Power Scarcity is Being Repriced
Data-center approved matters as much, if not more than, power itself.
Developments in the AI market have accelerated over the past week, and I wanted to share what I'm seeing from my vantage point at the intersection of power, infrastructure, AI, and Bitcoin.
The AI trade is no longer isolated to a handful of speculative companies. The Wall Street Journal recently noted,
"if you exclude the AI-driven “Magnificent Seven” — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Broadcom — the S&P 500 is actually down. Put differently: AI infrastructure demand is now lifting the broader market itself. The average U.S. stock has fallen almost as much as the MSCI All Country World Index excluding the U.S., because more than half the S&P members are down."
On this week's All-In Podcast, the guys (rightly) observe the same point from the infrastructure side: the chokepoint is no longer demand for AI — it is access to power.
"There is one very specific chokepoint constraining everything, which is access to power that's necessary to drive these tokens. To the extent that OpenAI missed, I think what that is is an insight into not enough compute capacity today. And that problem is only getting worse. You've already seen that with Anthropic as well, where they just found a way to economically induce Amazon to give them enough capacity so that you don't have to route through bedrock to get to the Anthropic models. What is my point? Everything in the market is now power-constrained. The reason that these folks may miss a number or a forecast have nothing to do with [market] demand. It is entirely 100 percent due to the supply of the power necessary to generate the output token."
At the same time, a growing number of planned data center projects across the country are facing delays, moratoriums, protests, utility pushback, environmental opposition, or interconnection bottlenecks. The Data Center Opposition report suggests a new group is formed every day and opposition spans 37 states, both red and blue. Even Oklahoma City voted in favor of a moratorium through the end of 2026.
These developments materially increase the value of already-zoned, already-energized industrial sites with existing operational history and power rights.
That is why Core Scientific’s recent Muskogee, Oklahoma announcement matters.
During its Q1 earnings release on May 6th, Core Scientific announced plans to expand its Oklahoma campus toward roughly 1.5 GW of gross power capacity, including a $421 MM acquisition for 440 MWs under an OG&E agreement in Muskogee, OK. Based on the transaction economics implied by the deal, the powered land alone appears to have fetched nearly $1 million per MW — and notably excluded employees, operations, and the broader operating platform. Their stock was up over 10% on the announcement.
Hut 8 - which spun out American Bitcoin, an Eric Trump company - announced it had signed a 15-year, 352 MW triple-net lease for a base-term contract of $9.8 billion and up to $25.1 billion if all renewal options are exercised. It's stock was up over 40% on the news. That's about $28 MM per MW.
We expect more announcements to come.
Public markets are now validating the exact power scarcity thesis we’ve been building around since 2021 at Hashpower: energized industrial land that's already approved for data center use, rewarding speed-to-power with AI/HPC optionality.