Data Center Market Update: Week of September 21, 2026

Texas widened its permitting freeze to cover every data center environmental approval in the state even as a 207MW gas-fired PPA in the Permian Basin moved ahead unaffected, Oracle hedged its exposure to a stalled New Mexico megacampus, and two separate multi-billion-dollar transactions — a $25 billion Asia-Pacific portfolio sale and a $3.2 billion Alabama build — showed capital still moving despite the friction.

Key takeaways

• Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed TCEQ on 21 September to halt all data center environmental permits until ERCOT and TWDB finish grid and water audits due 19 October; BloombergNEF puts roughly 49.8GW of pipeline capacity, about a fifth of the US total, at risk of delay.
• The freeze hasn’t stopped off-grid power deals: New Era Energy & Digital signed a 20-year, up-to-207MW PPA with Vistra’s Luminant on 21 September for Phase 1 of its 1.4GW Permian Basin campus, sourced from an adjacent gas plant rather than the ERCOT grid.
• Oracle sent developer Stack Infrastructure a force majeure notice on 24 September over Project Jupiter, the 2.45GW Stargate campus in New Mexico, preserving its right to defer rent for up to three years after the site’s gas pipeline slipped to a February 2027 in-service date.
• A BlackRock-led consortium (AIP) and IFM Investors are in exclusive talks, reported 24 September, to buy Stack Infrastructure’s separate Asia-Pacific portfolio — Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Melbourne — from Blue Owl Capital for up to $25 billion.
• Applied Digital confirmed its $3.2 billion Delta Forge 2 campus for Brookwood, Alabama on 24 September: a 210MW, roughly 15-year hyperscaler lease worth about $5.2 billion in contracted revenue, construction starting 1 October 2026.
• VIRTUS Data Centres closed a £2.45 billion ($3.24 billion) 13-bank financing package on 24 September to fund UK and European expansion.
• GPU rental pricing was flat for a second straight week: H100 median $3.29/hour, B200 median $6.01/hour, GB200 NVL72 median $13.25/hour.

Texas: permits frozen, off-grid power exempt in practice

Governor Abbott’s 21 September directive told TCEQ to stop issuing environmental permits to data center projects until ERCOT and the Texas Water Development Board complete audits of grid and water impact ordered earlier in August and mid-September; TCEQ must report compliance by 19 October. BloombergNEF’s read is that the combined freeze threatens roughly 49.8GW of pipeline capacity — about 20% of the entire US data center development pipeline — with up to $15 billion of exposure, per reporting picked up across legal and energy trade press. See our grid connection queues guide for the interconnection backlog this freeze compounds, and the full breakdown in our Texas permit halt guide.

The same week showed the freeze’s limits: New Era Energy & Digital’s subsidiary TCDC PowerCo signed a 20-year PPA for a minimum of 200MW and up to 207MW with Vistra’s Luminant, drawing power directly from Vistra’s adjacent 1,180MW gas plant in Odessa rather than the ERCOT grid, for Phase 1 of a Permian Basin campus planned to scale to 1.4GW. Behind-the-meter and self-generated power deals sit outside TCEQ’s environmental permit queue, so Texas developers with access to gas capacity have an increasingly clear workaround while grid-dependent projects wait. Details in our New Era-Vistra PPA guide.

Oracle hedges on Project Jupiter while its developer’s parent sells Asia

Oracle’s 24 September force majeure notice to Stack Infrastructure covers Project Jupiter, the 2.45GW Stargate campus in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, that anchors part of the OpenAI-SoftBank Stargate buildout. The notice doesn’t withdraw Oracle as tenant — Oracle said the project “remains on our planned schedule” — but it preserves the right to defer rent for up to three years if Bloom Energy fuel cells can’t come online on time; the pipeline feeding them has slipped from a roughly September 2026 in-service date to February 2027 after New Mexico’s State Land Office twice denied a right-of-way. Full context in our Project Jupiter force majeure guide.

