Argentina Makes Data Centres Bring 115% of Their Own Power

Argentina has created a class of electricity customer so large that it must supply itself. Resolution 264/2026, published in the Boletin Oficial on 25 September 2026, establishes the Regimen de Demandas Extratendenciales, the extra-trend demand regime, inside the wholesale electricity market known as the MEM. Any new connection or expansion representing at least 0.5% of average wholesale demand falls inside it. The Energy Secretariat, which sits within the Economy Ministry, says that threshold currently equals about 80 MW.

Eighty megawatts, then a supply plan

A project above the line must file a Plan Especial de Abastecimiento, a special supply plan, with its connection request. The resolution rewrites article 13 of Resolution 400/2025 to require that the plan secure at least 80% of the project's energy from new production, and firm physical capacity covering at least 100% of its consumption where the project is a production venture. The regime applies whether the connection is made through transmission or through a distribution company, and it catches expansions of existing loads as well as new ones.

Developers are left free to choose how. Each project may select its own technology and supplier, the Secretariat said, including generation built at the connection point itself. What the state is refusing to do is supply the electricity out of the existing pool.

Data centres carry fifteen extra points

Data centres are treated separately and more strictly. The rewritten article requires firm capacity equal to 115% of consumption where the applicant is, in the regulation's phrase, an emprendimiento de Datos, a data venture. The Secretariat attributed the difference to data centres' continuous consumption and their high sensitivity to interruption.

Existing customers keep priority over the new arrivals. If supply runs short, the Secretariat said, households, shops, small and medium businesses and industry already inside the system will be served before large demands that lack sufficient backing. Its statement described the objective as letting each large project supply itself at its own risk, without shifting costs to other users through their bills.

A charge for holding a place in the queue

The recitals name the problem the regime is meant to solve. Where multiple access requests converge on limited transmission capacity, the resolution states, it is necessary to avoid the speculative immobilisation of that capacity and to prioritise projects with a sufficient degree of maturity and compliance. It therefore establishes a capacity reserve charge meant to reflect the opportunity cost of capacity sitting unavailable, and to create incentives to meet committed timetables. Those passages are translated here from the Spanish text published in the Boletin Oficial and quoted by Infobae on 25 September 2026.

That is a familiar diagnosis reached by an unfamiliar route. ERCOT's large-load queue has run far ahead of what is approved or energised, and PJM asked FERC in August 2026 to direct new data centres onto their own back-up generation when supply tightens, both of which Parallax Nexus has covered. Argentina has skipped the curtailment argument entirely. It is not rationing scarce supply between large loads during emergencies; it is declining to serve them at all unless they arrive with new generation attached.

What the resolution does not do is say where the new plants come from. It sets the 80% new-production requirement and leaves the financing to developers, in a country where Infobae reported on 25 September 2026 that JP Morgan's country risk index for Argentina closed at 609 basis points, a six-month high. Nor did the Secretariat publish a count of pending applications above the 80 MW threshold, so the number of projects affected is unknown.

The honest reading is that this is a reserve-margin policy that happens to land on data centres. Argentina is refusing to let a new category of very large customer draw down the headroom that existing users depend on, and it has chosen to say so in a connection rule rather than in a tariff, where the politics would be harder.

Resolution 264/2026 amends Resolution 400/2025 rather than replacing it, and it builds on the same requirement for physical backing that the earlier text introduced. The test of the regime will be the first special supply plan the Secretariat approves, and the first it turns down.