09/14/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Tract lands in Iowa, Hyperscale Surge, OpenAI builds its own data centers, quantum computing
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
This week! 2025 Quantum World Congress, September 16-18 in Tysons, Virginia
[Link] Tract has acquired a 453-acre, fully entitled site in Altoona, Iowa, marking the company's entry into the Des Moines data center market. The development is planned as a technology park with over 1GW of capacity, positioning Tract in what the company describes as one of the country's most reliable data center markets. I’ve written about this development for a while now, and I plan to visit the site, observe the construction, and report back here. I’m also going to analyze the mix of energy sources, renewables, and grid capacity, as adding 1GW on top of the nearby Meta campus and the ‘coming soon’ Edged Energy site nearby could make things interesting.
Hyperscale Surge: Major Data Center Developments, energy concerns, and friendly neighbors
[Link] Land and Expand. A nice Data Center Frontier article on major projects by CleanArc in Virginia, Google in Arkansas, ODATA in Latin America, Fermi America in Texas, and Duke Energy's preparations in Florida, alongside emerging data center hubs in College Station, Texas, and Hermiston, Oregon.
[Link] AP News: US electric grids under pressure from energy-hungry data centers are changing strategy. With the explosive growth of Big Tech’s data centers threatening to overload U.S. electricity grids, policymakers are taking a hard look at a tough-love solution: bumping the energy-hungry data centers off grids during power emergencies.
[Link] How much energy will be needed to power AI? A recent video from the International Energy Agency.
[Link] Business Insider video: Data Centers 101 for the general public + what it is like to live next to the hyperscalers today + environmental concerns. Investigative, deep dive into the industry.
[Link] I am going to write a dedicated post on this in the future - but I find the Karashev Scale very interesting. The Kardashev Scale is a method to classify civilizations based on their energy consumption and technological advancement.
OpenAI
[Link] OpenAI Will Begin Building Its Own Data Centers. From the Yotta 2025 event last week in Las Vegas - Rich Miller reports on a panel discussion with Chris Malone, Head of Data Centers for OpenAI. OpenAI plans to build its own data centers and explore innovative rack designs to meet the growing demand for AI computing capacity, while continuing partnerships with cloud providers like Oracle, Microsoft, and Google.
[Link] It seems like it contains ‘some’ borrowed content that I have seen before - but this Unthinkable Build YouTube channel explores OpenAI’s $500 Billion AI Megaproject (Stargate).
[Link] OpenAI is considering developing a data center in South Korea. Speaking at a press conference in Seoul, OpenAI's chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, said the company was open to partnerships regarding data center construction.
‼️ [Link] The CEOs of OpenAI and Nvidia plan to pledge support for billions of dollars in UK data center investments when they head to the country this week at the same time as President Trump, Bloomberg News reported.
[Link] Vantage announced a $1.6 billion investment to scale its Asia-Pacific platform, and revealed its plans to expand to the Johor, Malaysia, market with the acquisition of Yondr Group’s 300MW+ hyperscale data center campus located in Sedenak Tech Park.
[Link] Microsoft to use Nebius GPU data centers, in a deal worth $17.4 billion over five years. Nebius will initially provide Microsoft access to dedicated GPU infrastructure capacity at its new data center in Vineland, New Jersey, from later this year.
[Link] AVAIO Digital announced that site work is officially underway on its $6 billion Taurus Data Center Hub in Brandon, Mississippi. The Taurus 329-acre campus is scheduled to be ready for occupancy in the first half of 2027.
[Link] Denver-based data center developer Rowan Digital Infrastructure announced three major financing milestones totaling $1.2 billion to fuel its expansion of sustainable hyperscale data centers.
[Link] QuEra Computing has secured additional investment from NVentures, Nvidia's venture capital arm, expanding its $230 million series B funding round, first announced in February.
[Link] Alice & Bob and Hyperion Research released a joint report projecting that early fault-tolerant quantum computing (eFTQC) will accelerate critical high-performance computing (HPC) applications within the next five years. The study, “Seizing Quantum’s Edge: Why and How HPC Should Prepare for eFTQC,” provides guidance on how HPC professionals can engage today in the design and integration of useful hybrid workflows for near-term applications.
[Link] PsiQuantum announced it has raised $1 billion in funding for its Series E round to build the world’s first commercially useful, fault-tolerant quantum computers. This funding will equip the company to break ground on utility-scale quantum computing sites in Brisbane and Chicago, deploy large-scale prototype systems to validate systems architecture and integration, and further advance the performance of its quantum photonic chips and fault-tolerant architecture.
[Link] Madrid's research network REDIMadrid has partnered with Ciena to launch a quantum-secure data transport project using Ciena's 6500 photonic system. The technology enables quantum key distribution to work alongside standard DWDM traffic on existing fiber networks, marking an important step forward in quantum-secure communications.
[Link] Qunnect announced that Montana State University (MSU) has deployed Qunnect's Carina product suite to establish the first quantum entanglement network in the Midwest. This milestone brings entanglement distribution to campus-scale telecommunications fiber and further strengthens MSU's role as a leader in quantum innovation.
[Link] Rendezvous Robotics, a space infrastructure company pioneering modular, autonomous in-orbit assembly, announced the close of its Pre-Seed round and emergence from stealth. Its patented TESSERAE technology was invented at MIT by Dr. Ariel Ekblaw, incubated at the Aurelia Institute, and spun out as Rendezvous, co-founded by Ekblaw alongside Phil Frank and Joe Landon. The leadership team brings experience from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and Nokia — spanning aerospace, telecom, and advanced technology — to enable the first-of-its-kind development of large-scale infrastructure built in orbit. Rendezvous has secured $3M in pre-seed funding led by Aurelia Foundry and 8090 Industries to support team expansion and transition from demonstrations to large-scale platforms for national security, commerce, and exploration.
[Link] The Internet Exchange operator DE-CIX has partnered with Germany's DLR aerospace center to enhance satellite communication systems for low Earth orbit constellations. Through the European Space Agency's OFELIAS initiative, they're developing advanced networking protocols and optimization algorithms to improve laser-based data transmission between ground stations and satellites. The three-year project aims to address the inherent trade-off in optical communications: while laser links offer superior bandwidth and data speeds compared to traditional radio signals, they face greater vulnerability to weather-related disruptions, including clouds, atmospheric turbulence, fog, and precipitation
Substack post - part 2 coming soon. I ran out of time to even start on the energy stories for the week.
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