03/17/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Zayo acquiring Crown Castle’s Fiber, CoreWeave's $11.9 billion contract, Crusoe AutoClusters, quantum computing advances, Planet Labs partners with Anthropic
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure. ☘️
[Link] Zayo will acquire Crown Castle’s Fiber Solutions Business. Digital Bridge company Zayo announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Crown Castle’s Fiber Solutions business in a transaction valuing the business at approximately $4.25 billion. With this acquisition, Zayo will expand its network with approximately 90,000 route miles of fiber, increasing its overall reach to more than 70,000 on-net locations.
[Link] CoreWeave inks $11.9 billion contract with OpenAI for data centers and services. As part of the deal OpenAI will become an investor in CoreWeave through the issuance of $350 million of CoreWeave stock.
[Link] Partners Group to acquire Australian data center provider GreenSquareDC. Partners Group will invest up to AUD 1.2 billion to transform GreenSquareDC into a next-generation data center platform in Australia. Partners Group has invested over $4 billion in data centers since 2021, including in EdgeCore and atNorth, a leading pan-Nordic data center platform.
[Link] Cologix, announced that storage company Backblaze has deployed its services at the Cologix TOR3 digital edge data center in Toronto.
[Link] Crusoe announced two new managed services on its Crusoe Cloud platform accelerated by NVIDIA: Crusoe Managed Inference and Crusoe AutoClusters, an advanced orchestration platform for AI training. These services aim to reduce the operational burdens of AI innovation, ensuring seamless recovery from hardware failures and reliable AI training experiences.
[Link] Cerebras Systems announced the launch of six new AI inference datacenters across North America and Europe, powered by Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engines. These facilities, equipped with thousands of Cerebras CS-3 systems, are expected to serve over 40 million Llama 70B tokens per second.
[Link] Infleqtion has secured a $6.2 million award from ARPA-E to spearhead the ENCODE project, aimed at enhancing energy grid efficiency through quantum computing. This initiative, a collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, EPRI, and NREL, seeks to integrate quantum algorithms into energy sector optimization.
For AI powered grids, energy intelligence company Bidgely will join fellow energy industry thought leaders in a series of live discussions at the upcoming DistribuTECH International conference in Dallas, Texas, taking place March 24 – 27.
[Link] Several data center hyperscalers, including Google, Amazon, and Meta, have signed a pledge to support the goal of at least tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. The Large Energy Users Pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, recognizes nuclear's potential to expand beyond traditional grid electricity and support industries such as the technology sector.
[Link] ABB and Charbone Hydrogen Corporation have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop up to 15 green hydrogen production facilities across North America in the next five years. ABB will be the preferred supplier for electrical substations and support Charbone in standardizing engineering for increased energy efficiency.
Quantum Computing
[Link] IonQ announced that it has raised over $372 million through its "at-the-market" equity offering program, netting approximately $360 million. The company also announced strong momentum toward its technological roadmap with a portfolio of nearly 400 granted and pending quantum networking patents that IonQ owns or controls in the U.S. and internationally.
[Link] Alice & Bob, a quantum computing company, has made a significant advancement in cat qubit technology by "squeezing" the qubits. This method compresses the quantum state to optimize error suppression, extending bit-flip error lifetimes by 160x compared to previous cat qubit implementations. Squeezing enhances bit-flip protection without compromising phase-flip performance, making phase-flip correction more manageable.
[Link] An international collaboration of scientists led by D-Wave performed simulations of quantum dynamics in programmable spin glasses—computationally hard magnetic materials simulation problems with known applications to business and science—on both D-Wave’s Advantage2 prototype annealing quantum computer and the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
[Link] You had me at AI and spatial imagery. Planet Labs is partnering with Anthropic to use Anthropic's Claude AI model for analyzing geospatial satellite imagery. This integration will combine Planet's daily geospatial data with Claude's AI capabilities, enabling near real-time pattern recognition and anomaly detection on a global scale.
[Link] Qualcomm announced the entry into an agreement to acquire EdgeImpulse, which will enhance its offering for developers and expand its leadership in AI capabilities to power AI-enabled products and services across IoT.
[Link] Eaton signs an agreement to acquire Fibrebond Corporation for $1.4 billion, expanding reach into multi-tenant data center market.
[Link] CoolIT announces a 4000W-ready single-phase direct liquid cooling (DLC) coldplate – more than doubling the previously accepted limits of single-phase direct liquid cooling.
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