The AI Campus Could Leave America. So Far It Has Not.

The question

The AI buildout brings construction, tax base and a large, steady load that can help pay for the grid when its costs are allocated correctly. So it is worth asking plainly: if more US communities say no, can the campuses go somewhere else?

The answer has three parts: the rules, who has leverage, and what each side values.

What each side values: the pushback has real economics behind it

Communities that pause data centers have an economic reason. PJM's 2025/2026 capacity auction raised about $14.7 billion. PJM's independent market monitor estimated it would have raised about $5.4 billion without data center load. The difference, about $9.3 billion, is recovered from customers across thirteen states and Washington DC. One county can keep the tax revenue while customers in many counties carry the cost. We covered that gap in The Data Center Is Not the Problem. The Deal Is.

The companies see it. Microsoft's latest 10-K lists "community opposition, state and local moratoriums, and hyper-local dissent" among its risks. Oracle's says moratoria "could hinder our ability to execute our expansion plans or prevent us from completing planned data center projects."

The rules: the pauses land on the best sites, and the door abroad is open for now

We have screened 15 states for places that could serve a 500 MW campus. Of 3,298 such places, 1,909 clear every state and local data center pause we found. The pauses fall where the grid is strongest: within the same state, a county with the largest transmission lines is about 1.8 times as likely to have paused as a county without them. Most of the map is still open, but it is shrinking in the best places. What the serving utility still has to confirm at each site is set out in our Large Load Power Diligence approach.

Abroad, the rules are open for allies, for now. In practice, the Commerce Department is not enforcing the 2025 AI Diffusion Rule's broad destination-based licensing regime for allied countries, although the Government Accountability Office says the rule "remains legally in effect." Since July 2026 a US export rule lets named US companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle, ship advanced AI chips to the UAE without a license. Because the rule was never formally repealed, a future administration could enforce it again without writing a new one. A campus abroad carries that policy risk for its whole life.

Who has leverage: the companies have somewhere else to go

Their own filings show it:

Microsoft employs 102,000 of its 223,000 people outside the US, and Oracle 92,000 of 141,000.

The campuses abroad are real. Microsoft has a five-year contract of about $6.2 billion for capacity at a 230 MW campus in Narvik, Norway. Start Campus in Sines, Portugal is permitted for 1.2 GW and is adding a second 200 MW building, with Microsoft GPUs from late 2027. Stargate UAE plans a 1 GW cluster inside a 5 GW campus. Google calls its gigawatt-scale AI hub in Visakhapatnam its largest investment in India to date. Nscale describes the Narvik region as having "abundant hydropower, low local electricity demand, and limited transmission capacity."

Two things keep this from being a story about leaving. First, the capital footprint remains much more US-weighted than the revenue footprint, and at Meta, Microsoft and Oracle the US share grew last year. Long-lived assets include offices, warehouses and other property as well as data centers, so this is where each company's capital sits, not a precise map of its AI infrastructure. Second, no company says it went abroad because of US pushback; most of these announcements describe cloud, sovereign or AI workloads.

One limit on the table: capacity bought under contract from a third party, such as the Narvik deal, may not appear in the buyer's long-lived assets at all. So the table shows what the companies own and lease on their balance sheets, and the activity abroad is larger than it shows.

The rule is the same as in any deal we analyze: the party that can walk away holds the power. We set out how that shapes who commits first in The Reciprocal Commitment Ladder.

What keeps the choice at home

The risk is that thousands of local decisions, each reasonable on its own, can add up to a national outcome nobody chose. In our view, training is generally more geographically flexible than latency-sensitive inference serving US users.

The fix is in how utilities price service. A community can say yes when it is not paying for the campus. The tool is the utility tariff: the schedule of prices and terms a utility files with its state regulator, not a tariff on imports. Utility tariffs that put the costs on the data center already exist, through collateral, minimum bills and dedicated generation. AEP Ohio's data center tariff makes a 500 MW customer post about $137 to $185 million of collateral against its minimum bills, unless it holds strong credit ratings and ample cash. Indiana's commission cleared a ring-fenced plant for an Amazon campus, set up so that data center costs "do not result in costs to other ratepayers." Rules like these let a county say yes on the merits.

