A combined two-month topic covering September and October, not a single-month topic. The losing ballot option was an emissions trading system.
Settle "hyperscale" in fifteen seconds
An industry standards body and a federal executive order independently landed on 100 MW as the threshold. That convergence is about as close to an uncontested definition as debate ever gets. Read both cards. It takes fifteen seconds and it ends the definitional debate before it starts.
The trap: the older 5,000 server and 10,000 square foot figures are dated and now capture facilities nobody in the industry would call hyperscale. If an opponent reads the IBM card and stops at the server count, point out that the same source also gives 100 MW and that the server figure is a legacy threshold.
The number that reframes the round
Synergy Research Group counted 1,136 hyperscale data centers worldwide at the end of 2024, with the United States accounting for 54 per cent of total worldwide capacity by megawatts of critical IT load. 137 were added in 2024 and 504 were in the pipeline.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google together account for 59 per cent of all hyperscale capacity. That figure matters more than it first appears: a moratorium on hyperscale construction is, in practice, a moratorium on three companies' expansion plans. Both sides can use this, and the side that says it out loud first usually controls the framing.
"Moratorium" is a legal term, not a rhetorical one
Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 535 U.S. 302 (2002), is the definitional card and the takings answer at the same time. The Court held that the moratoria at issue were not per se takings requiring compensation, and that whether a temporary moratorium effects a taking is neither always yes nor always no but depends on the circumstances.
The moratoria in that case ran 32 months and were described as temporary restrictions adopted to maintain the status quo while development impacts were studied.
Pro uses it twice. It defines the mechanism as temporary and study-oriented, which shrinks the con's "ban" framing. And it pre-empts the takings argument with the controlling case rather than a policy claim.
Where con should actually go
Not the takings argument, which Tahoe-Sierra answers. The stronger ground is the counterfactual: capacity moves offshore to jurisdictions with dirtier grids and weaker oversight, so domestic emissions fall while global emissions do not. That argument survives the definitional debate entirely.
Twenty-two pages: the resolution unpacked, framework options with their strongest objections, the clash map, and the evidence worth cutting. No account, no email, no card.