04/20/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Iowa and Illinois data center development, NVIDIA/CoreWeave, Soluna funding round, Hydrogen data center, Quantum networking
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] 300-acre industrial park planned for southeast Des Moines. Plans to prepare a 300-acre site in southeast Des Moines for development of an industrial park or other uses, such as data centers, the city and development partners announced in a news conference on April 17. Des Moines director of development services Cody Christensen confirmed that the site could be used for data centers. Cielo Digital lists a 500 MW Des Moines property on their website - but does not specifically mention this site.
[Link] Two data center campuses totaling 38 buildings proposed in Yorkville, Illinois. Two large data center campuses are proposed in Yorkville, Illinois: Project Cardinal by Pioneer Development, featuring 14 buildings totaling 1.8GW on about 1,000 acres, and Project Steel by Prologis, with 24 buildings over 540 acres and more than 9 million sq ft.
[Link] CoreWeave announced Cohere, IBM and Mistral AI are the first customers to gain access to NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems and CoreWeave's full stack of cloud services — a combination designed to advance AI model development and deployment.
[Link] Green data center company Soluna announced it has signed a term sheet for power for Project Ellen, a new 100 MW data center co-located with a 145 MW wind farm in South Texas. With Project Ellen, the company is expected to have over 698 MW of data center capacity in operation, construction, or development. Soluna also announced a 166 MW data center site in Texas - project Kati. Kati will power advanced computing applications, including Bitcoin mining and potentially AI.
[Link] Blockchain and AI infrastructure company Auradine announced closing of an additional $153 million in connection with its Series C funding round, bringing total capital raised to over $300 million. With this funding Auradine is announcing the formation of a new business group, AuraLinks AI, focused on open-standards based networking solutions to address the rapidly increasing bandwidth and cooling requirements of next-generation AI data centers.
[Link] Data Center Frontier: Deep Data Center: Neoclouds as the ‘Picks and Shovels’ of the AI Gold Rush. Neocloud providers are specialized cloud platforms focused exclusively on delivering high-performance, cost-efficient GPU infrastructure tailored for AI workloads like training large language models. They offer advantages such as access to cutting-edge hardware, bare-metal performance, scalable capacity on demand, and lower costs compared to traditional hyperscale clouds, making them essential enablers of AI innovation.
[Link] On LinkedIn Dean Nelson shared that modular, sustainable, off-grid data center company ECL has been live on #hydrogen for a year with Cato Digital as the first customer, achieving 100% uptime, 100% #offgrid cooled by 100% of its own generated #water. His post shares a local news story (video) that provides a nice profile of the company and the (pretty amazing) technology used in the Mountain View facility.
[Link] Green Hydrogen: A Perfectly Clean But Complicated Solution to A.I.’s Power Hunger. The generative AI boom is driving a surge in data center construction, increasing energy demands, and prompting exploration of green hydrogen as a sustainable power source. Green hydrogen, produced via electrolysis using renewable energy, emits only oxygen, making it appealing for data centers needing reliable, scalable energy. Companies like Microsoft are testing hydrogen fuel cells, but high costs and political uncertainties pose challenges to widespread adoption.
[Link] IonQ announced it has signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korean company Intellian Technologies, a global provider of satellite communication antennas and ground gateway solutions, to explore how secure quantum networking can transform satellite communications.
[Link] Telecom Industry Summit: Protecting Critical Communications Infrastructure. Between June and December 2024, there were 5,770 reported incidents of theft and vandalism targeting critical communications infrastructure in the U.S., disrupting service for over 1.5 million broadband and wireless customers. Copper theft, driven by rising market prices, is a major cause, affecting utility poles, cellular towers, and fiber optic lines. These attacks pose serious risks to public safety and essential services. The telecom industry, along with law enforcement and policymakers, is calling for stronger laws, better enforcement, stricter scrap metal regulations, and enhanced security measures to protect vital networks.
[Link] Firmus Technologies and Eaton: Synert. A collaboration between Firmus and Eaton has yielded a Frequency Control Response system designed to mitigate the impact of AI workloads on power grid stability. The system transforms Eaton-powered UPS systems to act as energy buffers, absorbing fluctuations in demand from AI facilities. A deployment in Australia has demonstrated the system's ability to provide fast frequency response services to the grid, generate revenue from UPS capacity, and reduce AI infrastructure energy costs by over 25%. This technology is integrated into the company's AI FactoryOS platform. The partnership aims to address the energy challenges associated with large-scale AI deployments. Check out synert.co for more information on the smart UPS platform for AI factories.
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