Source: Sabrina Tavernise / The New York Times.
A Financial Times piece today — "Banks in danger of 'choking' on data centre financing seek to offload risk; Lenders explore private deals; Unprecedented borrowing; Public opposition raises stakes" — extends a months-long FT thread documenting how the AI buildout is actually being financed. The body of today's piece is paywalled within this brief's source corpus; three earlier FT pieces past their embargo provide the substantive anatomy.
Tabby Kinder reported on December 29, 2025 that tech companies have moved more than $120 billion of data-center spending off their balance sheets using special-purpose vehicles funded by Wall Street investors, with Meta, Elon Musk's xAI, Oracle, and CoreWeave leading the way. Pimco, BlackRock, Apollo, Blue Owl Capital, and JPMorgan supplied the $120 billion in debt and equity. Oracle alone accounts for roughly two-thirds of the SPV total — including a $13 billion structure (with $10 billion of debt from Blue Owl and JPMorgan) for its Abilene, Texas OpenAI facility, a $38 billion debt package for two Texas-and-Wisconsin data centers, and an $18 billion loan for a New Mexico site. Meta's October 2025 deal with Blue Owl Capital created a $30 billion SPV called Beignet Investor — funded by ~$27 billion in loans from Pimco, BlackRock, Apollo, and others, plus $3 billion equity from Blue Owl — for its Hyperion facility in Louisiana, allowing Meta to add $30 billion of borrowing without it appearing on its balance sheet. Morgan Stanley estimated $1.5 trillion of external financing is needed to fund tech companies' AI plans.
Antoine Gara and Eric Platt reported on August 21, 2025 that JPMorgan and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group were in talks to underwrite a $22 billion loan for Vantage Data Centers' 1,200-acre, $25 billion “Frontier” campus in Texas — announced with the backing of Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Silver Lake and DigitalBridge committed an additional $3 billion in equity. Ten data centers are planned within the campus; first delivery mid-2026, full delivery by end of 2028.
Michelle Chan reported on February 6, 2026 that at least $56 billion of data-center construction loans tied to Oracle's $300 billion OpenAI deal have been given investment-grade ratings — a rare designation for project finance during construction, which opens the loans to insurance companies and pension funds. The loans cover Oracle's leases on the Texas-and-Wisconsin and New Mexico facilities. Pricing on the rated tranches sits at 2.5 percentage points above SOFR; pricing on newer Oracle-linked debt has widened to 3-4.5 percentage points above SOFR — junk-rated levels — per a TD Cowen research note (January 26, 2026). Christine Brozynski, partner at Norton Rose Fulbright: "Almost all large [data centre] deals are trying to get a credit rating now." An anonymous senior project-finance banker, in the same piece: "We basically tapped every single project finance bank possible but there are only so many banks. Banks will have to offload that risk if they want to keep lending."
What today's May 4 piece adds, per its headline framing: lenders are now exploring private deals to offload this debt, with public opposition raising the stakes. OpenAI alone has made more than $1.4 trillion in long-term computing commitments across the sector's major players — meaning lenders across multiple data centers could be exposed to the same risk if a single tenant falters. The FT's “public opposition raises stakes” framing connects today's financial-side reporting to the New York Times reporting in Lead 3 above.
Sources: Tabby Kinder / The Financial Times, December 29, 2025. Antoine Gara and Eric Platt / The Financial Times, August 21, 2025. Michelle Chan / The Financial Times, February 6, 2026. Today's headline framing only, The Financial Times, May 4, 2026.
Tuesday's Ohio ballot carries two energy-relevant decisions. Richland County voters decide whether to repeal the county's renewable-energy ban — a campaign whose contribution disclosures published two days ago showed pro-ban funding from Majority Strategies LLC, the largest historical recipient of money from The Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money group founded by former Ariel Corp. natural-gas-compressor executives. The Ohio Supreme Court Republican primary features four candidates competing to challenge the court's only Democrat, Justice Jennifer Brunner — a contest that, depending on November outcomes, could make the court 7-0 Republican. (Justice Daniel Hawkins also faces a Democratic challenge in November, on the same potential math.) Today's AEP $75 million ruling in Lead 1 above is the freshest data point on how that court has been ruling on utility-regulation questions.
Separately and on a longer timeline, the 25-megawatt constitutional-amendment signature drive remains the larger Ohio data-center fight in 2026: petitioners need 413,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties by July 1 to put the proposed amendment — which would prohibit data centers with peak load above 25 MW — on the November ballot. Petitioners Austin Baurichter (Brown County) and Nikki Gerber (Adams County) told Ohio Capital Journal this week they are confident of meeting the bar. Today's Dayton Daily News carried a column by Thomas Suddes, former Plain Dealer legislative reporter writing from Ohio University, framing the constitutional amendment as a continuation of Ohio's 1912 home-rule expansion and naming the eminent-domain question — whether data centers, like utilities, would gain the legal authority to acquire private property for sites and transmission corridors, or to install on-site small modular reactors.
Sources: Susan Tebben / Ohio Capital Journal (Republican Supreme Court primary candidates); Megan Henry / Ohio Capital Journal (signature drive); Thomas Suddes column / Dayton Daily News.
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