10/26/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Google's verifiable quantum advantage, Armada/OpenAI, data centers in space, Applied Digital, Google Cloud
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] Google announced that its researchers have demonstrated the first-ever “verifiable quantum advantage” — showing a quantum computer successfully running a verifiable algorithm that surpasses even the fastest classical supercomputers by 13,000 times. Sundar Pichai said in a post that “Willow ran the algorithm - which we’ve named Quantum Echoes - 13,000x faster than the best classical algorithm on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. This new algorithm can explain interactions between atoms in a molecule using nuclear magnetic resonance, paving a path towards potential future uses in drug discovery and materials science.”
I can’t express exactly why - but I think this press release is extremely important, and hints at a next-generation architecture for the AI Factories and ?Inference factories? Armada and OpenAI to Advance Edge AI for Industry. Armada announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI. The collaboration will focus on delivering smaller, industry-specific AI models designed to address operational challenges across critical sectors, enabling scalable, real-world deployment of AI applications at the edge. As part of the agreement, Armada Galleons, ruggedized modular data centers, will serve as a key foundation for efficient inference compute, and Armada Edge Platform (AEP) will ensure seamless deployment of models in diverse and bandwidth-constrained environments.
This week in data centers in space! (I’m just going to keep saying that until it doesn’t sound cool)
[Link] Crusoe has partnered with Starcloud to become the first public cloud provider to operate in space, planning to deploy GPU capacity on a satellite launching in late 2026 with services available by early 2027. The collaboration aims to address AI’s growing energy demands by co-locating computing infrastructure with abundant solar power in orbit, eliminating terrestrial constraints like energy grids, cooling needs, and land use. Crusoe also announced the initial closing of its $1.375 billion series E round, bringing the company’s expected valuation to over $10 billion.
[Link] YouTube: First AI Datacenters In Space! (EXCLUSIVE Starcloud Tour). Touring Starcloud HQ in Redmond, WA with Founder and CEO Philip Johnston.
[Link] Starcloud, an NVIDIA Inception startup, is preparing to launch the first state-of-the-art data center-class GPU into space this November, deploying an NVIDIA H100 GPU aboard a 60-kilogram satellite that will offer 100 times more computing power than any previous space-based operation.
[Link] A thoughtful (and thorough) post from Andrew Côté on the bull and bear case for orbital data centers.
[Link] Energy Secretary Chris Wright has directed FERC to expedite the interconnection process for large loads like AI data centers that agree to be flexible and curtailable, proposing to standardize the interconnection process with new federal oversight despite FERC’s historically limited jurisdiction in this area.
[Link] QTS marks topping out of first three buildings at Cedar Rapids data center campus, signaling completion of each building’s structural framework. The project represents a planned $10 billion investment, which QTS describes as the largest economic development project in Cedar Rapids and Iowa history. I drove by the site recently, and it is impressive (and massive!).
[Link] Applied Digital has secured a 15-year, $5 billion lease agreement with a major U.S. hyperscaler to provide 200 megawatts of AI infrastructure capacity at its Polaris Forge 2 campus in North Dakota, with construction expected to begin coming online in 2026.
[Link] OpenAI plans to deploy another Stargate data center cluster, this time in Port Washington, Wisconsin, to be developed alongside Oracle and Vantage Data Centers, on a site from powered land provider Cloverleaf Infrastructure.
[Link] Aligned Data Centers and Calibrant Energy announced a groundbreaking 31 MW battery energy storage system at an Aligned facility in the Pacific Northwest that will enable the data center to access grid power and come online years ahead of schedule, bypassing traditional utility upgrade delays.
[Link] Anthropic revealed plans to dramatically expand its partnership with Google Cloud, deploying up to one million TPUs in a deal valued at tens of billions of dollars. The expansion is expected to bring over a gigawatt of computing capacity online in 2026.
[Link] Calix announced that its agentic broadband platform, built on Google Cloud’s AI and data infrastructure, will deliver breakthrough innovation for providers to lead in the AI era.
[Link] Nebius unveiled Nebius AI Cloud in its new AI data center in Israel, a state-of-the-art facility housing one of the country’s first publicly available deployments of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.
[Link] AWS response to the October 19 US-East-1 outage. It is always DNS.
[Link] Switch announced the closing of its fourth asset-backed securities (“ABS”) offering, raising nearly $659 million. This transaction marks Switch’s fourth ABS offering, bringing total ABS issuance to approximately $3.5 billion and making Switch the largest single issuer of data center ABS since 2024.
[Link] Cologix announced its acquisition of DataHiveOne, Calgary’s primary carrier hotel and Western Canada’s hub for global interconnection, as well as most of DataHive’s colocation and interconnection assets. The acquisition marks Cologix’s entry into the Calgary market, expanding its geographic diversity and continuity, and strengthening its position as a leading interconnection provider across Canada.
[Link] I hadn’t known a lot about Cerebras before…. but this video tour of their Oklahoma data center is pretty cool.
[Link] IonQ has set a new world record in quantum computing by achieving 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity—the first company to cross the “four-nines” benchmark—using its proprietary Electronic Qubit Control technology. This breakthrough dramatically improves error-corrected performance by up to 10 billion times compared to previous standards and positions IonQ to scale to millions of qubits by 2030.
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Great roundup! The Nebius announcement about deploying Blackwell GPUs in Israel is particularly noteworthy - it shows how the neocloud providers are moving quickly to offer cutting-edge hardware in strategic regions. The combination of sovereign AI concerns and the need for alternative infrastructure options outside the hyperscalers is creating real opportunites for specialized AI cloud providers. It's also interesting to see this alongside the space-based datacenter developments - we're witnessing a genuine diversification of compute infrastructure at multiple levels.