The cost of building and powering data centers full of AI chips could be $5.2 trillion by 2030, according to McKinsey. As with all such economic engines, Big Law is finding a sizable role to play.
The data center boom sits at the intersection of two major client bases—Big Tech and the world’s largest private asset managers—and presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for firms built to cross-sell their services.
More than 4,000 data centers have sprouted nationwide, with more on the way. Across the spectrum, lawyers hired to help foster the proliferation of facilities say demand continues to ratchet up.
What follows are a few examples Bloomberg Law identified to exemplify the work—covering financing, partnerships, property sales, and energy contracts—unfurling inside law firms in the data center era.
The Land Deal: Fairwater
In early 2023,
Five years earlier, Wisconsin had approved an incentive-laden deal with Taiwan-based manufacturer
Jake Remington, a Milwaukee-based land use partner who co-leads Husch’s data center group, shepherded a team of attorneys tasked with multiple duties for Microsoft: coordinating with local and state agencies to navigate zoning laws and land-use regulations; expediting environmental reviews to secure permits; negotiating tax incentives and intergovernmental agreements; and handling title and survey issues.
They also had to be sensitive to the bad feelings that lingered after the failed Foxconn deal.
“Not only did you have those displaced property owners, you also had the taxpayers looking at this land and saying, ‘You gave all these benefits to an international corporation, a non-American corporation and look what happened here,’” said Rodney Carter, a partner and member of the Husch team.
He was among the lawyers representing Microsoft routinely appearing at public government meetings.
“My heart was sinking as I walked into City Hall for the development approval meetings because I hoped no one speaks in opposition to this application,” Carter said.
No such opposition emerged, he said.
Husch Blackwell partners said Microsoft’s promise to bring jobs and tax revenue and also to work with the local technical college resonated with elected officials and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D).
It didn’t hurt that Remington and Carter are alumni of Wisconsin law schools, nor that Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Mount Pleasant sold Microsoft the site for $50 million but also agreed to refund a share of the property taxes. Husch Blackwell played a pivotal role in negotiating these tax incentives, Remington said.
The company broke ground on its first data center building in Wisconsin in 2023, and plans to bring the $3.3 billion, 1.2-million-square-foot site online this year—packed with
Husch Blackwell is also helping Microsoft expand its Wisconsin footprint. Microsoft purchased 240 acres of land in nearby Kenosha in 2025. The company initially invested $4 billion to develop four data centers there, Carter said.
In January 2026, Microsoft announced another $13.3 billion expansion in Mount Pleasant, for 15 new data centers, bringing the total potential project valuation to more than $20 billion across roughly 2,000 acres, Carter said.
Husch Blackwell plans to continue advising Microsoft on its buildout of the new data centers. “The expansion in Mount Pleasant is evolving into a significant hub for AI, while also serving as a model for how innovation can benefit the broader community,” Carter said. “In this case, that community is the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor.”
The firm’s data center group, which has grown to more than 65 lawyers in less than two years, has worked on more than 110 projects across the US since the beginning of 2020 and is co-led by energy regulatory partner Carrie Collier-Brown from Austin, Tex.
The Kansas City-founded firm placed 78th in AmLaw rankings in 2025 and posted 15% year-over-year growth.
Innovative Financing: Hyperion
To bring the project to life, a group of at least six law firms—including Latham & Watkins, Kirkland & Ellis, Milbank and Clifford Chance—worked to design a complex joint venture structure that kept the debt off the Facebook parent company’s books. The structure is viewed by lawyers as a model for future deals.
Meta placed Hyperion into a majority-owned joint venture with Blue Owl Capital funds, which will own an 80% interest. That shifts construction risks to outside capital, while allowing Meta to retain control of operations.
“The novelty in the structure was how the JV arrangements worked and the treatments that were sought by each party,” said Jaime E. Ramirez, a partner at Milbank who focuses on infrastructure projects. A Milbank team including Ramirez guided
The project funding ultimately flows from institutional investors in the capital markets—pension funds, insurers, and private credit funds—through Blue Owl’s investment vehicles. The transaction is going to “catapult the market into a whole separate capital pool that has up to now been largely untapped,” said Ramirez.
The structure is already in demand among clients seeking to push capital markets into data center opportunities, the Milbank partner said.
“There’s going to be a lot of interest in the fact that investors took construction risk on a bond for a data center,” Ramirez said. He expects the Meta transaction to spur further usage of its unique joint venture concept and capital markets involvement.
