06/22/25 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: New data centers in Montana, Georgia, and Texas; fast-racking small modular nuclear reactors; quantum computing
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
🆒 [Link] Certificate in Global Digital Infrastructure - The UC Berkeley Center for New Media has launched the world’s first undergraduate certificate program dedicated to global digital infrastructure, aiming to demystify the hidden backbone of the Internet for students worldwide. Developed in collaboration with industry leaders such as Infrastructure Masons and the SubOptic Foundation, the program offers a comprehensive examination of the technical, economic, legal, environmental, and social aspects of digital infrastructure, including data centers and subsea cables. Partners: Infrastructure Masons, Suboptic Foundation, TeleGeography, Data Center Dynamics Academy, and the National Data Centre Academy. In February, they had an open house to discuss the new program.
[Link] TAC Data Centers to build 600MW, 200,000 sq ft buildings campus in Great Falls, Montana. The company reportedly aims to invest $1-1.5 billion in the 2 million sq ft development, known as Project Cardinal.
[Link] Marietta City Council approved a request from MMM Acquisitions to rezone land just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, for a 108 MW data center campus. The location was previously a cell tower site, and the company looks to develop a 347,200 sq ft data center campus with a substation.
[Link] APR Energy has obtained approval from state regulators to move forward with the development of an 800-acre data center in Pampa, Texas. The data center is expected to have an initial capacity of 400MW and will be powered by on-site natural gas turbines.
[Link] How much water do West Des Moines data centers actually use? According to Des Moines Water Works, Microsoft was the sixth top water user in the month of May. The tech corporation used 2.1 million gallons of water across its five data centers.
[Link] Google has announced a collaboration with CTC Global, a developer and manufacturer of high-capacity advanced conductors, to accelerate the deployment of next-generation transmission technology for the U.S. power grid. The partnership aims to scale the use of CTC Global's high-capacity, domestically manufactured advanced conductors to rapidly boost grid capacity and reliability. The U.S. Department of Energy believes mass deployment of advanced conductors could double transmission capacity in just a few months, as opposed to the 7- to 10-year timeline associated with constructing new transmission lines.
[Link] The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has launched a fast-track pilot program aiming to get small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) operational by July 2026, bypassing the traditional national laboratory process and expediting advanced reactor testing under direct DOE oversight. The initiative, spurred by recent executive orders, seeks to address growing energy demands from AI, data centers, and industrial electrification, and is seen as a response to the slow pace of nuclear innovation in the U.S.
[Link] NuScale Power announced research programs aimed at advancing an integrated energy system that can provide both clean water and an energy-efficient means for hydrogen production. A single NuScale Power Module (NPM) coupled to a state-of-the-art reverse osmosis desalination system could yield approximately 150 million gallons of clean water per day without generating carbon dioxide.
[Link] Bill Gates-backed TerraPower announced the close of a $650 million fundraise. This capital raise builds on the previous investments and supports both the first Natrium plant, along with the company’s plans to rapidly deploy additional units in the U.S. and abroad.
[Link] Schneider Electric has launched new data center solutions: EcoStruxure Rack solutions, prefabricated modular EcoStruxure Pod Data Center, and an OCP-inspired NetShelter Open Architecture.
[Link] Mission: Deliver energy to planet Earth. Straight out of an Isaac Asimov novel, Aetherflux hopes to deliver space solar power from LEO next year. The company has closed a $50 million Series A round of financing from Index, Interlagos, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and NEA. The DoD’s Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund (OECIF) also recently approved their program for funding.
Quantum Computing
[Link] A collaboration between German quantum company Kipu Quantum and IonQ, a commercial quantum computing and networking company, has resulted in a successful solution for the most complex protein folding problem ever executed on a quantum computer. The teams were able to solve the largest known protein folding problem, comprising a 3D use case of up to 12 amino acids, which is an industry record.
[Link] India has taken a major step toward secure quantum communication by demonstrating entanglement-based quantum key distribution over a free-space link spanning more than one kilometer. The experiment, conducted by the DRDO-Industry-Academia Centre of Excellence (DIA-CoE) at IIT Delhi, achieved a secure key rate of approximately 240 bits per second while maintaining a quantum bit error rate below 7%.
[Link] HPCwire: Summer Slide Show: Key 2027 Quantum Computing Trends in Seven Slides. Delivered by Bob Sorensen, SVP at Hyperion Research, the outlook for quantum is robust, perhaps approaching the inflection point that Jensen Huang said the Viva Tech 2025 conference in Paris just one week ago.
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