It used to be standard that companies would build infrastructure along with their plants. Cities all across the US Midwest were built this way.
It might be that they can't. (Well, not without spending even more money or time.)
They're looking for power which:
1. Fits on-site, rather than needing more space or being far away and dependent on the grid.
2. Can be ramped up on-demand, to keep their stuff running if there's a blackout.
3. Prioritizes their facility with "first dibs" when there are brownouts or other issues.
4. Can be built quickly so that they can finish the facility and start selling/renting.
These requirements are tend to conflict with the goals of making cheap power for sale: An offshore wind-farm might mollify local ratepayers, but it doesn't do anything for their facility reaching "ready".
There's nothing to stop hyperclouds from finishing it with temporary nat gas behind the meter now and striking long-term power purchase agreements that fund extra utility build-out.
They're not doing that because (a) it costs more and (b) nobody has made them.
Hopefully that'll change with a bluer Texas, new Congress, and more assertive municipalities.
There's a trivial path to win/win here, if the companies were universally required to enter into sustainable deals (both financially and environmentally). Even playing field nationally = no particular cloud wins by finding the rube locality that will accept a bad datacenter deal.
If in a year Mississippi said "Plants are ready to deliver on that power purchase agreement you signed, at a lower cost than onsite turbines" then they'd be turned off.
Yet instead of a PPA, xAI contracted with TVA for wholesale power, is building their own dedicated turbines, and is using mobile turbines temporarily.
None of that helps the regional electricity market, because it's not integrated.
IMO data centers themselves are environmentally unobjectionable, but gas turbines are loud polluters and it should be almost impossible to get permits for more than a few months at a time.
The existing law could be used to stop them just fine but Trump has no interest in that.
But there's a bigger problem going on here.
Our elites no longer believe in the social contract.
They intend to crush the rest of us beneath their boot.
They need to be brought back to heel before they do and we enter another dark age.
The real problem is that politics has gotten so broken that people have lost the connection between building things and having them. You'll have the same people opposing new generating capacity while complaining about high electric bills.
We need to force it to come back or things will get really bad for most people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems
The current industry has a voracious appetite for power. There are a variety of solutions capable of cleanly supplying it (solar, wind, nuclear).
What's missing is the shared infrastructure investment and guaranteed revenue stream contracts to link the two. This is where government industrial policy has historically and successfully stepped in (e.g. shipyards, railroads, electrification, interstate system, heavy press, etc).
Hell, guarantee waived species environmental inspections as part of the government's contribution.
Unless you can demonstrate that those problems are solved, there is no credibility to nuclear power. It doesn't need to be an endless discussion, the discussion has concluded that nuclear power is too expensive and too late to be relevant.