Daily Briefing
Monday, March 16, 2026
70 articles scanned · 8 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— Segro has signed a pre-lease agreement to develop a 50MW, 30,000 sqm (322,917 sq ft) three-story powered shell data center on the Slough Trading Estate for an existing customer.
— Segro has received planning committee approval for a 70MW utility power, 56MW IT capacity data center at Premier Park in Park Royal, West London, developed under a joint venture with Pure Data Centres Group and intended for an unnamed hyperscaler.
— WinDC will deploy 11MW of modular data centers built by Armada across renewable energy sites in New South Wales, other National Energy Market locations, and Western Australia, with initial sites including wind, solar, and battery locations.
Planning & Permits
— The City Council of Provo, Utah, unanimously voted to deny a rezoning application by developer B+F Timpanogos Tech that would have allowed construction of a 66,000 sq ft, two-story data center at 1507 S. 180 East, despite city staff recommending approval.
— The proposed Provo data center would have offered around 5MW of capacity with the potential to reach 30MW, with some $280 million potentially invested in the project.
— Segro's West London data center joint venture with Pure DC received planning committee approval; the facility is set to be leased to an unnamed hyperscaler.
Hyperscaler Activity
— Meta is considering laying off more than 20% of its staff as it plans to spend $600 billion on data centers by 2028, according to Reuters.
— Meta reportedly signed a $10 billion+ cloud deal with Google, a $14.2 billion CoreWeave deal, a $3 billion Nebius contract, and entered a $27 billion joint venture with Blue Owl Capital to fund its 2GW Hyperion data center.
— Bridge Data Centres, backed by Bain Capital, announced plans to invest S$3–5 billion in Singapore to advance AI-ready data center developments, supporting over 2GW of AI-ready capacity globally.
Investment & M&A
— Nebius Group has unveiled a long-term AI infrastructure supply agreement with Meta worth around $27 billion.
— Mark Zuckerberg spent approximately $14.8 billion on a 49% stake in data labeling firm Scale AI and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead a new superintelligence lab.
— GFiber and Astound Broadband are set to merge after Alphabet sells its majority stake in GFiber to private equity, with the combined footprint expected to reach approximately 7.1 million U.S. locations according to New Street Research.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— The UK government is investing £45 million in a 1.4MW AI supercomputer called Sunrise, funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which will be housed at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham campus and is expected to come online in June.
— Sunrise will deliver up to 6.76 exaFLOPS of AI-accelerated modeling performance and will incorporate AMD EPYC processors, AMD Instinct GPU accelerators, Dell PowerEdge infrastructure, and WEKA storage.
— AWS has partnered with Cerebras to use its chips and in-house processors to deliver what it describes as some of the fastest AI inference solutions available for generative AI applications and LLM workloads.
Cooling & Sustainability
— Bridge Data Centres announced plans to pioneer Singapore's first floating hydrogen power generation model for data centers, leveraging the nation's maritime transport, port infrastructure, and global energy supply chains.
— WinDC and Armada's partnership is focused on deploying containerized AI compute at renewable energy generation sites — including wind, solar, and battery locations — across Australia.
Connectivity & Networking
— Meta has paused work on the Strait of Hormuz section of its 45,000-kilometer 2Africa subsea cable after Alcatel Submarine Networks issued force majeure notices to customers following US-Israel strikes on Iran and retaliatory strikes across the region.
— ASN's Ile De Batz cable installation ship is stranded at a port in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, and the growing conflict in Iran has also impacted early work on Sea-Me-We 6.
— 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, according to SVP Bill Gartner.
Colocation & Leasing
— Colocation vacancy rates have fallen to 2.3%, down from 9.8% in 2020, with 73% of the construction pipeline pre-leased, according to recent industry reports cited in an industry commentary.
— Segro stated its data center strategy targets a 2.5GW+ opportunity in its powered land bank, citing the critical mass of data centers built at Slough over 20 years and the site's Simplified Planning Zone status.