08/10/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Iowa, QTS, Tract, Gigawatt-Scale data centers, AI, Nuclear, Edge Compute, and more
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
Important news first - Iowa developments:
[Link] QTS launches $10 billion data center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The campus will support the construction of 7 buildings located on 612 acres within the Big Cedar Industrial Center, bringing 2,000 construction and permanent jobs. Thank you QTS!!
[Link] This is kind of a repeat, or update on a story I wrote about months ago, but…. the Business Record reports that Colorado data center developer Tract Capital has acquired over 500 acres in Altoona south of Northeast 70th Avenue and about one-half mile west of Northeast 46th Street, Polk County real estate records show. Mid American Energy has to get to work fast here - the big Meta campus is just around the corner, and Edged Energy is building down the road.
[Link] Tract is planning a 400-acre campus in the Mooresville Technology Park outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. The campus could see construction work on the first data centers start in 2028, with initial power delivery set for 2029. The company says more than $30 billion could be invested in the site over the next 20 years. NBC reports that the Mooresville Park land includes parcels from the late racing star Dale Earnhardt’s estate - making for a family dispute on whether or not to rezone his onetime sanctuary as industrial land.
[Link] Fermi America has partnered with Hyundai Engineering & Construction to develop the nuclear component of an 11GW HyperGrid AI campus in Amarillo, Texas, aiming to deliver clean power for next-generation AI infrastructure. The project, integrating nuclear, natural gas, solar, and battery storage, is set to begin construction in 2026 with the first reactor operational by 2032.
These energy stories, predictions, and capacity projections are just getting nuts:
[Link] As AI capex leads US economy, global data center capex projected to grow at 21 percent CAGR to $1.2 trillion by 2029. 50 GW of new capacity expected in five years, Dell’Oro says.
[Link] Brookfield: Next decade will see 75GW of AI data centers built, total AI infrastructure spend to pass $7 trillion
[Link] Energy Vault Holdings announced it has entered into an exclusivity agreement for a $300 million preferred equity investment to fund the launch of Asset Vault, a fully consolidated subsidiary of Energy Vault dedicated to develop, build, own and operate energy storage assets, stand-alone or paired with generation facilities, in the most attractive energy markets globally. The investment will support Energy Vault’s IPP strategy to build, own and operate energy storage assets, accelerating the deployment of 1.5 GW in attractive priority markets.
[Link] Helion Energy has started construction on a site in Malaga, Washington for a planned nuclear fusion power plant that will supply power to Microsoft data centers by 2028.
[Link] The Denver International Airport has set an initiative to meet future clean energy demands for over 20 million passengers by 2045. As such, they are doing a feasibility study that will assess the viability of small modular reactors, costing up to $1.25 million.
[Link] Quantica Infrastructure has launched Big Sky Digital Infrastructure, a 5,000-acre campus in Montana to provide powered land, renewable energy, and high-speed fiber connectivity for AI, hyperscale, and data center operations, with construction starting in 2026.
[Link] Data Center Richness Podcast: Can You Run AI Servers Without a Data Center?
[Link] China's Galaxy Data Center to invest $2 billion in data centers in Thailand. The investment will be used to establish a computing cluster in Rayong, a city situated on the Gulf of Thailand's east coast.
On the Edge:
[Link] BrainChip announced the launch of the BrainChip Developer Akida Cloud, a new cloud-based access point to multiple generations and configurations of the company’s Akida neuromorphic technology. The initial Developer Cloud release will feature the latest version of Akida’s 2nd generation technology, Akida 2.
[Link] NVIDIA's collaboration with OpenAI extends to the edge, enabling developers to run the new gpt-oss models locally on NVIDIA GeForce RTX AI PCs with at least 16 GB of VRAM. This is made possible through integrations with popular open-source frameworks like Hugging Face Transformers, Ollama, and vLLM, as well as NVIDIA's own TensorRT-LLM.
[Link] The Blaize AI Platform is a new edge-native solution for multi-modal intelligence. It is designed to handle complex workloads efficiently and is being deployed in Asia for public safety, defense, and infrastructure projects.
[Link] Renesas announced the launch of its new 64-bit RZ/G3E microprocessor (MPU), a general-purpose device optimized for high-performance Human Machine Interface (HMI) applications. Combining a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 running at up to 1.8GHz with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), the RZ/G3E brings high-performance edge computing with AI inference for faster, more efficient local processing.
[Link] You had me at HPC, AI, NCSA, and National Geospatial-Intelligence. 🤤 The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign were awarded a $25.8 million contract from the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for high-performance computing in support of NGA strategic partnerships, advancement of artificial intelligence, and machine learning and logistics for data production on a global scale.
[Link] Vertiv announced Vertiv OneCore, a scalable prefabricated solution that integrates Vertiv’s proven power, thermal, and IT infrastructure technologies into a single, factory-assembled system. Designed to accelerate high-density data center deployments, Vertiv OneCore simplifies project execution by reducing on-site complexity and compressing timelines.
[Link] York Space Systems successfully launches BARD mission, demonstrating next-generation communications capabilities for NASA. The mission will flight-demonstrate the Polylingual Experimental Terminal (PExT), an advanced communications payload designed to enable real-time interoperability between government and commercial satellite relay networks.
[Link] DARPA’s Quantum-Augmented Network (QuANET) program has demonstrated the first functioning quantum-augmented network, integrating quantum links into classical communications infrastructure. A hackathon showed successful uninterrupted message transmission across the network, including squeezed-light encoding that improved from five minutes to 0.7 milliseconds, achieving a 6.8 Mbps bit rate.
[Link] TechCrunch: Tesla is breaking up the team behind its Dojo supercomputer, ending the automaker’s play at developing in-house chips for driverless technology, according to Bloomberg. Dojo’s lead, Peter Bannon, is leaving the company, and the remaining team members will be reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla. The disbanding of Tesla’s Dojo efforts follows the departure of around 20 workers, who left the automaker to start their own AI company called DensityAI.
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