Innovation in structure and terms will be key to navigate the growing demand in data center work, which requires collaboration across several teams, including capital markets, M&A, project finance and real estate for a single transaction.
Milbank formally launched an AI data center practice group in November to address the complexities of such cross-practice collaboration. The group is led by the chair of the firm’s global project, energy and infrastructure finance group, Dan Bartfeld, in addition to Ramirez and Erwin Dweck, who also captains Milbank’s real estate group.
‘Behind the Meter': CloudBurst
For a data center campus in San Marcos, Tex. spanning nearly 100 acres, Jackson Walker last year helped CloudBurst Data Centers Inc. strike a deal to receive as much as 450,000 million British thermal units per day of natural gas directly from pipeline operator
Under the deal, Energy Transfer will send enough gas from the Waha hub in the Permian Basin to generate up to 1.2 gigawatts of electric power to CloudBurst’s facility for at least 10 years. That’s usually enough to power about 240,000 homes on the state grid.
“The amount of electricity can power a small city,” said Meghan Griffiths, an Austin-based partner who leads Jackson Walker’s Digital Infrastructure & Data Centers team.
The firm, the largest in Texas, formalized its now 30-member AI data center team in 2019, but says it has been aiding clients with infrastructure projects such as powering cloud computing and cryptocurrency since 2013. Griffiths and Michael Nasi, who practices environmental and energy law in Austin, lead the crew. The team has since done data center-related work in Texas, Utah, North Dakota, and other states.
Amy Baird, a partner in Houston focused on energy-related matters, also worked on the CloudBurst-Energy Transfer agreement. Baird said the firm got the call due to its familiarity with the state’s pipeline industry and previous representation of Energy Transfer for regulatory and litigation matters.
“The directive of most of the data center developers when it comes to natural gas transportation and natural gas commodities contracts is, ‘Help us understand the industry.’ In this case, it was the Texas intrastate pipeline industry,” Baird said. “Then, ‘Help us negotiate given the parameters of how our data center needs to operate.’”
Colorado-based startup CloudBurst sought to power the AI data center independently because of recurring concerns over the state’s power grid capabilities since it was devastated in the 2021 Winter Storm Uri.
Key to the deal was determining whether there were sufficient pipeline connections close enough to CloudBurst’s project site so the developer wouldn’t have to build a lot of expensive pipeline infrastructure, Baird said.
CloudBurst’s Executive Chair Cynthia Thompson said the facility would begin operations in the third quarter of 2026. Thompson also said the company plans to work with Energy Transfer to “identify additional potential data center sites on or close to their strategic natural gas pipeline network.”
The deal was Energy Transfer’s first long-term partnership to supply natural gas directly to a data center—a sign of the times as gas operators, producers, and pipeline companies compete to power emerging AI data centers in Texas.
Jackson Walker expects more work with developers needing direct power.
“Their core business is running a data center, not power plants,” Baird said. “If the market can’t get them power fast enough, they have to be innovative enough to figure out how to do behind-the-meter solutions.”
The Road Ahead
There are, of course, limits to the growth. Some prognosticators see an AI-fueled data center bubble forming amid the frenzy, much the way such confidence preceded the dotcom collapse a quarter century ago. And critically, there have been no significant returns on the investments thus far.
“While AI has transformative potential, much of the current enthusiasm is driven by hype rather than tangible productivity gains.” said Citadel CEO
“Even if you do not believe in a data center bubble, there are only so many data centers that need to be built,” Freshfields co-head of M&A Ethan Klingsberg said in a January report.
Data center builders and users are also finding resistance on the ground. Microsoft withdrew its proposal for a data center in Caledonia, Wis., not far from the first of Fairwater’s installations in Mount Pleasant, after vocal backlash from residents.
Aside from concerns about noise as well as water and air quality, lawmakers and municipalities are also scrutinizing data centers’ role in spiking electricity rates.
But despite emerging hurdles, the pace shows little sign of slowing.
Nader Mousavi, a Sullivan & Cromwell partner based in Palo Alto, Calif., has been at the table representing
“This is Silicon Valley meets New York,” Mousavi said last fall. “Silicon Valley’s bread and butter has always been complicated, technology-driven investment. And it’s now happening at an unprecedented scale that requires high degrees of creativity and sophistication across diverse practices.”
It’s the busiest time in Mousavi’s 27-year career, he said. But the deals are also pulling in lawyers from the firm’s energy, real estate, joint venture, and debt practices.
“It’s essentially all of the tools in the toolbox,” he said. “They are all in play. And they are all needed.”
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