08/17/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: DOE pushes SMRs, this week in grid capacity, Google takes a stake in TeraWulf, Sodium-Ion batteries
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
DOE selects companies to develop Small Modular Reactors
Equinix collaborates with energy providers worldwide for sustainable solutions
This week in the Grid Capacity, Capriciousness, Crisis
The Switch EVO AI Factories
Google takes an 8% stake in bitcoin miner and AI-computing company TeraWulf
The Department of Energy's Grid Storage Launchpad marked its first year of operation
I went down the rabbit hole on sodium-ion batteries
[Link] The DOE selected 10 companies to develop advanced reactors, including Small Modular Reactors: Aalo Atomics, Antares Nuclear Inc., Atomic Alchemy Inc., Deep Fission Inc., Last Energy Inc., Oklo Inc., Natura Resources LLC, Radiant Industries Inc., Terrestrial Energy Inc., and Valar Atomics Inc. Meanwhile X-Energy announced an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense Defense Innovation Unit (“DIU”) and the U.S. Department of the Air Force to advance the development of its commercial microreactor in alignment with President Trump’s executive order to deploy advanced nuclear technologies at DOD installations to support U.S. national security.
[Link] Rolls-Royce SMR has been selected as the preferred bidder to develop the UK’s first small modular reactors in partnership with Great British Energy – Nuclear, aiming to create up to 3,000 jobs and power around 3 million homes with clean energy by the mid-2030s.
[Link] Equinix announced it is collaborating with alternative energy providers (Oklo, Radiant, ULC-Energy with Rolls-Royce SMR, Stellaria, Bloom Energy) to develop sustainable electricity solutions for its global data centers, responding to surging power demands driven by artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company is pursuing a diversified energy strategy that includes traditional utility partnerships, on-site power generation technologies like fuel cells, and investments in next-generation nuclear energy to mitigate potential power constraints.
This week in the Grid Capacity, Capriciousness, Crisis
[Link] A new report released from EPRI and Epoch AI forecasts that training a leading model could require more than 4 gigawatts (GW) of power by 2030—enough to power millions of U.S. homes.
[Link] Fortune: More outages, aging infrastructure, and bicoastal dysfunction: BofA warns America’s grid is 30%-46% ‘beyond its useful life’. “Gigawatt-scale growth” will necessitate increased investment not just in new capacity, but in modernizing transmission and distribution channels. Until then, expect more outages—and a widening gap between where power is produced and where it’s needed most.
[Link] Fortune: AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over.
[Link] In a letter addressed to PJM stakeholders sent August 8, the Chair of PJM’s Board of Managers, David E. Mills, said recent increases in large load additions, mainly from data centers, “present both opportunities and challenges for the regional grid.” Mills notes that PJM’s location, size, market opportunities, and system reliability make it an attractive area for such customers to set up shop. PJM’s most recent long-term load forecast anticipates a peak load growth of 32 gigawatts from 2024 to 2030; approximately 30 GW from data centers.
[Link] CoreWeave Pioneers AI Innovation with Industry-First NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 Deployment in Switch’s AI Factory. CoreWeave announced that they were the first AI cloud provider to bring up the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 platform, in collaboration with Dell Technologies, at Switch. We are proud to be the AI Factory solution to host this “industry first” deployment, which marks a significant leap forward in high-performance AI computing and AI capabilities, now running in Rob Roy’s EVO AI Factories. Most of this story is about CoreWeave and NVIDIA, but I am most impressed with the EVO AI Factories. My favorite data center tour still stands today, some 10+ years later: Switch data center in Vegas.
[Link] Alphabet has taken an 8% stake in bitcoin miner and AI-computing company TeraWulf. TeraWulf recently signed two 10-year leases with AI cloud platform Fluidstack to provide data-center services amounting to 200 megawatts of critical IT load.
[Link] Google is investing $9 billion to expand its AI and cloud infrastructure in Oklahoma, including a new data center campus in Stillwater and upgrades to its existing Pryor facility. The move is driven by the state's affordable and reliable power grid, lower construction costs, and incentives, making Oklahoma an attractive hub for data center growth.
[Link] Aramco has signed an $11 billion lease and leaseback deal involving its Jafurah gas processing facilities with a consortium of international investors, led by funds managed by Global Infrastructure Partners, a part of BlackRock. Jafurah is the largest non-associated gas development in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, estimated to contain 229 trillion standard cubic feet of raw gas and 75 billion Stock Tank Barrels of condensate.
[Link] Avaio Digital, a data center firm, has announced its first Spanish data center, the Algete Data Hub, in Algete, Community of Madrid, with a €650 million ($759m) investment. The project, named Avaio Digital Scorpio, has secured 56.3MW of power from Iberdrola, with an initial 8MW interconnection agreement, and operations are set to begin in 2028.
[Link] The Department of Energy's Grid Storage Launchpad marked its first year of operation, transforming from an empty 93,000-square-foot facility to a bustling research center developing affordable energy storage solutions for America's electrical grid. The facility features cutting-edge laboratories, including AI-powered robotics systems that can perform hundreds of battery experiments per day and scanning electron microscopes that examine battery materials at the atomic level.
[Link] Peak Energy announced the launch and shipment of its sodium-ion battery energy storage system (ESS) that delivers a patent-pending passive cooling design to dramatically reduce lifetime energy costs. Cost-competitive with state-of-the-industry products while offering dramatically lower operating and maintenance costs, Peak Energy's product is the first ever fully passive megawatt-hour scale battery storage system, the largest sodium-ion phosphate pyrophosphate (NFPP) battery system in the world, and the first grid-scale sodium-ion storage solution ever deployed to the U.S. electric grid.
[Video Link] Undecided with Matt Ferrell: How CATL Made Batteries 90% Cheaper (And What Happens Next). 🧂
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