# Where the Buildout Remains Contingent The ~$50B Arkansas hyperscale buildout is frequently described — by its promoters and sometimes by its opponents — as a done deal. The documentary record says otherwise, project by project and forum by forum. This synthesis maps **every decision point the record shows is still open**: what is undecided, who decides it, in what window, and what the public record actually anchors. It documents decision points; it does not give legal or strategy advice. **Method.** Compiled 2026-06-10/11 from the full corpus by a seven-domain analysis (regulatory, land-use, water/environmental, fiscal, transparency, political, contractual) whose candidate findings were each independently stress-tested against the underlying documents. Findings that survived that adversarial check are stated as established; items from domains whose verification pass did not complete are marked *(analyst-level)*. Tier discipline applies throughout: Tier-1 anchors live on the linked source pages. ## I. Conway is the least-committed project in the corpus Every binding instrument behind [[Project Stratus]] is either contingent or not yet enacted: - **The 65%/30-year abatement does not exist yet.** The [[Act 9 Industrial Revenue Bond|Act 9]] structure requires future city ordinances — the IRB authorization, the lease/leaseback, the closing — none of which appears in any council record through the FOIA-2026-126 production; the project's own promoters described the abatement as essential. Bond and franchise ordinances are subject to Arkansas's Amendment 7 referendum machinery (the verification pass confirmed the statutory windows: 30 days for bond ordinances under § 14-55-304, with franchise grants both referendum-subject and immune to emergency clauses). **Decision-maker: Conway City Council; window: open now, likely late 2026.** - **The cooling plan has zero regulatory approvals.** As of the 2026-04-29 record in [[Black & Veatch Effluent-Cooling Engineering for Project Stratus|the utility production]], the [[Tupelo Bayou Treated-Effluent Cooling]] scheme had not yet been presented to ADH or ADEQ — the agency meetings were not even scheduled — and the [[April 2026 FAQ Project Stratus|project FAQ's]] 5-MGD demand equals roughly the plant's entire current effluent volume. The B&V Final Engineering Report and the Item-4(e) Rate Analysis (the ratepayer-cost document) remain unproduced. **Decision-makers: ADH, DEQ/APC&EC, Conway Corp board; window: the regulatory phase has not begun.** - **The drought context is now documented.** Conway entered mandatory Phase 2 water curtailment 2026-06-01 ([[2026-06 Conway Enters Mandatory Water Curtailment]]) — and effluent volume tracks water consumption, so the cooling source itself is drought-sensitive. - **The land is unclosed and the principal unnamed.** The rezoned Adams Property's recorded title remains with the landowner-applicant per the vesting record; the developer is a [[Forgelight Ventures, LLC|Wilson Sonsini nominee shell]] whose principal no Tier-1 channel names ([[T003 - Shell-LLC Principal Attribution for Forgelight and Willowbend|T003]]). *(analyst-level on the closing-status detail)* ## II. Project Boar is pre-permit, pre-decision — and now regulated - Google's own representative: "There are a number of permits that still need to be filed" ([[2026-06 Google Holds an Invitation-Only Meeting on the Port Data Center]]); its project site describes the **"Evaluation"** stage with "[a] final decision to build" not yet made. - The [[2026-06 Little Rock City Board Adopts Data-Center Regulations Ordinance|June 2 city ordinance]] binds at the first application: heavy-industrial zoning only, 900-foot setbacks, air/high-efficiency-liquid cooling with no primary groundwater. The verification pass corrected the strongest reading — the MOU already contemplated Central Arkansas Water surface supply, so the groundwater bar is not a design veto — but the **future Act 9 bond ordinance and franchise actions remain undelivered city commitments** without which the announced tax economics don't exist. - The Purchase Agreement behind the $11.5M conveyance stays withheld under § 25-19-105(b)(9)(A) **after closing**, while the recorded deed shows no clawback, reverter, or development condition on 383.52 public acres; the verification pass located the documented custodian — the City Clerk, per the City's own Resolution 16,671 recital — making the post-closing withholding a ripe, targetable records question. **Decision-makers: Little Rock Board of Directors, the Port, Google; window: open until the build decision.** ## III. The under-construction sites still have unbuilt legal floors - **AVAIO / Project Leo** is grading dirt with: no recorded deed into any AVAIO entity (title remains in [[Arnett Construction Company]]); no air permit; no named cooling-water source; an unissued USACE § 404 verification (SWL-2025-00064) that the permittee's own SWPPP sequences construction around — a genuine site-access chokepoint for the stream crossings; and **county "final approval" never issued** (the planning file's own reviewer statement). Its power contract surfaced only on the company's website — an "executed ESA" for 150 MW (April 2027) scaling to 1.1 GW ([[AVAIO Digital Partners]]) — and appears in **no public docket**, posing the same SRC-approval question the Google contract just answered. *(New input 2026-06-12: the ESA's existence and curtailment terms are now Tier-1-documented in AVAIO's own words — "a mandatory curtailment provision on a temporary basis for up to 150h per year"; "Without this provision, Entergy would not have supplied any power"; curtailment as MISO LMR Type 1 until [[Ironwood]] (Nov 2028), then on EEA-2 events until [[Jefferson Power Station]] (Dec 2029) — see [[AVAIO Tier 4 Equivalent Email to the Commerce Secretary]]. The contract itself remains undocketed, and the air permit the 62-generator backup fleet presupposes remains unfiled.)