05/18/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Qualcomm, AMD, Quantinuum, and AWS in UAE, another Iowa data center, Cisco joins AIP, Google infrastructure
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
Things to watch for this week:
[Link] The city of Altoona (a Des Moines suburb) is poised to get another large data center. The Altoona City Council is scheduled to hold a public hearing this week to rezone about 370 acres for a proposed data center development north of Interstate 80. The rezoning request comes from Denver-based data center developer Tract. The land is a little bit north of and is right between the massive Meta campus and the recently announced Edged Energy data center.
[Link] According to Teslarati - Based on images taken of the Giga Texas complex recently, it appears that work is now underway to construct a new facility for Tesla’s Cortex 2.0, a companion to the site’s existing Cortex supercluster.
[Link] OpenAI plans to help develop a massive new data center in the United Arab Emirates that may eventually be one of the largest in the world, a 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi. US and UAE officials said Thursday that G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI company with historic ties to China, would be building a 5-gigawatt data center in collaboration with several unnamed US companies.
[Link] Qualcomm and Saudi Arabia AI company HUMAIN signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the intent to enter a strategic collaboration for the development of next-generation AI data centers, infrastructure, and cloud-to-edge services. Under the agreement, HUMAIN and Qualcomm Technologies also announced a major collaboration with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) to establish a world-class Qualcomm Design Center in Saudi Arabia for semiconductor technology.
[Link] AMD and HUMAIN announced an agreement to build an open, scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient AI infrastructure that will power the future of global intelligence through a network of AMD-based AI computing centers stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States. The parties will invest up to $10B to deploy 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity over the next five years.
[Link] AWS and HUMAIN announce a more than $5B investment to accelerate AI adoption in Saudi Arabia and globally. The two companies will invest in a strategic partnership to build a groundbreaking “AI Zone” in the Kingdom.
[Link] The UAE and the US have strengthened their clean energy partnership through the UAE-US Partnership for Accelerating Clean Energy (PACE), aiming to mobilize $100 billion to deploy 100GW of clean energy globally by 2035. As part of this initiative, they committed $20 billion to develop 15GW of clean energy projects across the US, led by Masdar alongside private investors.
[Link] Quantinuum is establishing a Qatari-incorporated Joint Venture with Al Rabban Capital to accelerate quantum computing adoption in Qatar and the region. The Joint Venture has three core objectives: enabling access to Quantinuum’s world-leading quantum technologies in the region; co-developing quantum computing applications tailored to regional needs in areas such as New Energy, Materials Discovery, Precision Medicine, Genomics, and Financial Services, as well as generative quantum AI.
[Link] TensorWave has raised $100M in Series A funding to accelerate the deployment of the world’s largest liquid-cooled AMD GPU cluster, consisting of 8,192 MI325X GPUs.
[Link] Cisco has joined the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), a coalition led by BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, MGX, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and xAI, aimed at accelerating investment in AI data centers and enabling infrastructure. The partnership plans to unlock $30 billion in initial capital, potentially mobilizing up to $100 billion with debt financing, to build secure, scalable, and efficient AI infrastructure.
[Link] Armada, Second Front, and Microsoft announced the successful deployment of Second Front’s Frontier platform on Microsoft Azure Local, hosted within an Armada Galleon modular data center.
[Link] Quantum Insider. Quantum Computing Roadmaps: A Look at The Maps And Predictions of Major Quantum Players. I have been looking for something like this article for some time now. It (very nicely) showcases today's quantum companies, their strategies, and the future of the industry.
[Link] This is a very interesting All-In podcast interview with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. I’ve taken a page or two of notes from this one - where he talks about AI, Google data center infrastructure (big fan of Urs Hölzle), energy resources, robotics, quantum computing R&D, and much more.
[Link] Prodigy Clean Energy and Serco announced progress on a prototypical test program demonstrating the robustness of Prodigy’s Transportable Nuclear Power Plants (TNPPs) to resist accidental and threat scenarios.
[Link] EPRI releases a framework to address extreme weather risk assessment and adaptation.
I might have to do a part 2 this week…. just too much out there to report on……
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