09/29/2024 What I Read Last Week
DigitalInfrastructure news: Iowa, Nuclear, Microsoft, Hydrogen, Blackstone
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] An unnamed company is seeking financial incentives from the city of Cedar Rapids to build a massive $750 million data center campus near Google's planned $576 million data center in southwest Cedar Rapids. Cedar Rapids City Council members unanimously approved a term sheet with tentative deal points for a development agreement with SNA LLC to construct two or more data center buildings on approximately 560 acres along 76th Avenue SW that would create at least 30 new high-paying jobs. I’ve heard rumors from QTS to Meta, and even __❗__ (well… speculation abounds…)
[Link] Just down the road from Cedar Rapids is the NextEra Duane Arnold Energy Center, in Palo, Iowa. It was shut down four years ago after it was deemed not economically viable anymore. With all of this data center activity in Cedar Rapids, it is reported that NextEra is weighing whether to bring the facility back online.
[Link] Constellation announced the signing of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft that will pave the way for the launch of the Crane Clean Energy Center (CCEC) and restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, which had shut down 5 years ago. Before being shut down the plant had a generating capacity of 837 megawatts. Data Center Frontier has a very nice analysis of this story, the push for clean energy by hyperscalers, and the challenges of restarting nuclear plants.
[Link] Microsoft has announced an investment of 14.7bn reais ($2.7bn) to bolster Brazil's cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure over the next three years. The funding will see Microsoft expand its cloud and AI infrastructure across several data center campuses in the state of São Paulo.
[Link] Startup ECL says it will build a 1GW 🇭hydrogen-powered AI data center in Texas with Lambda . The TerraSite-TX1 will initially have a capacity of 50MW, at a cost of around $450 million. AI cloud provider Lambda (AGI is here! (A) lot of (G)PUs (I)nterconnected) will be the first customer, but is not taking the whole 50MW. ECL launched its first production data center last spring, using hydrogen as its primary power source.
[Link] Blackstone has confirmed a 10 billion pound ($13.3 billion) investment for an artificial intelligence data center in northeast England. Construction of the AI data center next year will create 4,000 jobs, including 1,200 roles dedicated to the construction of the site.
[Link] Google will spend $3.3 billion to build two new data centers in South Carolina and expand an existing cloud campus.
[Link] Quantum Computing company IonQ announced that it has signed a $54.5 million contract with the United States Air Force Research Lab (AFRL).
[Link] Crusoe Energy Systems announced that it has collaborated with VAST Data to offer Crusoe Cloud customers Shared Disks, a new high performance storage product for AI. This collaboration between Crusoe and VAST will deliver a petabyte-scale file system capable of reads up to 200 MBps per TiB per node with hundreds of GPps in aggregate read and write bandwidth per cluster. This summer VAST announced that its Data Platform had been certified as a high-performance storage solution for NVIDIA Partner Network cloud partners.
[Link] Asia data center provider Princeton Digital Group unveiled its major growth plan for India by expanding capacity to a total of 230 MW in the country, driving an investment program of ~USD 1 billion in India. This is part of PDG’s new USD 5 billion investment program for AI-ready data centers in Asia.
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