10/20/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: OpenCompute Summit, Aligned acquired for $40B, Meta and Blue Owl Capital, InferenceMAX
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] On October 20, 2025, the Linn County (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Planning & Zoning Commission will hold a meeting to discuss data centers and their potential land use impacts. The discussion, following a presentation by Planning & Development Director Charlie Nichols, aims to prepare the commission for reviewing a forthcoming data center ordinance. Google is looking to build its second data center campus near Palo, just NW of Cedar Rapids.
I drove by Google and QTS data center builds in Cedar Rapids last week. Wow. They are MASSIVE. More on this in the future…
[Link] Aligned Data Centers, with its portfolio of 50 facilities across nine U.S. states and four Latin American countries, is being acquired for $40 billion by a consortium including BlackRock’s GIP, Nvidia, Microsoft, and UAE’s MGX, a move expected to accelerate its expansion in the AI infrastructure space.
[Link] What you need to know about the $40B Aligned Data Centers deal
The Open Compute Global Summit (OCP) was held last week.The theme: Leading the future of AI. The Open Compute Project Foundation announced a new “Open Data Center for AI” Strategic Initiative to develop standardized specifications for data center infrastructure addressing power, cooling, and mechanical challenges needed to deploy high-density AI clusters, supported by an open letter initiated by Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
[Link] The Double-Wide AI Racks Have Arrived. Meta is spearheading a shift to “double-wide” racks under the new Open Rack Wide spec to pack more AI compute and networking hardware into single enclosures, as showcased at the Open Compute Project Global Summit.
[Link] AMD showcased its “Helios” rack-scale design, an open-based AI reference platform aligned with the new Open Rack Wide (ORW) standard contributed to OCP by Meta
[Link] Arm contributed the vendor-neutral Foundation Chiplet System Architecture (FCSA) to OCP, promoting interoperable chiplet designs for AI infrastructure. The Arm Total Design ecosystem, which has tripled in size since 2023, added 10 new partners to advance chiplet innovation
[Link] NVIDIA has announced more than a dozen partners as it looks to prepare the data center industry for 800-volt DC power architectures and rack densities of 1MW.
[Link] Renessas announced that it is supporting efficient power conversion and distribution for the 800 Volt Direct Current power architecture announced by NVIDIA, helping fuel the next wave of smarter, faster AI infrastructure.
[Link] Arm and Meta have formed a multi-year partnership to optimize AI performance across Meta’s platforms, from mobile devices to data centers. Meta will deploy Arm’s Neoverse processors in its data centers for better power efficiency, while both companies are optimizing key AI software like PyTorch for Arm architecture.
[Link] Meta and Blue Owl Capital have finalized a nearly $30 billion financing package for Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana, where Meta will retain only 20% ownership while using a special purpose vehicle structure that keeps the debt off its balance sheet.
[Link] I’m going to bookmark this for later….. To fully comprehend and appreciate how interesting it sounds. It is from semianalysis - so it must be pretty cool. InferenceMAX is an open-source benchmarking platform that runs nightly performance tests on hundreds of GPUs, continuously tracking the latest inference software improvements across AMD and Nvidia hardware for popular LLMs like LLaMA and DeepSeek to provide real-time, transparent comparisons of throughput, latency, cost per token, and performance per watt.
[Link] Vantage Data Centers, announced the expansion of its Italian footprint to include a second campus in Milan. With an investment of more than €350 million (approximately $407 million USD), the MXP2 campus is designed to support the growing demand for high-performance, scalable digital infrastructure in the country.
[Link] Oklo and newcleo, a European developer of advanced nuclear reactors, announced a joint agreement to develop advanced fuel fabrication and manufacturing infrastructure in the United States. Subject to customary approvals, newcleo plans to invest up to $2 billion via a newcleo-affiliated investment vehicle.
[Link] If there is one company that is looking really good with all of this data center build-out mania, it is TSMC. As the largest semiconductor foundry - the company announced 3rd Quarter Earnings of US$33.1B as advanced technologies reached 74% of Sales. Gross margin for the quarter was 59.5%, operating margin was 50.6%, and net profit margin was 45.7%.
Follow me on X for more links and news.
Coinbase is the easiest (and best) place to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Use my referral link to sign up.