Research
Public-record walkthroughs and decision trees from data center site readiness work. Air permits, interconnection headroom, and off-grid feasibility, with primary-source citations on every fact.
Research note - May 23, 2026
Ten counties across Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, and Illinois, profiled at the depth a battery developer can underwrite. State preemption (MD HB 1036, VA HB 891), zoning by district, NFPA 855 fire-code adoption, the active interconnection corridor, recent BESS approvals + denials, every fact primary-cited.
Read the piece →Research note - May 17, 2026
Meta runs 100% of live Llama 3.1 405B traffic on MI300X. OpenAI committed to 6 GW of MI450. The May 2026 picture: hardware specs vs NVIDIA, neocloud rental pricing 30–75% below H100, the workloads where AMD beats NVIDIA on $/M tokens, and the off-grid power-density penalty from 750W → 1400W per GPU.
Read the piece →Tool - May 12, 2026
Chat-driven parcel finder across 28 states, scored against Cliff's ridge-logistic Resistance Index. Trained on 225 decided entitlement outcomes with primary-source citations (leave-one-out AUC 0.96). Resistance range: active moratorium and organized opposition at the high-risk end; PILOT and pre-filing engagement at the approval end.
Read the piece →Research note - May 12, 2026
Three of the eight functional layers of data center site readiness have software vendors today. Five are still served entirely by specialist consultants. The map of where software exists and why the gap is becoming tractable in 2026.
Read the piece →Calculator - May 7, 2026
Interactive capex, opex, throughput, margin, and payback model for a GPU inference fleet. Tweak GPU, model, batch size, electricity price, and facility capex; throughput is derived from first principles (HBM bandwidth, compute roofline, batch saturation) rather than hardcoded benchmarks.
Read the piece →Research note - May 2, 2026
Power-side capex per MW, generation stack, AI workload fit, and operator comps or proposals adjacent to each uptime tier from 50% (mining analogy) up through 5-9s (mission-critical, grid-anchored).
Read the piece →Case study - May 1, 2026
Public-record walkthrough of Crusoe's Longhorn Data Center air permits in Abilene, Texas. TCEQ Standard Permit 177263, PBR 177262, issued Title V FOP O4721, and the pending PSD filing for Buildings 9 and 10.
Read the piece →Decision tree - May 1, 2026
A cited Texas and federal air-permit decision tree for arbitrary Texas parcels and proposed data-center generation stacks, with Longhorn and Goodnight demos from TCEQ records.
Read the piece →Research note - April 24, 2026
Extends Tyler Norris's Rethinking Load Growth (Duke, Feb 2025) to ERCOT load-zone resolution. Cliff's public dataset reveals 11 GW of incoming data-center queue concentrated in the Panhandle across two sites, a load-pocket binding constraint the aggregate paper methodology cannot resolve.
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