Daily Briefing
Sunday, March 15, 2026
88 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— Apto, a PIMCO-owned developer, has announced plans to build a 195,000 sqm campus in Fuenlabrada, Madrid, with total capacity projected to reach up to 240MW across five buildings, with up to €2 billion to be invested in redeveloping a former bottling plant site.
— A data center with a maximum capacity of 40MW is planned for an industrial park near Butzbach, Germany, approximately 35km north of Frankfurt, with the first phase requiring up to 10MW and built on a land parcel approximately 30,000 sqm in size; energy company RheinEnergie is among the partners involved.
— US real estate firm Comstock has launched a Data Center Platform and entered into two development arrangements: one in Oklahoma in partnership with Canadian energy firm Jericho Energy Ventures, utilizing approximately 18,000 acres of Jericho's land and energy assets, and one in the Mid-Atlantic region; Comstock made a $1.5 million initial investment in Jericho for a seven percent share.
— A data center project in Arcene, Bergamo, Italy — a 181,000 sqm 'Innovation Hub' developed by the Vitali Group — remains stalled after construction was expected to begin in 2024, with the local mayor expressing frustration and the developer's management under investigation following claims of fraudulent bankruptcy.
Power & Grid News
— LS Power is proposing a 205-acre data center campus in Hanover County, Virginia, featuring a behind-the-meter connection to a nearby natural gas plant, with plans including a GE Vernova LM6000 gas turbine and on-site solar; LS Power previously filed plans with FERC to sell around 300MW of power from two gas-fired units at its 1.19GW Doswell natural gas plant.
— Atlas Energy is buying $840 million in power assets from Caterpillar as the company seeks to build out private grid infrastructure to meet surging electrical demand from data centers and manufacturers.
— Investor-owned utilities (IOUs) are working to interconnect 39 GW of data center and manufacturing load, with Duke Energy, Northern Indiana Public Service, and Xcel Energy among the utilities with major data center projects in their queues, according to EEI.
— The DOE has offered $1.9 billion for transmission reconductoring and advanced grid technology under a funding opportunity that renames the Biden-era Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program as SPARK.
Planning & Permits
— In Q2 2025, $98 billion of data center investment was blocked or delayed — more than all previous quarters since 2023 combined — and 25 projects were canceled due to local opposition, quadrupling from the prior year, according to Paces.
— The UK government has proposed giving AI data centres priority access to the electricity grid under new plans to address rising energy demands.
— Apto's 240MW Madrid campus in Fuenlabrada already has building permits in place, with construction set to begin soon and site enabling works — including an on-site 40MW substation — already completed.
Hyperscaler Activity
— Meta is considering laying off more than 20 percent of its staff — out of 79,000 employees as of December 31 — as it plans to spend $600 billion on data centers by 2028, with gigawatt-scale construction projects underway and a $27 billion joint venture with Blue Owl Capital to fund its 2GW Hyperion data center.
— Meta has paused work on the Strait of Hormuz section of its 45,000km 2Africa subsea cable due to the war in the Middle East, with cable installer ASN's Ile De Batz ship stranded at a port in Dammam, Saudi Arabia; the delay follows a separate Red Sea delay caused by Houthi attacks announced four months prior.
— AWS has partnered with Cerebras Systems to deploy an AI inference solution combining AWS Trainium-powered servers with Cerebras' wafer-scale CS-3 systems and Elastic Fabric Adapter networking on Amazon Bedrock; AWS also plans to offer open-source LLMs and Amazon Nova models using Cerebras hardware later in 2026.
Investment & M&A
— Hyperscale Power, a US solid-state transformer developer, has raised €5 million ($5.7 million) in a seed round led by venture capital firms World Fund and Vsquared, with the money to be used to build its first prototype miniaturized solid-state transformer.
— Mexican telco América Móvil's Colombian subsidiary Comcel (operating as Claro) has filed a request with the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce to integrate assets of Azteca Comunicaciones Colombia and Total Play Comunicaciones Colombia from Grupo Salinas, including a fiber optic network spanning approximately 20,000 km and a second network spanning approximately 12,000 km.
— Eutelsat has completed its €5 billion equity and debt refinancing strategy, closing €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) in senior notes, following a prior €1.5 billion two-part equity raise completed in late 2025.
— Alphabet has sold a majority stake in GFiber to private equity, with GFiber set to merge with Astound Broadband; the combined footprint will reach approximately 7.1 million US locations, according to New Street Research.
Policy & Incentives
— PJM wholesale power costs jumped 54 percent in one year, with the grid operator's last two base capacity auctions showing a growing shortfall compared to its reserve margin targets.
— The Italian government has granted data centers 'strategic intervention' status, intended to accelerate permits and justify special land use exceptions, though the stalled Innovation Hub project in Arcene illustrates that this designation has not yet unlocked progress on all projects.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Nvidia is hiring for a Language Processing Unit team following its $20 billion deal to license Groq's technology, with job listings referencing "purpose-built hardware for large language models and generative AI workloads" and one role focused on developing silicon photonics and co-packaged optics platforms for the LPU.
— AMC Robotics has selected Hive Digital Technologies' GPU-based AI compute infrastructure for development, testing, and deployment of its AI-powered robotics platform.
— NTT has landed 115 MW in data center deals as part of a $10 billion AI infrastructure push.
Cooling & Sustainability
— Colocation vacancy rates have fallen to 2.3 percent from 9.8 percent in 2020, the facility construction pipeline has seen a 10x volume increase from 2020 to 2025 with 73 percent pre-leased, and the market cap has grown 161 percent from 2019 to 2025, according to recent industry reports cited by Tower Tech president Mathu Solo.
— A study by the Energy Research Institute of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore found that widespread use of solid-state transformers could reduce losses in the electricity grid by up to 25 percent.
Connectivity & Networking
— Cisco is rolling out a new multi-rail optical system that supports up to 128 fiber pairs per rack and reduces data center power consumption, targeting AI data center deployments.
— GE Vernova and Hitachi have entered into a memorandum of understanding to explore deployment of their water-cooled BWRX-300 small modular reactor (SMR) in Southeast Asia.
— Orange Spain and the Madrid City Council completed Spain's first real-world trial of 5G Standalone network prioritization for emergency services, using network slicing to separate critical traffic flows during a major public event, as part of the EU-funded Emer5gencias project.
Colocation & Leasing
— Meta reportedly signed a $10 billion+ cloud deal with Google, a $14.2 billion CoreWeave deal, a $3 billion Nebius contract, and is in talks with Oracle for a $20 billion contract, alongside its own gigawatt data center construction projects.