By Ben Hertz-Shargel of Woods Mackenzie

As industry concerns over an AI bubble mount, the scale of data center ambitions continue to grow. As of mid-October, the US data center pipeline reached 245 GW of planned capacity, driven by a handful of enormous, speculative projects. These projects, and the renewable deals hyperscalers are signing, skew heavily toward Texas. More than a quarter of pipeline capacity targets the state, whose pipeline nearly doubled from 35 GW in Q1 to 67 GW in Q3. 

Data Center Alley gives way to Data Center Prairie  

It is conventional wisdom that for data center developers, ‘access to power’ has become the mantra. That is, the importance of fiber proximity to end customers and other data centers has been superseded by the imperative to secure power from utilities. The giga-scale campuses that have been announced this year, sited in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and particularly West and North Texas, signal yet another pivot in strategy. Developers have increasingly given up confidence that utilities can meet their power and timeline demand and instead seek to build their own generation based on local natural resources. 

Most frequently this resource is natural gas, with a particular focus on the Permian in Texas. Pacifico Energy’s 5-GW GW Ranch, poolside’s 2-GW Project Horizon, and FO Permian’s 5-GW campus in Midland County are examples. The gas network in the US is at capacity, and building new gas generation far from supply means paying for and – perhaps more importantly for developers – waiting for new pipeline capacity. 

In some cases, it should be noted, campuses are being leveraged for their scale and solar or wind resource, such as Tract’s data center parks in Nevada and Utah, and Quantica’s Big Sky Digital Infrastructure campus in Montana. While more headlines have made about the potential for batteries to make data centers flexible assets, we’ve found that batteries are being planned much more commonly to balance renewables at large campuses and to add needed fast-ramping capacity to onsite gas. 

Distorting the capital landscape 

These mega campuses not only reflect a new siting strategy: they distort the capital landscape. The 2% of projects over US$17 billion represent 42% of overall capital deployment, with the 60% of projects below US$1 billion contributing only 8%. With questions already intensifying regarding froth in project investment and company valuations, these projects promise to drive even more froth. 

The two highest-cost projects, Project Jupiter in New Mexico (US$160 billion) and Project Kestrel in Missouri (US$100 billion), are an order of magnitude more expensive than the campuses being developed by companies like Meta and Microsoft, without appreciable increase in IT infrastructure. They are notably being funded through novel financial engineering: Their developers will be both the payers and payees of industrial revenue bonds (IRBs) issued by the local government, a contrivance that enables tax benefits. 

Betting big on onsite generation 

The new energy-chasing campuses are committing to onsite generation in a way that developers have been hesitant to in the past. Hyperscalers have been very clear that they prefer grid power, which requires less operating risk, shorter contract commitments, and no exposure to scope 1 emissions. Developer commitment to onsite generation reflects a bet either that hyperscalers urgency to deploy will overcome their concerns, or that the developer will be able to sell to a new generation of hyperscalers with greater risk tolerance and less concern for sustainability. 

The net result is that while the number of projects in the pipeline with onsite generation has increased only to 10%, these projects represent a whopping 34% of pipeline capacity.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of sites are in Texas, and the technology is gas turbines. 

This trend could have significant implications for both energy affordability and reliability. Whether on- or off-grid, projects with utility-scale gas generation will increase gas burns, competing with LNG exports and raising the long-term price of natural gas. This will drive up both gas and electricity bills across the country. To the extent to which turbine-based projects are off-grid, utilities will have an even harder time obtaining turbines given production limitations. That could pose reliability challenges for on-grid load growth, including electrification. 

Whether or not a bubble bursts, these affordability and reliability challenges are likely to provoke state intervention to protect customers. As that begins happens, all bets are off. 

Insuranceopedia reviewed national datasets from the NSC, FEMA, NFPA, NHTSA, and the CDC to analyze accident trends surrounding Thanksgiving. The results show that Thanksgiving surpasses Christmas, Memorial Day, and even the Fourth of July in several key danger categories.

Thanksgiving is the most dangerous U.S. holiday for fires, with a 388% spike in home fires.

Thanksgiving week car crashes killed 2,525 people from 2020–2024, more than any other major holiday.

40% of all injuries on Thanksgiving Day come from structural fires.

“Most people think of Thanksgiving as a low-risk holiday, but the data paints the opposite picture,” Says Max Coupland, CEO of Insuranceopedia.