So every US site now has two gates. The first is whether the grid can serve it. The second is whether the local utility's rates let the community say yes without its residents paying the bill. Our site diligence starts from both.

Methodology

Company figures. Latest Form 10-K for each company, read on EDGAR on 25 October 2026: Microsoft FY ended 30 June 2026 (filed 29 July 2026); Alphabet, Amazon and Meta FY2025 (filed 5 February, 6 February and 29 January 2026); Oracle FY ended 31 May 2026 (filed 22 June 2026). Shares and growth rates are our arithmetic on the filed figures. Long-lived assets outside the US, prior year to latest, in millions: Meta 18,790 to 23,414; Alphabet 45,631 to 66,481; Microsoft 141,833 to 175,159; Oracle 14,704 to 30,547 (sum of the UK, Germany, Japan and other countries); Amazon 87,200 to 121,200. US: Meta 117,478 to 173,390; Alphabet 138,993 to 195,337; Microsoft 230,069 to 300,354; Oracle 45,439 to 102,717; Amazon 241,600 to 321,900.

Definitions differ, so the companies are not strictly comparable with each other. Alphabet, Amazon and Meta include operating lease assets. Oracle excludes goodwill, intangibles, non-marketable investments and deferred taxes. Microsoft assigns long-lived assets by "the location of the controlling statutory company," not where an asset sits, and counts billings to OEMs and certain multinational organizations as US revenue. Amazon attributes AWS sales to the selling entity. Meta's revenue table combines the US and Canada, so its US revenue is taken from the footnote ($74.78 billion); its long-lived asset table reports the United States separately.

Campuses abroad. Narvik: Aker and Nscale release, 17 September 2025, and Nscale release, 31 July 2025, which is also the source of the Narvik quote. Sines: Start Campus release, 11 November 2025 (1.2 GW permit), and Nscale release, 5 May 2026 (second 200 MW building, Microsoft GPUs from late 2027). Stargate UAE: WAM (UAE state news agency) and SoftBank Group release, 22 May 2025. Visakhapatnam: Google Cloud release, 14 October 2025. Projects reported only in news coverage are excluded.

Export controls. BIS announcement of 13 May 2025 rescinding the AI Diffusion Rule and directing non-enforcement; GAO decision B-337935, 12 May 2026; BIS rule "Enhanced Favorable Treatment for the United Arab Emirates," 91 FR 43034, effective 10 July 2026, which also restates where the advanced computing license requirement is enforced. A Federal Register search of all BIS documents published from 15 July to 25 October 2026 found no new rule on AI chips or model weights.

US siting. PJM: Monitoring Analytics, PJM's independent market monitor, analysis of the 2025/2026 RPM Base Residual Auction, actual revenue of $14,687,047,358 against $5,354,943,499 in a scenario without embedded and forecast data center load (Scenario 88); the monitor identifies data center growth as the primary driver. The $9.3 billion difference is our subtraction. Place counts: Tafel Power screen of 15 states, re-counted 21 October 2026. A place counts as paused if any state, county, city or township covering it has adopted a data center moratorium or pause, read from the adopting government's own documents. The local search is not complete in any state, so the 1,909 is an upper bound. The 1.8 compares counties only within their own state and then combines the states, across the 14 states with any pause. It measures where pauses are, not why.

Utility tariffs. AEP Ohio, P.U.C.O. No. 22, Schedule DCT; collateral is waived for a customer rated at least A- (S&P) and A3 (Moody's) with cash above ten times the requirement. IURC Cause 46362 order, 17 June 2026, which declines jurisdiction over the plant and finds it reasonable and necessary; the quoted aim is from the Commission's GenCo declination order in Cause 46183, as quoted in the 46362 order.

Sources

• Microsoft 10-K FY2026
• Alphabet 10-K FY2025
• Amazon 10-K FY2025
• Meta 10-K FY2025
• Oracle 10-K FY2026
• Aker and Nscale, Microsoft agreement
• Nscale, Stargate Norway
• Start Campus, Microsoft at Sines
• Nscale, Start Campus
• SoftBank Group, Stargate UAE
• WAM, Stargate UAE
• Google, India AI hub
• BIS, AI Diffusion rescission
• GAO B-337935
• BIS UAE rule, 91 FR 43034
• IURC Cause 46362