Pennsylvania put AI data centers behind a local veto, and Broadcom went looking for $100 billion anyway

On Tuesday, Governor Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05(opens in a new tab), which removes every artificial intelligence data center proposal from Pennsylvania's Permit Fast Track Program and states that data centers will not be considered for it in the future. The Department of Environmental Protection will not issue a permit until the developer has executed a legally binding consent order committing to the state's GRID requirements, attended a mandatory pre-application meeting, and secured all required local approvals first. If the township says no, the state says no. Nondisclosure agreements on these projects are no longer permissible.

The GRID terms are the part that changes the arithmetic. Developers must pay the full cost of the new generation, transmission, and distribution their project requires, without shifting that cost to Pennsylvania households and businesses. They must sign community benefit agreements, hire locally, and meet water conservation standards. What is being withdrawn is the implicit ratepayer subsidy that made some of these sites pencil out. What is being added is a local approval step with no fixed clock on it, and a transparency rule that means the terms of the next site are public before it is built rather than after.

Two days later, Broadcom was reported to be seeking more than $60 billion in debt(opens in a new tab) to finance AI chips for Anthropic and other buyers. The structure under discussion is a senior secured tranche of roughly $60 billion to $70 billion, which Broadcom would partly guarantee, plus a junior tranche near $30 billion, issued through a special purpose vehicle with Blackstone and Apollo in talks to participate. Close to $100 billion, against chips that have not shipped, for capacity that has not been sited.

Read those two together, because they point the same direction. Siting costs are rising at the state level and the buildout is being financed with borrowed money at the vendor level. Debt carries a coupon and a maturity. Equity carries neither. Capacity funded this way has to be sold at a price that services the debt on the lender's schedule, not on the schedule where an enterprise finishes proving out its pilots. Any three-year plan that assumes inference prices keep falling on their own is forecasting against a capital structure that now requires the opposite.

Two of the month's sharpest security stories sat in that same layer. CISA gave federal civilian agencies three days to patch a 9.4-severity flaw in Ray, the framework that schedules distributed training jobs, and researchers documented a four-day intrusion campaign in Taiwan run by agents built on freely available open source frameworks. Neither was a model failure. Both were failures in the plumbing that most AI risk registers cover with a single line.