SitePower
The Interconnect
Issue 05 · September 2026
The Price of Yes. Capital didn’t blink in September. Permission did, and the smart money spent ~$11bn buying time-to-power instead of land.
The Read
September settled an argument. For two years the question in every room was “who funds it?” This month the money answered without being asked. Crusoe raised $3.9bn. VIRTUS closed £2.45bn with 13 banks. A consortium is reportedly closing in on up to ~$25bn for a single APAC platform.
What got scarce was yes. Loudoun moved to pause Data Center Alley for a year. Oregon took state land off the table until mid-2027. Thailand stopped 49 builds. And Oracle served force majeure on a flagship Stargate site. It was the first time this cycle that permission and power risk turned up as a legal notice rather than a slide.
The tell is where the smart money went. Not land. About $11bn went on the kit that shortens time-to-power: 800V DC power conversion, thermal, behind-the-meter controls. When the suppliers start paying infrastructure multiples for the bottleneck, they’re telling you what the bottleneck is.
The Month in Power
Five moves that mattered in September.
The supply chain bought the bottleneck. Flex paid $4.4bn for EPC Power (800V DC). SLB paid $4.1bn for Kelvion (thermal). Vertiv paid $1.45bn cash, plus up to $1.15bn earn-out, for UtilityInnovation Group (behind-the-meter power). Eaton paid €810m for COL Group. That is roughly $11bn spent on one thing: compressing time-to-power. None of it was land. Confirmed.
‘Yes’ got scarcer. Loudoun advanced a 12-month pause in Data Center Alley. Oregon froze state-land sales for data centres to July 2027. Thailand suspended 49 builds. Woodford County became Kentucky’s first permanent ban. Data Center Watch counts 45 US projects, about $68bn, blocked or delayed by local opposition in Q2 alone, and 843 active opposition groups. Confirmed. The Loudoun pause is advanced, not yet final.
Permission risk became financing risk. Oracle served a force-majeure notice on Project Jupiter in New Mexico, a flagship Stargate site. In the same week SB Energy pushed its IPO back, Holtec halted its listing and Aggreko postponed. Capital is still there, but it now prices the permit and the power date, not just the tenant. The notice is confirmed; reports differ on its cause.
Hyperscalers stopped waiting for the grid. Google signed a 22-year PPA for up to half of Loviisa’s nuclear output alongside €13bn for Finland, plus a 396 MW geothermal deal with Fervo. NextEra secured a $1.9bn DOE loan to restart Duane Arnold on a Google PPA. Oracle contracted 1.7 GW of Texas wind. Last month’s nuclear gap still stands, so gas still carries the decade. Confirmed.
Money kept printing anyway. Crusoe raised $3.9bn at $30.9bn. VIRTUS closed £2.45bn with 13 banks. Vantage added a $2bn facility and Serverfarm took its fund to $3.89bn. A BlackRock/IFM consortium is reportedly closing on up to ~$25bn for Stack’s APAC platform (~70%). Every one of these is a bet on sites that already have power and permission.
For the Three Chairs
What September means for your chair.
Energy technology
Sell the date, not the efficiency. Buyers paid acquisition multiples for anything that shortens time-to-power: 800V DC, prefab power, behind-the-meter generation, flexible load. If your pitch leads with efficiency and not ‘MW energised by when’, you’re answering last year’s question.
Apply as a technology company →Site developers
Entitlement is the asset. Power-ready land is repricing, but permitted, power-evidenced land is the scarcer thing. In Lombardy a 120 MW scheme died for want of grid-connection data. Lead with the substation letter, the water plan and the community package, not the acreage.
Apply as a site developer →Financiers
Underwrite the permit and the power date. Jupiter showed where power-delivery risk lands when it bites: on the counterparties. Treat entitlement, interconnection evidence and local-political exposure as first-order credit variables, not a diligence appendix.
Apply as a financier →From the Desk
The money is ready. The site isn’t.
Thirty days of briefs, and one sentence written thirty different ways: the money is ready, the site isn’t.
That’s the gap SitePower exists for. Technology, sites and capital each have plenty of their own. What’s short is the match, qualified on the things that now decide whether a project happens: the permit, the interconnection evidence, the power date. September made that list longer, not shorter.
My read for the quarter: the projects that close won’t be the biggest announcements. They’ll be the ones that turned up with a signed substation letter and a council that had already said yes. Dull, I know. Dull closes.
The Call
SitePower is application-only. Every counterparty passes the same qualification gate before any introduction is made. If you build technology, bring the power date. If you develop sites, bring the permission. If you deploy capital, bring the patience to underwrite both.
Bring the permission, or bring the power. We’ll bring the other two.
— Nigel Broomhall, SitePower
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SitePower is operated by BreakPoint Energy Ltd. This newsletter is market commentary, not investment, legal, or financial advice. “Reported” items carry our own probability estimate.