Daily Briefing
Sunday, March 8, 2026
39 articles scanned · 8 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— Oracle and OpenAI have canceled plans to expand their flagship Abilene, Texas Stargate data center campus beyond its current 1.2GW capacity under development, citing financing challenges and OpenAI's changing demand forecasting.
— Bloom Energy's 2026 Power Report predicts that over 50% of new data center campuses will exceed 500MW by 2035, with nearly one-third expected to exceed 1GW.
— Texas is poised to capture nearly 30% of US data center market share by 2028, while Georgia's market share is expected to grow by 75%, according to Bloom Energy's 2026 Power Report.
Power & Grid News
— Bloom Energy's 2026 Power Report found that one-third of data centers are projected to be fully off-grid by 2030, as more operators invest in onsite power generation.
— Utility delivery timelines are approximately one and a half to two times longer than hyperscalers and colocation providers expect, with the expectation gap widening over the past six months, according to Bloom Energy's report.
— Power at the Abilene Stargate site will not be ready for a year, a factor cited in OpenAI's decision not to expand the campus, with OpenAI preferring to deploy Nvidia Vera Rubin chips at a new site instead.
Hyperscaler Activity
— Meta is reportedly in talks to lease untapped and unbuilt capacity at the Abilene, Texas Stargate site from developer Crusoe, after Nvidia put down a $150 million deposit on the future capacity and brokered the deal.
— OpenAI has tapped Oracle to deploy 4.5 gigawatts of compute capacity under a contract Oracle values at $300 billion over its lifetime, which reportedly remains on track despite the Abilene expansion cancellation.
— Oracle announced plans to raise an additional $50 billion in debt and equity to finance its data center ambitions.
Investment & M&A
— Nvidia put down a $150 million deposit on future capacity at the Abilene, Texas Stargate site before approaching Meta about leasing the space, according to Bloomberg.
— MariaDB has entered into an agreement to acquire in-memory computing specialist GridGain to meet the sub-millisecond data demands of agentic AI.
Policy & Incentives
— According to recent research cited in the article, 92% of European organisations say global instability has heightened their cloud sovereignty concerns, with geopolitical tensions and laws such as the US CLOUD Act driving the shift.
— California, Oregon, Iowa, and Nebraska's respective relative data center market shares are each expected to drop by more than 50%, according to Bloom Energy's 2026 Power Report.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Enterprises are now writing $100 million checks for AI infrastructure, according to VAST Data VP John Mao, who described AI as a 'big-dollars game.'
— A multi-day outage at the Abilene Stargate site caused by winter weather impacting liquid cooling equipment reportedly damaged relations between OpenAI and site developer Crusoe.
— Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated during the company's most recent earnings call that 'inference tokens per watt translates directly to the revenues of the CSPs.'
Cooling & Sustainability
— A multi-day outage at the Abilene Stargate campus was caused by winter weather impacting liquid cooling equipment, highlighting operational risks for large-scale AI data center deployments.
Connectivity & Networking
— HPE announced new PTX12000 modular routers supporting dense 800G connectivity with the ability to scale to 1.6 terabits per second, and a new line of PTX10002 fixed-form routers, at MWC26 in Barcelona.
— Ciena reported a $7 billion order backlog in Q1 2026, with CFO Marc Graff stating the company expects demand to 'continue to outstrip supply' for the foreseeable future due to persistent supply chain constraints.
— Transcelestial debuted its Centauri+ terminal, bringing post-quantum cryptography to its fleet of laser terminals supporting 40 Gbps optical wireless links.