07/20/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: $90B investments in Pennsylvania, Vantage enters Nevada, PsiQuantum, Oklo reaches NRC readiness
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
The first Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit was held in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, featuring a number of significant announcements. Data center and energy firms have pledged to invest $90 billion in the state.
[Link] Blackstone makes a $25 billion investment in data center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania, along with a new joint venture with PPL Corporation for power generation. Blackstone-backed QTS has secured multiple land sites to develop and operate Pennsylvania data centers. At the summit, PPL also said it would invest $6.8 billion through 2028 to expand grid capacity and modernize transmission across multiple Pennsylvania counties to support the growing power demand of data centers.
[Link] CoreWeave announced it is committing an initial $6 billion to equip a new, state-of-the-art data center outside of Philadelphia in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, purpose-built to power the most cutting-edge AI workloads. The company said the facility would have room to grow up to 300 MW.
[Link] Interior Secretary Doug Burgum spoke to CNBC at the Summit about the tremendous infrastructure opportunity, AI energy demands, and what the administration (and certain states) are doing to make energy permitting easier.
[Link] Pennsylvania Data Center Partners and PowerHouse Data Centers launch joint venture to build next-gen 1.35 GW hyperscale data center campus in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The $15 billion project will see three hyperscale data center campuses in Central Pennsylvania and a new AI data hub, Pennsylvania Digital I (PAX) that will deliver 1.35 GW of capacity with expandability up to 1.8 GW.
[Link] Meta's Mark Zuckerberg pledges hundreds of billions for AI data centers in superintelligence push. Its first multi-gigawatt data center, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, while another, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the coming years.
[Link] Vantage Data Centers announced its entry into the Nevada market with a 224MW campus (NV1) in Storey County just outside of Reno. Nearly $3 billion will be invested in the project.
[Link] Switch announced an expansion across its Borrowing Base and Revolving Credit Facilities to $10 billion. With this latest milestone, Switch has raised $20 billion since 2024 through sustainable financing structures, including sustainability-linked loans, green loans, and green bonds.
[Link] Video - CNBC Property Play: Building data centers on the moon. CNBC's Diana Olick sits down with David Steinbach, global chief investment officer at Hines, and Ross Centers, CEO of Ethos. They discuss why lunar data centers may become the next frontier in real estate and how the space exploration boom mirrors the early railroad era. I had to dig a little to find this - but I first wrote about data centers on the moon in 2012… a look at the “unique engineering challenge”.
[Link] A Bloomberg news report says that xAI is in discussions to lease data center capacity in Saudi Arabia, likely with Humain, a Saudi-backed AI company. Humain could offer xAI several gigawatts of capacity. Another company, which Bloomberg did not name, is already working on a 200-megawatt facility, making it a more realistic short-term option for xAI, the report said.
[Link] Power first, platform-driven model. Hut 8 announced a corporate rebrand that aligns the Company’s external positioning with its strategic focus on energy and digital infrastructure through an integrated platform model focused on disciplined capital allocation, operational rigor, and relentless performance optimization. Their website showcases the platform of layer 1 - Power, layer 2 - Digital Infrastructure, layer 3 - Compute (Bitcoin mining, Cloud, or GPU-as-a-Service). As of March 31, 2025 the company says they have 1,020 MW capacity under management.
[Link] Oracle plans to invest U.S. $2 billion over the next five years to meet the growing demand for its AI and cloud infrastructure in Germany. The company also announced plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years to meet the rapidly growing demand for its AI and cloud services in the Netherlands.
[Link] Oklo announced the successful completion of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) pre-application readiness assessment for Phase 1 of the combined license application (COLA) for Oklo’s first commercial Aurora powerhouse at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). I also watched this interesting YouTube video on the Oklo origin story - Sam Altman’s nuclear startup that could be bigger than OpenAI.
[Link] Google announced it will buy as much as 3 GW of hydropower generation capacity from Brookfield Renewable Partners.
[Link] Stonepeak to Invest $1.3 Billion in Princeton Digital Group.
[Link] Core Memory YouTube video - PsiQuantum: Inside the $1 Billion Quantum Computer That Could Change the World. This is a really interesting video on how PsiQuantum took a radically different approach to building quantum computers out of light itself. Their photonic qubits don't need the extreme cooling that other quantum systems require, and they're promising to leap from today's small-scale demonstrations straight to a million qubits by 2027.
[Link] Quantum milestone. A team of scientists from QuEra Computing, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has reported the first experimental demonstration of magic state distillation carried out entirely on logical qubits. The study, “Experimental Demonstration of Logical Magic State Distillation,” is now available as Accelerated Article Preview on the Nature website. Using QuEra’s Gemini neutral-atom quantum computer, the team transformed five imperfect quantum states into one high-quality state, a crucial step toward building powerful, error-free quantum computers.
[Link] The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) held its second Quantum Technologies Showcase on the Hill. Twenty-six QED-C member companies demonstrated quantum technology, providing a rare opportunity for members of Congress, congressional staff, other government officials, the media, and the public to interact with quantum tech in person and to learn about its potential applications.
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