 “Between rushed travel, long cooking hours, and unfamiliar foods around curious pets, it’s a perfect storm for accidents. Our goal is to help families stay safe and avoid the kinds of claims we see spike every November.”

1. Thanksgiving Driving Is Deadlier Than Any Other Major Holiday

Thanksgiving travel may feel routine, but the numbers tell a different story:

2,525 people were killed in car crashes over Thanksgiving week from 2020–2024 — higher than Christmas, Labor Day, July 4th, and Memorial Day. (Source: National Safety Council)

36% of all Thanksgiving week traffic fatalities involve a drunk driver. (Source: NHTSA)

8% of all annual car accident injuries occur during Thanksgiving week alone. (Source: National Safety Council)

Experts say the deadly combination of alcohol, rushed travel, and congested roads makes Thanksgiving week uniquely hazardous.

Driving Safety Tips For Thanksgiving

Give yourself extra time so you don’t feel pressured to speed.

Stay overnight or limit alcohol consumption.

Avoid distractions and focus fully on the road.

When possible, avoid peak travel times during the most dangerous days of Thanksgiving week.

2. Thanksgiving Is the No. 1 Day of the Year for House Fires

Thanksgiving isn’t just the biggest cooking day of the year — it’s also the most dangerous.

Thanksgiving Day sees an average of 1,500 reported fires — 388% higher than the daily average. (Source: NFPA)

1,446 home cooking fires were reported on Thanksgiving Day 2023 alone. (Source: NFPA)

40% of all Thanksgiving Day injuries come from structural fires. (Source: FEMA USFA)

Residential fires on Thanksgiving cause five deaths each year on average. (Source: FEMA USFA)

Most incidents happen between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., during meal prep. (Source: FEMA USFA)

The #1 cause of fires on Thanksgiving? Unattended cooking.

Fire Safety Tips For Thanksgiving

Stay in the kitchen while cooking, especially when frying or simmering.

Keep kids and pets away from hot surfaces and kitchen tools.

Test smoke alarms before starting holiday meal prep.

Keep floors clear to avoid dangerous slips while handling hot items.

Ensure cords from appliances aren’t dangling or accessible to children or pets.

3. A Hidden Danger: Food Poisoning from Mishandled Turkey

Foodborne illness spikes every Thanksgiving, and improper turkey preparation is a major culprit.

78% of people rinse their raw turkey, spreading bacteria around their sink and countertops. (Source: CDC)

Even after cleaning, 14% still have lingering contamination in or around the sink. (Source: CDC)

Food Safety Tips For Thanksgiving

Thaw the turkey far enough in advance and cook thoroughly.

Refrigerate leftovers within 2 hours.

Cut large portions into smaller pieces so they cool safely.

Eat leftovers within 3–4 days, or freeze them.

Always reheat leftovers to 165°F (74°C).

“Thanksgiving should be a time for connection, not catastrophe.” Says Max Coupland.

 “A few simple precautions can prevent the kinds of accidents that turn a celebration into an insurance claim. The goal isn’t to scare people, it’s to help families enjoy the holiday safely and avoid unnecessary risks.”

Authored by Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute,

Lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas; lie down with neocons, you wake up with wars.
–Me

So goes President Trump’s 28 point peace plan to end the Russia/Ukraine war. Revealed at the end of last week, the plan initially received a cautious but cautiously optimistic reception in Moscow.

It was hardly a dramatic tilt toward the Russian position. Many of the plan’s points ranged from the implausible to the bizarre. For example the idea that President Trump would be crowned some sort of “peace czar” overseeing the deal, and that Russia would agree to use its seized assets to rebuild Ukraine. Then there is the one that Russia should accept a demilitarized “buffer” zone taking up a good chunk of Donetsk (which itself would be “de facto” part of Russia but not de jure – and thereby subject to the vicissitudes of Western electoral politics). And of course there was the part where the US would share the “profits” from Russia’s paid reconstruction of Ukraine.

Very Trumpian, very weird.

Nevertheless the flawed plan (in terms of Russian acceptance) dropped like an atom bomb on the US neocons and their European counterparts. Trump’s peace plan was “entirely dictated by Putin,” the UK Independent breathlessly tells us. Yes, that is how propagandistic the western mainstream media really is. And suddenly we are back to Russiagate and accusations the Trump is acting as Putin’s puppet – or at least stenographer.

