Who Pays When Wall Street Miscalculates? Not Wall Street.
When I worked at a PE backed company, about 6 weeks in, we had the conversation you read about in r/antiwork. “Unfortunately, our costs were higher than we projected, and our revenue isn’t what we hoped. We are going to have to tighten our belts, and ask all of you to work a little harder” No one was surprised when they started letting people go a few months later.
What struck me though, was how easy it would have been, as the financial and excel wizards they were, to adjust their math. If they were willing to adjust their profit expectations, a 275 person company, passionately working hard in the same direction towards a valuable, defined goal with an existing customer base could keep doing that, without having to change much. But Wall Street would never adjust their profit expectations. That’s not what they do. Now, they want to destroy another vital ecosystem in pursuit of more imaginary zeros and a great story for the Hamptons this summer.
Here's what happened:
Hillsboro's power grid is maxed out, and data centers that were promised power can't get it.
BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street have been funding data center development in Hillsboro, creating demand for power that the grid cannot meet.
When their own investment miscalculation created a bottleneck, their solution wasn't to slow the data center rollout, fund the grid upgrades themselves, or accept lower returns. It was to propose dredging 100 miles of the Columbia River to lay a high-voltage cable under its bed.
They are ALSO the money behind Five Point Infrastructure, which owns PowerBridge, the firm proposing the Columbia River dredging.
Dredging is a terrible idea. It means resuspending decades of PCBs and heavy metals near Superfund sites, heating water already too warm for struggling salmon, violating the treaty rights of the Yakama Nation and other tribal nations. And for what? To protect that projected bottom line.
Let me be direct about the priority question: if there's a capacity constraint on Oregon's grid this summer, neighborhoods get power before server farms. Air conditioning for families is a public health issue. Data center uptime is a private equity return. Those are not equivalent claims on a public resource.
The deeper problem is that this situation was entirely predictable and preventable. When the same pools of capital create demand on one side of an equation and own the utility that has to meet it on the other, the conflict of interest doesn't resolve itself in favor of the public. It resolves itself in favor of the investors, and the costs get externalized onto communities, ecosystems, and ratepayers.
Oregon's Public Utility Commission has the authority to change this calculus. A governor who directs the PUC to require large industrial customers to pay the full infrastructure cost of their demand, not socialize it onto residential ratepayers, transforms the economics immediately. If data centers have to fund their own grid upgrades, the Columbia River dredging proposal collapses on its own merits. If private equity firms want Oregon's infrastructure to serve their growth projections, they can pay for it.
There's also a question worth asking about those projections themselves. AI-driven data center demand forecasts have been used across the country to justify infrastructure investments that benefit builders regardless of whether the demand ever materializes. Oregon communities are being asked to bear permanent ecological harm for speculative returns. That's not a trade Oregon should make.
I would oppose the Columbia River dredging project. I would direct the PUC to require cost-causation pricing: the entity that creates the demand pays for the infrastructure to meet it. And I would say clearly and publicly what is happening here: private equity firms that miscalculated their investment are trying to make Oregon's rivers, ratepayers, and tribal communities pay for their mistake.
That's not infrastructure. That's extraction. And Oregon deserves a governor who knows the difference.
