03/09/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Edged Energy in Iowa, xAI expands Tennessee, CoreWeave IPO, TSMC building in U.S., quantum computing.
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] Edged Energy will build a 105,000 square foot Des Moines data center - just a little west of the large Meta campus. The Ankeny City Council voted Monday to approve a development agreement for the construction of a 105,000-square-foot multi-tenant data center on the city’s southeast side. The development agreement includes an incentive of a five-year sliding scale tax increment finance package not to exceed $2 million, and the creation of 22 jobs that pay between $29.76 and $35.71 an hour.
[Link] xAI is expanding its Colossus data center operations by acquiring a 1-million-square-foot property in Memphis, Tennessee. xAI is upgrading its primary Memphis-based facility, aiming to scale its capacity to 1 million Nvidia GPUs by the end of this year.
[Link] CoreWeave files for IPO and acquires MLOps and LLMOps company Weights & Biases. NVIDIA-backed CoreWeave has filed for a 2025 initial public offering in the U.S., aiming to raise approximately $4 billion with a valuation exceeding $35 billion. The company has also announced its plans to acquire Weights & Biases, a developer platform for building AI models and applications. This acquisition aims to create an end-to-end platform, from compute to model management, to help AI labs and enterprises build, tune, and deploy AI applications faster.
[Link] TSMC announces a $100 billion investment in the U.S. The new capital brings TSMC’s total investment in the U.S. to $165 billion and will go toward building five new fabrication facilities in Arizona.
[Link] Data Center Frontier: Several new reports from CBRE, PwC, and Synergy Research highlight the rapidly evolving data center landscape, driven by AI, cloud services, and increasing demand for digital infrastructure. According to CBRE, data center construction activity reached historic levels, with 6,350 MW under development at the close of 2024.
[Link] Last Energy to deploy 30 microreactors in Texas for data centers. The company announced plans to build 30 microreactors in the state's Haskell County near the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
[Link] EcoDataCenter's owner, Areim, has successfully secured EUR 450 million in capital from leading institutional investors. The capital will be used to enable further growth and drive the green transition in the data center industry through EcoDataCenter.
[Link] NanoQT and QuEra are collaborating to integrate quantum networking interfaces with neutral-atom Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) to establish a scalable, networked quantum computing architecture. NanoQT will provide its quantum networking interface expertise, while QuEra will offer its neutral-atom QPU platform as a hardware testbed.
[Link] IonQ announced a milestone in the development of high-speed, mixed-species quantum logic gates for trapped-ion quantum computing and networking. Detailed in a new paper written by IonQ scientists and co-authored with Australian National University, the research shows a novel approach to achieving an orders-of-magnitude increase in physical gate speed of two-qubit gates between different atomic species.
[Link] HPC wire: A team of researchers led by Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China has reported their 105-qubit superconducting quantum processor — Zuchongzhi 3.0 — posted the fastest benchmark so far in the race for quantum advantage (QA), beating the mark set by Google late last year.
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