Built Different

More than 5,500 construction workers report to one site in the Texas Panhandle every day. They are building a data center for Google, powered by the wind farm next door. The campus is in Armstrong County, outside Amarillo, near the town of Claude. Crusoe is developing it. Ground was broken in June 2025. Six buildings, with the first handed to Google in early 2027 and the rest finished by the end of that year. The power comes from two wind farms beside the site, Goodnight 1 and Goodnight 2, each 265.5 megawatts. The first is running. The second is under construction. When the wind produces more than the campus needs, the surplus goes back to the grid, with the grid as backup the other way. Once it opens, Google has committed to 50 permanent jobs. Thousands of people for two years. A few dozen for the next thirty. Everything the building will be is decided by the thousands who leave. The few dozen who stay inherit it. So does the owner, and so does the county, which local reporting says could collect more than $850 million in tax revenue over the project's life.

In 1426, seventeen Italian merchants in London refused to pay an insurance claim. The case ended up in the City's own court. The policyholder was Alexander Ferrantyn, a Florentine merchant. His ship, the Seint Anne of London, was carrying wine from Bordeaux. Ship and cargo were insured for £250, and the risk was split among seventeen Italian merchants living in London, from Venice, Genoa, Florence and elsewhere. Spaniards seized the ship. Ferrantyn, working through an agent, bought back both the vessel and the wine. Then he made his claim. He was refused. He sued at the Guildhall, and the case sits in the Plea Rolls of the City of London. The policy was governed by "the order, manner, and custom of the Florentines," so the court had to read an English dispute under Italian practice. The underwriters also paid the disputed £250 into court, plus £100 as surety, while it was argued. The Italian merchants who wrote these policies traded on a street that came to carry their name. Lombard Street. Historians find the earliest evidence of marine insurance in London in their records, and a 1547 policy still invoked the custom of "Lombard Street of London." In 1691, Edward Lloyd moved his coffee house to 16 Lombard Street. The dispute is almost six hundred years old. The questions at the heart of it are the ones I still argue. What did the policy actually promise, and whose rules decide?

Google just signed up to keep a 1970s nuclear plant running until 2050. In Finland, the Loviisa plant supplies about a tenth of the country's electricity. Without new investment, its operating life was set to end around 2030. On September 9, @Google signed a 22-year agreement to buy up to half of its output, which supports extending the plant's life through 2050. It comes alongside €13 billion of Google data center and related investment in Finland across 2027 and 2028. Twelve days later, Georgia Power announced a Google agreement tied to upgrades at two existing American nuclear plants, Vogtle and Hatch. New turbines, pumps, motors and cooling equipment, squeezing about 96 more megawatts out of reactors that are already built. It still needs approval from Georgia's Public Service Commission. Both deals buy more life, or more output, from reactors that already exist. The fastest megawatt available to the AI industry right now is one that is already standing. Maintaining what we built used to be the unglamorous part of infrastructure. It has just become one of the most valuable.

In 1760, two Philadelphia underwriters refused to pay an insurance claim. It took five years and an appeal to London to settle it. The claimant was John Brown of Providence, with his late uncle Obadiah. Their ship had sailed, they said, to exchange prisoners of war with the French, under an official flag of truce. A British privateer captured it and found molasses and sugar bought from the French at Saint Domingue. The underwriters, David and William McMurterie, had covered only a small part of the risk. £100, for a premium of £23. They argued the capture was "not a Loss within the Meaning of the Policy," because the voyage had been "illicit and contraband Trade." The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held they had to pay. The McMurteries appealed all the way to the Privy Council in London. On July 16, 1765, it upheld the decision. Hannah Farber tells this story in her work on early American insurance, and her conclusion is pointed. Insurance gave merchants "a framework for sidestepping questions of legality altogether." The underwriters wrote the policy. The court held them to the words they wrote.

Thousands of AI chips can change their power draw in the same instant. They do it hundreds to thousands of times a day. The electric grid was never designed for a customer like that. When a large AI model is being trained, the chips work in lockstep. They draw hard, pause while the results are exchanged, then draw hard again. In the words of one July announcement, "many thousands of GPUs ramp up and down in synchronized bursts." A neighborhood does not behave that way. Ten thousand air conditioners do not switch on in the same second and off again a moment later. That July announcement came from Crusoe and ON.energy. They plan to install 5 gigawatts of specialized battery-backed power equipment across several hyperscale campuses, with commissioning starting this year and running into 2027. Its job is to absorb the swings on site so the grid sees a steadier customer. In Texas, the system was validated against ERCOT's large-load interconnection requirements and its ride-through protocols, the rules for how a big load has to behave when the grid wobbles. Under Senate Bill 6, passed in 2025, large new loads in Texas must be equipped so ERCOT can curtail them in an emergency. Every structure I have litigated was designed around an assumption about the load it would carry. When the load changes character, the design has to change with it. AI changed the character of electrical load. The industry is now building the equipment to catch up.

In 1935, only about 2% of Texas farms had electricity. Thirty years later, only 2% did not. Nationally the figure was about 1 in 10. In Texas it was worse. Rural families lit their homes with kerosene lanterns and pumped water with windmills, because private utilities would not string lines across miles of land for a handful of customers. On May 11, 1935, President Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration by executive order. It lent money to cooperatives, owned by the customers themselves, to build the lines the utilities would not. In the Texas Hill Country, a newly elected congressman named Lyndon Johnson lobbied hard for an exception to the rules on how many customers a line needed per mile. In 1938 the Pedernales Electric Cooperative was formed. Its loan covered 1,718 miles of line and $1,332,000, at the time the longest mileage and largest sum ever approved in a single REA grant. The first line was energized on November 1, 1939, serving 422 members in Burnet County. By 1965, 98% of Texas farms had power. It was one of the clearest times America decided electricity had to reach places the market would not reach on its own. The next decision is being made now, around data centers, and Texas is at the center of it again.