At the political level, EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas pretty well summed up the level of delusion among the European elite: “We have not heard of any concessions from Russia. If Russia really wanted peace, it could have agreed to an unconditional ceasefire a long time ago.’”

Yes, Kaja “Sun Tzu” Kallas. Military history teaches us that every army making rapid gains on the battlefield periodically pauses to make concessions to the losing side. Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair and not everyone would get a trophy.

President Trump’s demand that Ukraine’s acting president, Zelensky, accept the terms by Thanksgiving or face a cut-off in US military and intelligence assistance put the Europeans and US hawks in panic mode. It appeared Trump was finally tired of playing Hamlet after the framework he presented in Alaska in August was agreed upon by Russia and then abandoned by Trump himself after receiving an earful from said Europeans and US neocons.

This time, by golly, Trump was finally going to step up and end a conflict nearly a year after he promised to end it 24 hours.

And then Rubio walked in.

The one lesson Trump 2.0 did not learn from Trump 1.0 is that the personnel is the policy, particularly with a president who appears uninterested in details and disengaged from complex processes. Trump 1.0 was dragged down by neocon albatrosses John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, among others.

Even a Col. Douglas Macgregor brought in in the 4th quarter at the two minute warning to throw a “Hail Mary” pass to get us out of Afghanistan was tackled behind the line of scrimmage by Robert O’Brien, Trump’s final National Security Advisor and neocon dead-ender.

Neocons are wreckers. That’s the one thing they are good at.

The inclusion of new blood in the person of Vice President Vance ally, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll – who supplanted terminally clueless Trump envoy Keith Kellogg – offered the promise that finally the realist faction in the shadows of the Trump Administration would have their shot.

Then the rug was pulled. Again.

Rubio jetted off to Geneva to help lick the wounds of the European “leaders” who are dedicated to fighting the Russians down to the last Ukrainian.

Politico lets us in on what happened next, in a piece titled, “Rubio changes the tack of Trump’s Ukraine negotiations after week of chaos.”

Before Rubio showed up in Switzerland, it largely felt like Vice President JD Vance, via his close friend Driscoll, was leading the process. By the end of the weekend, Rubio had taken the reins because the conversations became more flexible, the official said.

“Flexibility” means that we are back to square one, with a reversion to the Kellogg/Euro view that the side winning a war should unilaterally freeze military operations in favor of the losing side.

Politico continued:

Rubio’s participation in the talks produced much more American flexibility, the four people familiar with the discussions said. Rubio told reporters on Sunday night that the aim is simply to finalize discussions ‘as soon as possible,’ rather than by Thanksgiving.

That loss of momentum and destruction of the sense of urgency means we have returned to the endless bickering of the eternally deluded voices who even in the face of rapid recent Russian advances believe that Ukraine is winning – or could win with a few hundred billion more dollars – the war against Russia.

Never mind the golden toilets. Suddenly that’s out of the news.

At the end of the day, all the drama changes little. As President Putin himself said while meeting with his own national security council (h/t MoA):

Either Kiev’s leadership lacks objective reporting about the developments on the front, or, even if they receive such information, they are unable to assess it objectively. If Kiev refuses to discuss President Trump’s proposals and declines to engage in dialogue, then both they and their European instigators must understand that what happened in Kupyansk will inevitably occur in other key areas of the front. Perhaps not as quickly as we would prefer, but inevitably.

And overall, this development suits us, as it leads to achieving the goals of the special military operation by force, through armed confrontation.

In other words, Russia is happy to achieve its objectives through negotiation, which would save lives and infrastructure especially in Ukraine. But it is also willing to continue its accelerating push to achieve those objectives militarily. And no fever dreams of war with Russia from the likes of former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen is going to change that.

Marco Rubio is a pretty bad Kissinger, and Kissinger was bad enough. At some point – and that point may have now passed – the Russians are going to rightly conclude that they have no negotiating partner in a US still dominated by people like the former Senator from Florida whose first love is regime change in Venezuela and Cuba.

Whatever the case, Trump should be pretty miffed that Marco threw a spanner in what would have been a world record, unprecedented, universally-praised, like-nothing-the-world-has-ever-seen, solving of NINE wars in just his first year in office!

America could use a breather from the Democratic Party’s billionaire-backed dark-money NGO machine, which has spent years running a rolling color-revolution-style campaign against President Trump and anything aligned with America First (one that we’ve coined “invisible insurrection“). 

