The Boom Just Met the Neighbors.

A Note from Our CEO

For two years, the data center boom has been sold as a law of physics. AI needs compute, compute needs power and fiber, so the routes get built. Straight line, up and to the right.

July put a dent in that.

On July 1, Virginia, the single largest data center market on earth, started taxing the electricity those buildings pull. Eleven-hundredths of a cent per kilowatt-hour, aimed squarely at the AI campuses. Out in New Mexico, Oracle’s $165 billion Project Jupiter is sitting on a key permit while residents sue the county and fight over water in the middle of a historic drought. They already scrapped the on-site gas plant after the neighbors pushed back.

None of this means the boom is over. The demand is real. But the boom just picked up something it didn’t have last year: neighbors, lawyers, and a tax bill.

Here’s why that matters to you, even if you never touch a hyperscale job. A build that has to clear a county commission, a lawsuit, and a power fight doesn’t move on the timeline the press release promised. It moves on the timeline the slowest opponent allows.

So the question for this summer isn’t “how do I get in on the boom.” It’s “how much of my next twelve months am I betting on one campus that a courtroom can freeze?”

Pär Cedergren, CEO and Co-Founder

✅ Reality Check

The friction is showing up in the record, not the rumor mill.

Three things landed in the last two weeks, and they point the same direction.

Virginia signed the first statewide tax in the country tied specifically to data center power use. It’s capped at $600 million a year, and it’s written with a carve-out so it lands on AI compute and not your local internet provider. When the biggest market in the world decides the boom should chip in for the grid, other states read that.

New Mexico is the flip side. Oracle’s Project Jupiter is a 2-gigawatt campus waiting on a permit while a county gets sued over how it was approved. The company has already redesigned its power plan under public pressure.

And it isn’t just those two. Local moratoriums, rate-hike worries, and water fights are popping up across the map faster than the routes can be surveyed.

More money than ever is pointed at this build. It’s just no longer pointed in a straight line.

🔀 The Uncomfortable Truth

The most exciting job on your board might also be the most fragile.

Everybody wants the marquee route, the one tied to the billion-dollar campus with the name you recognize. It looks like a franchise. It looks like a year of work locked in.

It’s also the job most exposed to things that have nothing to do with your crews. A tax vote. A drought. A lawsuit from three residents and a county commission that got ahead of itself. You can have the best splicers in the state and still watch that route sit frozen because a courtroom two counties over hit pause.

That’s concentration risk, and construction people run into it constantly. Bet the year on one giant, contested job and you’re not running a fiber company. You’re running a bet on someone else’s permit.

The operators who come out of this fine won’t be the ones who chased the biggest campus hardest. They’ll be the ones spread across enough work, from BEAD to metro to rural to enterprise, that no single stalled megaproject can take their summer down with it.

🏢 From the Field

Spreading your work comes down to one thing: being able to move when a job stalls.

Here’s how the exposure actually bites. A shop lines up its whole season behind one anchor campus. Crews hired, equipment leased, everyone pointed at the same site. Then the permit slips a quarter. Maybe a lawsuit adds two. Now there’s a payroll running against work that legally can’t start yet.

The teams that stay steady through a year like this tend to share a habit. They keep a mix of jobs moving, and they keep every one of them clean enough to prove and bill on its own. So when one route stalls, they shift crews to the next without losing the thread on what was already done. The stalled job doesn’t become a black hole. It becomes a pause.

That only works if your records travel with the work instead of living in one person’s memory of one big site. When the plan changes on you mid-season, and this is the summer it will, the operators who can move fast are the ones who never let the paperwork pile up behind them.

📘 The Guide: Keeping Cash Moving in a Lumpy Season

A pipeline that stops and starts is exactly the kind that gets your cash stuck, because every stall stretches the gap between work done and money in.

If you want the full playbook for keeping that gap tight through a choppy build season, we put it in one place. The Fiber Operator’s Summer Cash-Flow Roadmap is a month-by-month field guide with a 60-second self-check and the 2026 numbers behind the squeeze. Built for fiber ISPs, GCs, and subs.

The Bottom Line

The boom didn’t stop. It got complicated. Build like it.

The demand for fiber isn’t going anywhere. But “inevitable” and “on schedule” are two different words, and July just proved which one the data center boom actually is.

Don’t bet your company on one campus clearing one courtroom. Spread your work, keep every job clean enough to stand on its own, and stay able to move your crews the day the plan changes. Because this year, it will.

Chase the boom if you want. Just don’t let one of its fights become yours.

Where to Find Us

We’re out in the market with operators trying to plan a season that keeps rewriting itself. Permits slipping, campuses stalling, plans changing after the crews are already hired.

We will be attending Mountain Connect next week, August 10–12 in Denver, and ISE EXPO, August 18–20 in Nashville. If you’re attending either event, connect with our team to talk about the future of broadband and network infrastructure. We’d love to see you there! Grab the roadmap above, and we’ll be back in two weeks with the next issue.

OciusX

Got a topic you’d like to see us dive into? Reach out! Otherwise, we’ll see you in the next edition.