Critical infrastructure siting · United States · AI data centres first
We screen a site against the four things that end projects — power, water, permits and local politics — and we tell you which of them nobody can answer yet. One site, three working days, no charge for the first three.
Evidence · what a brief actually says
This is not a mock-up. It is the output for the county we are studying first — including the part where our own answer disagrees with the people who live there.
Limits · what we will not tell you
Screening is only worth buying if you know exactly where it stops. Most reports leave that boundary to the reader. We put it on the first page.
Why sites die · 2026
Texas ordered an audit of every data centre in the interconnection queue — roughly 474 GW of requests, about 90% of them data centres. New approvals wait for the outcome.
Cost of finding out late: years, and a deposit. ERCOT queue audit, Aug 2026A 430-acre technology park in Hanover County, Virginia was refused. In a neighbouring county a 900 MW project failed by a single vote. The land was fine. The politics were not.
Cost of finding out late: the site, publicly. Virginia Mercury / WTVR, May 2026New York paused new projects above 50 MW for up to a year. Fourteen states have moratorium bills in play. A county can be perfect and still be closed.
Cost of finding out late: a stalled deal. Executive order, 14 Jul 2026In Dinwiddie County the developer changed the cooling design and moved buildings off a Civil War battlefield core — after the public meeting, not before.
Cost of finding out late: redesign under scrutiny. Local coverage, Sep 2026Method · four moves, three days
Megawatts, timeline, latency needs, budget, and what you already know. These become hard filters and weights — not a wish list.
Grid, water, fibre, land and zoning, permitting, incentives, hazards, on-site energy. Fifteen public services answer in parallel; each fact carries its source and its response time.
Where our data contradicts local officials, a utility filing or your own information, it goes in the brief as a flagged contradiction — not smoothed over.
Verdict, stop-factors, time to power, the unknowns, and the exact questions to send the utility, the county and the water authority.
The engine · eight layers, labelled honestly
Every layer below is either computed for you or explicitly verified with you. No layer is silently half-done.
Who it is for
You are holding several sites and need the weak ones gone before you spend on options.
You already own land, a substation and an interconnection position. Which of them actually works as a campus?
We do the upstream filter, white-label if you prefer, so your own work starts on sites worth the fee.
Who it is not for
At hyperscaler scale you already have better data than we do. We would be a step backwards.
The decision is behind you. Screening now is confirmation, and confirmation is not what we sell.
Our briefs name what is unknown. If a clean score is the deliverable, a different supplier will serve you better.
Origin
hyd.eco began as a geospatial method for natural hydrogen exploration: finding where geology and existing infrastructure meet, so a resource could actually reach a market. The research was presented at EHEC 2026 in Seville and at PowerConnect in Gdańsk.
Data centres ask the same question from the other side — where do energy, water and connectivity meet a building? The screening engine carries over. Hydrogen stays inside it.
Founder
Twenty years between companies, governments and the people who live with what those companies build: construction approvals and a site on public contracts, operations at an oil export pipeline consortium, partnerships across Russia, Kazakhstan, Argentina and Europe.
For the past two years: infrastructure siting — first natural hydrogen, now data centres. Most of the open questions turn out to be about power, water and land use, and about who in a given place needs to say yes.
Pilot · three slots
Send a site
The founder reads every message and replies personally — usually within one working day, and with a straight answer if we are not the right fit.