The pressure campaign is constant: activist fronts sparking orchestrated unrest in places like Los Angeles through the protest-industrial complex, followed by scripted influence operations like the so-called “Seditious Six,” whose latest messaging pressures military and intelligence personnel to “refuse illegal orders” – without saying what illegal orders. 

The bigger picture is very alarming: It’s all part of a coordinated effort to delegitimize the Trump administration and America First movement and to keep the country in a state of manufactured chaos with aims for regime change. 

🚨#BREAKING: Multiple self-driving Waymo cars, collectively worth upwards of $600,000 each have been destroyed and light on fire by rioters

📌#LosAngeles | #California

At this time, Los Angeles police are urgently requesting Waymo to shut down its self-driving car app as… pic.twitter.com/eU4ANqPfyt

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) June 9, 2025

Remember weeks ago when Jennica Pounds, also known as “DataRepublican,” peeled back the layers of what appears to be the interworkings of at least one color-revolution-style operation orchestrated by Democrats, nonprofit groups, ex-USAID employees, and leftist billionaires to undermine and destabilize President Trump’s MAGA from within.

🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING: International actors are involved in the State Department led color revolution 🚨🚨

This is not speculation; it’s straight from a recorded call.

Ex-USAID employees describe how, before January 20, they moved internal groups off government systems and into… pic.twitter.com/XtinGt306o

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 9, 2025

Now, DataRepublican has gone down the Deep State rabbit hole and uncovered what appears to be a web of NGOs that launched an informational campaign just days before a group of unhinged left-wing lawmakers, including Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Chris DeLuzio (D-Pa.), Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), along with Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), urged members of the military and intelligence community to “refuse illegal orders,” repeatedly emphasizing, “You must refuse illegal orders.”

“I think we are getting very, very warm as to whose NGO’s idea it was to have the Senators produce a video about refusing illegal orders,” DataRepublican wrote in an X post, adding, “National Lawyers Guild issued a document about refusing illegal orders on 11 November. And now they have partnered with Win Without War to advertise seditious-adjacent behavior on billboards. And Win Without War has multiple Congressional liaisons on their “About” page.”

Excellent find. I think we are getting very, very warm as to whose NGO’s idea it was to have the Senators produce a video about refusing illegal orders.

National Lawyers Guild issued a document about refusing illegal orders on 11 November. And now they have partnered with Win… https://t.co/yu66Amnzjd pic.twitter.com/Yvm3fpkoV7

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 26, 2025

She continued:

The footer says Win Without War which links to EIN 27-0819099. It’s a small 501(c)(4) which seems to have been named New Security Action in the past. Open Society seems to be its major backer. Other than that, the website links to three partners which I haven’t dug into yet: About Face: Veterans Against War GI Rights Hotline National Lawyers Guild (infamous for supporting antifa, historical extreme Left network) One thing that jumped out to me about Win Without War’s About Page is that multiple people in their leadership claims to work with Congress.

I’m dying under a book deadline for Dec 1, but took a quick look. The website is notwhatyousignedupfor dot org .

The footer says Win Without War which links to EIN 27-0819099. It’s a small 501(c)(4) which seems to have been named New Security Action in the past. Open Society… pic.twitter.com/y4FXragNPg

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 26, 2025

Others chimed in:

It’s been revealed that a nonprofit linked to George Soros is fomenting sedition within the military around the same time a “script” went out to Democrat members of Congress urging rebellion within the ranks against President Trump….

🚨 BREAKING: It’s been revealed that a nonprofit linked to George Soros is fomenting sedition within the military around the same time a “script” went out to Democrat members of Congress urging rebellion within the ranks against President Trump.

There are also links to ANTIFA.… pic.twitter.com/1S4roMD4Vk

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 26, 2025

The color-revolution playbook fueled by the Democratic Party’s NGO network is now increasingly evident: the operation relies on engineered unrest, coordinated misinformation barrages, and sustained perception-shaping campaigns aimed at softening the ground for political regime change – a similar type of operation run overseas.

Bravo, @DataRepublican! 👏! This excellent thread exposes the well-funded legal division of RIOT, Inc. we discussed with @POTUS last month. The National Lawyers Guild is the legal muscle for Antifa thugs backed by dark money from the Rockefeller, Arabella, Tides, and Soros… https://t.co/uY7xQQKi8X

— Seamus Bruner (@seamusbruner) November 26, 2025

Strip away the noise, and it becomes clear: Democrats have no economic agenda to offer the middle class except for Marxism; their primary objective is regime change.