03/02/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Amazon's quantum chip, Mobile World Congress, $5.6B Blackstone Energy fund, AST SpaceMobile, and global data center projects.
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
Mobile World Congress Barcelona is this week, and I already see a few announcements. I’ll be watching #MWC25 on X.
Nokia announced its partnership with KDDI, SoftBank, T-Mobile US, and NVIDIA to advance AI-powered Radio Access Networks (AI-RAN). Nokia will be establishing AI-RAN center in Dallas for real-world testing, innovation, and validation of AI-RAN solutions.
Ampere announced it is accelerating its effort to address the telecom market. The company announced new customers and ecosystem partnerships with Supermicro, O-RAN software company SynaXG, OREX SAI, Canonical, and Fujitsu.
[Link] Amazon Web Services has unveiled Ocelot, a prototype quantum computing chip designed with built-in error correction using "cat qubits," potentially reducing the resources needed for quantum error correction by up to tenfold. AWS researchers estimate that Ocelot could accelerate the timeline to practical quantum computers by up to five years and significantly reduce the cost of production.
[Link] I had started to draft an AI prompt to help me understand quantum computing, its main concepts, and the impact of AI… when I ran across an awesome article that explained all of this and more. The AI and Capital Substack: Quantum Computing: The Future of AI and Wealth Creation.
[Link] Blackstone announced a $5.6 Billion final close for Blackstone Energy Transition Partners IV at hard cap. One of the portfolio companies in that fund is Energy Exemplar, which supports grid reliability with a software platform that allows decision-makers to accurately model electric, gas, and water energy markets. They had an interesting blog post recently that listed the key takeaways from their PowerGen International conference, which focused on the evolving landscape of energy generation, demand growth, grid resilience, and innovative technologies shaping the future of the power sector.
[Link] Arm has launched the Armv9 edge AI platform, designed for IoT applications. It features the new Cortex-A320 CPU and Ethos-U85 NPU, which together enable on-device AI models with over a billion parameters.
[Link] AST SpaceMobile Secures $43 Million contract in support of the U.S. Space Development Agency. The SDA will accelerate the delivery of needed space-based capabilities to the joint warfighter to support terrestrial missions through development, fielding, and operation of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.
[Link] Evaluating Interconnection Market Health. A really interesting article from TeleGeography on their take for what comprises the core elements of an interconnection ecosystem: network, internet exchanges, cloud, data centers, power, economy, and governance. TeleGeography also recently issued the 8th edition of its State of the Network Report.
Global Data Center news: Mexico, Canada, India, and South Korea
[Link] ODATA, an Aligned Data Centers company announced the energization and expansion of critical substation and transmission infrastructure near its DC QR03 data center campus, solving the data center energy scarcity in Querétaro, Mexico. In partnership with Ammper, ODATA successfully energized 200 MW in the first phase of this energy project earlier this month, and is on track to reach 400MW.
[Link] Vantage Data Centers announced a $500 million CAD (more than $350 million USD) investment to deliver 32MW and fuel the development of QC24, the fourth and final facility on the company’s growing Quebec City campus.
[Link] CtrlS Datacenters launched its new datacenter park in Chennai on February 25, 2025. It features a 72 MW IT load capacity, earthquake resistance, flood-proof design, AI-ready cooling, and a 120 MW gas-insulated substation.
[Link] LG Electronics founding family member Brian Koo has teamed with the South Korean government, to form a new Fir Hills Inc. venture. The team looks to build a large AI data center that can scale up to 3 gigawatts of capacity.
Follow me on Twitter for more links and news.