* The northern [[ADP Little Rock Green Compute, LLC|Green Compute]] expansion has filed nothing at all: any new county rule reaches it. - **Google / Project Pyramid** holds a Title V permit whose own numbers create a ceiling: 249.1 of 250 tpy NOx allowable, with a continuously-enforceable 242-tpy rolling cap ([[Project Pyramid Title V Air Permit (2507-AOP-R0)]]). The verification pass corrected the strongest reading (under the PSD minor-source rules, expansion can proceed by minor modification unless the *change itself* is major) — but the operative point stands: **every wet-cooled site must still come back to DEQ for operational water permits** (NPDES/withdrawal), with public-comment and APC&EC-appeal rights attached, before cooling at scale; the Water Plan's own slides put Pyramid's target completion at 2027 and Leo's at 2028. The prospective "gray water" source named by West Memphis Utilities has no regulatory correlate yet ([[Identifying the Unnamed Cooling-Water Data Centers]]). ## IV. The APSC arena: the rules were just written, and they cut both ways - **What closed:** [[2026-06 APSC Order No. 7 Approves the GAJA Rider Annual Update|Order No. 7]] (Ironwood stays; $109.98M flows; the Commission's hands tied on capital structure) and the Google SRC's final orders ([[2025-12 APSC Approves the Google SRC and Rejects the Payment Treatment|Order No. 9]], [[2026-01 Order No. 11 Forces Life-of-Asset Amortization of the Google Payments|Order No. 11]]). - **What the closings opened:** Order No. 9/11 establish that the Commission **will police hyperscale deal structure** — it rejected a stipulated treatment as benefiting "EAL and Google, not EAL's other customers," forced life-of-asset amortization, and directed that EAL "shall not contract away ratemaking treatments that are clearly within the province of the Commission." That holding governs **every future SRC — including whatever agreement AVAIO's website says is already executed.** - **The live prudence track:** Entergy's own filings show a **$157.8M gap between Ironwood's estimated cost ($700.2M) and the Commission's benchmark ($542.3M)** — with Order No. 7's on-the-record refund caution under § 23-4-1304(h)/(v), a mandatory final prudence review, and Independent-Monitor questioning ordered at every future annual update. The verification pass tempered it honestly: the benchmark may disaggregate (generation vs. transmission), no order names the figure, and this Commission just approved 99.6% of the ask — a burden-shifted bet on a deferential tribunal, but a real, standing one. - **The participation calendar:** Staff/Intervenor direct testimony **2026-08-05**; public comment hearings **Batesville 10/20** and **El Dorado 10/27** (the rate case's only direct citizen channels); evidentiary hearing **11/4–5**; the next GAJA update **by 2027-03-06** with mandatory five-year bill-impact projections. The cost-allocation argument no party has yet made — that the data-center-driven buildout should be borne by its causers, on the [[Large-Load Cost-Allocation Comparators|Kentucky model]] — has a forum and a date. *(analyst-level on the unargued-allocation point)* ## V. The county arena: an 8-vote question on a 35-day clock The [[2026-06 Quorum Court Postpones the Refiled Data-Center Moratorium|June 9 postponement]] defined the field: a threshold-based ordinance (≥5 MW / ≥100,000 gpd) **drafted by the County Judge nominee**, needing a simple majority (8 of 15) as a non-emergency measure, with the motion to advance set for **July 14**, an "independent subject matter expert" special meeting before it, and the Chamber — the Project Boar NDA holder — lobbying against it on the floor. The Planning Board's parallel track shows slippage: the five referred measures are **absent from the posted June 23 agenda**. The verification pass's correction matters: no legible per-JP roll-call exists anywhere in the record, so the "8 votes exist" claim is unproven — the July 14 vote is the first test that will produce one. The **November 3 County Judge race** (the ordinance's drafter vs. Michael Rushin) sits behind all of it: the office signs or vetoes ordinances and appoints the Planning Board. ## VI. The records arena: what is still hidden, and where the handles are The quantified offsets remain sealed (FR-16, the revised CKE-3/CKE-4, Bethel's Table 1); the West Memphis Act 9 ordinances/PILOT — publicly described at a **$60B cap** ([[2026-06 Reporting Details the West Memphis 60-Billion-Dollar Bond Cap for the Google Data Center|the Conway template's twin]]) — have **never been requested**; the B&V engineering and Rate Analysis documents sit unproduced behind Conway's chamber; the Port Purchase Agreement sits with the City Clerk; AEDC/APSC/DFA remain silent past the § 25-19-107 final-demand window (the statute's 7-day expedited-hearing petition is available, though fee recovery against state agencies is barred — *(analyst-level on AEDC specifics)*); and DEE/DEQ's item-6 pre-permitting correspondence — the channel most likely to name the shells' principals — was due **EOB 2026-06-11** on a conditional commitment whose silence is ambiguous and requires a follow-up. Every one of these is a specific, addressed, procedurally-available request. ## VII. What the map shows Read together: **no Arkansas hyperscale project outside West Memphis has its full legal and fiscal floor built.** Conway's abatement, franchise, cooling approvals, and land closing; Boar's permits, bond ordinance, and build decision; Leo's deed, air permit, water source, federal verification, and undocketed power contract — each is a public decision not yet made, each with a named decision-maker and, in most cases, a date. The cost side runs on the same calendar: the rate case's class-allocation contest opens August 5, and the Commission has now twice shown — in its own words — that it views the current structure's benefits as flowing to "EAL and Google, not EAL's other customers." The record does not say the buildout will be stopped; it says, precisely and datably, **where it has not yet been decided.** ## Caveats - Items marked *(analyst-level)* come from analysis domains whose independent verification pass did not complete; their underlying citations were drawn from the corpus but have not been adversarially re-checked. Treat them as leads. - This page reflects the record as of **2026-06-11**; the decision calendar in Section VII of [[Who Pays for Entergy's New Generation]] and the Home page's docket board are the living versions. - Confidence: **medium** — the Tier-1 anchors are strong; the forward-looking windows (meeting dates, statutory clocks) are inherently provisional.