The same week, a separate story put Stack Infrastructure’s owner, Blue Owl Capital, on the other side of a transaction: Bloomberg reported on 24 September that a BlackRock-backed consortium (the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership) and IFM Investors are in exclusive talks to buy Stack’s Asia-Pacific data center portfolio — campuses in Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney and Melbourne — for up to $25 billion. The two situations involve separate Stack businesses, but together they illustrate a sponsor managing power-driven delay risk on one continent while monetizing a mature portfolio on another. Track deal-level detail as it firms up on our transactions tracker and investment hub.

New capacity and capital keep moving

Applied Digital confirmed on 24 September that its $3.2 billion Delta Forge 2 campus will rise on roughly 160 acres of a 1,300-acre site in Brookwood, Alabama. A roughly 15-year lease with an unnamed investment-grade hyperscaler covers the full 210MW of critical IT load across 1.26 million square feet, worth about $5.2 billion in contracted revenue over the base term; construction begins 1 October 2026 for delivery in the first half of 2028, alongside $270 million in community benefits payments to Tuscaloosa County over 20 years.

VIRTUS Data Centres closed a £2.45 billion ($3.24 billion) financing package on 24 September from a 13-bank consortium led by BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, Societe Generale and Standard Chartered — one of the largest UK data center bank financings on record, including a £1.2 billion green capex facility. It funds the 78MW Saunderton campus in Buckinghamshire, further build-out at LONDON19 in Slough, and expansion in Germany and Italy. Separately, Digital Realty said on 22 September it will develop a new subsea cable landing station at its LAX12 campus in El Segundo with partner Assured Communications, targeting Asia-Pacific to North America traffic from 2028 — no investment figure or anchor cable customer has been named yet. See our AI data center financing guide for how deals like VIRTUS’s typically get structured and repaid.

Table: this week’s largest disclosed items

Item	Parties	Value	Date
Environmental permit freeze	Texas Governor / TCEQ	~49.8GW pipeline at risk (BloombergNEF)	21 Sep 2026
Gas-fired PPA, up to 207MW	New Era Energy & Digital — Vistra/Luminant	20-year term	21 Sep 2026
Force majeure notice	Oracle — Stack Infrastructure (Project Jupiter)	2.45GW campus, up to 3-year rent deferral right	24 Sep 2026
Asia-Pacific portfolio deal (talks)	BlackRock (AIP) / IFM Investors — Blue Owl / Stack Infrastructure	Up to $25B	24 Sep 2026
New campus lease	Applied Digital — unnamed hyperscaler	$3.2B campus, $5.2B contracted revenue	24 Sep 2026
Bank financing package	VIRTUS Data Centres — 13-bank consortium	£2.45B ($3.24B)	24 Sep 2026

Table: GPU rental pricing, week of September 28, 2026

GPU	On-demand median	Range	Trend vs. prior week
H100 (80GB)	$3.29/hr	$1.30-12.29	Flat
B200 (180GB)	$6.01/hr	$3.69-16.11	Flat
GB200 NVL72 (per GPU)	$13.25/hr	$8.00-27.04	Flat

Source: Coloprice GPU price tracker, updated 25 September 2026, aggregating GetDeploying, ComputePrices, CoreWeave, Oracle Cloud, Azure and specialist-cloud list prices.

What this means for buyers

Texas’s permit freeze and Oracle’s New Mexico hedge are two sides of the same problem: power delivery, not capital or demand, is now the binding constraint on new capacity, and buyers evaluating either market should price permitting and interconnection delay into their timeline as a base case rather than a downside scenario. The workaround pattern is also becoming clearer — behind-the-meter gas deals like New Era’s keep clearing in Texas even as grid-tied permits freeze, so buyers with flexibility on power sourcing have more options than the headline freeze suggests. On the capital side, the BlackRock-IFM talks for Stack’s Asia-Pacific book and Applied Digital’s fully-leased Alabama campus show large-scale financing hasn’t slowed; if anything, mature APAC portfolios are becoming attractive exit assets for infrastructure funds even as US greenfield sites face more scrutiny. Compare current facility-level detail on our data center index and country pages at /data-centers/, track live GPU pricing on the GPU tracker, or request quotes through /quote/.

Sources

This update draws on reporting from Houston Public Media, Troutman Pepper Locke, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, DataCenterDynamics, Intelligent Data Centres and Coloprice’s own GPU price tracker, linked above. Facility-level figures are cross-checked against our own colocation price index methodology where applicable.