Azeem Azhar, author of Exponential View, argues that after the data-center backlash, the leverage local governments hold is time. Azhar uses the Scottish developer DataVita's pledge of up to US$100,000 per MW a year to a community fund as a reference price for permit negotiations.

Concept illustration on a mustard background: at lower left, a white building lettered DATA CENTER has three fan units on its roof, rows of server racks visible through its open front and a small open box at its corner, with a road below it carrying a truck with a crane arm, and a long red cable runs from the building's side in winding S-curves up to the upper right, where its plug stops just in front of a wall socket on a substation fenced with wire mesh and wired to a lattice transmission tower. At right, a suited figure holding a sheet of paper stands at the entrance of a columned building behind an A-frame sign lettered LOCAL GOVERNMENT; large black quotation marks sit at the lower left and upper right, and in the lower foreground a black silhouette of a person stretches one arm out to the left with an open palm. Printed on the image: 4 years Average US grid connection wait, per Azhar.

Our inference: after the elections, political permission is a new constraint on data centers that don't yet have permits, which fits SecondSource's November 5 report that the industry won only one of 41 ballot measures. Azhar is an analyst who writes Exponential View, a newsletter on the tech industry, and the November 6 piece is advice addressed to Democrats, with a clear stance. Azhar's arithmetic: a 1 GW data center costs about US$40 billion in total, annual operating costs are under 2.5% of capital spending, and two-thirds of operating costs are electricity. Electricity is a small part of the total bill. Revenue, though, starts only once the site is connected to the grid. A building takes 18 to 24 months, but a US grid connection takes four years on average, so Azhar argues local governments can negotiate on timing, not on power prices (Exponential View, 2026-11-06). Azhar's US$100,000 figure comes from a Scottish political arrangement. The US comparison he gives is Oracle's one-time US$84,000 per MW in New Mexico, and he doesn't show that the Scottish figure carries over to US counties. How we checked →

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This item ran in the brief of Nov 7, 2026, alongside 13 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

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SecondSource (2026). "Azeem Azhar, author of Exponential View, argues that after the data-center backlash, the leverage local governments hold is time. Azhar uses the Scottish developer DataVita's pledge of up to US$100,000 per MW a year to a community fund as a reference price for permit negotiations.." https://secondsource.io/en/expert/2026-11-07-1/. Accessed access date.