Daily Briefing
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
148 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— Nscale has signed an agreement to acquire American Intelligence Power Corporation, including its up to 8GW Monarch Compute Campus spanning 2,250 acres in Mason County, West Virginia, with the first phase of 2GW expected online by 2028 and the full 8GW targeted for 2031.
— Microsoft is planning two data center projects in Medina, Texas — Microsoft SAT93 and Microsoft SAT94 — each representing a $26 million investment and spanning 245,000 sq ft, with construction set to begin in March and April 2027 respectively.
— Applied Digital has effectively withdrawn its plans for a 430MW data center near Toronto, South Dakota, composed of two 907,000 sq ft buildings, citing the absence of sales tax exemptions that neighboring North Dakota offers.
— The city of Norwalk, Iowa, has approved a development agreement with Tract for a 282-acre site west of Highway 28, with the city anticipating total investment of around $12 billion and no tax incentives requested.
Power & Grid News
— The EIA has projected that data center demand could drive a 79% ERCOT price hike in 2027, with data centers potentially driving 2025–2027 annual load growth 15% higher in Texas in a high-demand scenario.
— PPL Electric has reached a $275 million rate case settlement that includes a data center tariff, under which data centers and other large loads would need to sign agreements of not less than a specified term.
— Caterpillar has previously agreed to provide G3500 series natural gas generator sets to cover the first 2GW of the Monarch Compute Campus, with deployment planned by the first half of 2028.
— Nvidia's Vera Rubin DSX reference design includes a DSX Flex software component that connects AI factories to power-grid services, enabling them to dynamically adjust power use and orchestrate demand with hybrid onsite generation.
Planning & Permits
— The Norwalk, Iowa city council voted on March 5 to approve a development agreement with Tract for a 282-acre plot, though officials stated any future data center project would require a separate approval process including new city-level reviews, state and federal regulatory requirements, and public meetings.
— Microsoft previously filed for two projects under the names SAT93 and SAT94 at the same Medina, Texas address in February 2025 with a suggested investment of $350 million each, but the latest TDLR filings show revised investments of $26 million each with construction pushed to 2027.
— Applied Digital cited South Dakota's lack of sales tax exemptions on computer equipment, cooling equipment, and batteries — and the state legislature's rejection of a bill to create such exemptions — as reasons its Toronto, South Dakota project is unlikely to go forward.
Hyperscaler Activity
— Microsoft has signed a letter of intent with Nscale to lease 1.35GW of AI compute capacity at the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, to be based on Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs.
— AWS plans to deploy more than one million Nvidia GPUs, including Blackwell and Rubin architectures, within the next 12 months, and has also committed to continued investment in its in-house Trainium AI accelerator.
— Nebius Group has secured a $27 billion long-term AI infrastructure supply agreement with Meta, under which Nebius will provide $12 billion of dedicated AI compute capacity across multiple data center locations.
— Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated at GTC 2026 that the company currently sees at least $1 trillion in demand for Blackwell and Rubin products and related networking through 2027, up from $500 billion a year prior, with 60% of business coming from the top five hyperscalers.
Investment & M&A
— Nscale has signed an agreement to acquire American Intelligence Power Corporation, a joint venture between Fidelis New Energy and 8090 Industries that was founded at the start of 2026.
— Frore Systems has raised $143 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its total valuation to $1.64 billion, to develop chip cooling technology for the data center market.
— Surf AI launched with a $57 million funding round to develop an agentic security operations platform for enterprise security teams.
— Dell cut 10% of its workforce in FY26, accounting for nearly 11,000 jobs.
Policy & Incentives
— Applied Digital noted that North Dakota offers sales tax exemptions on computer equipment, cooling equipment, and batteries, whereas South Dakota does not, and that attempts to pass a bill creating such exemptions were rejected by the South Dakota state legislature.
— The UK government is spending £45 million on a new AI-driven supercomputer called 'Sunrise,' designed to model nuclear fusion physics, with the system expected to come online this summer at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham campus.
— The BBC reported that the number of UK data centers is expected to rise by nearly 20%, from around 475 to almost 575, with most new facilities due to be built within the next five years, raising sustainability concerns.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Nvidia launched the Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design at GTC 2026, developed in partnership with Cadence, Dassault Systèmes, Eaton, Jacobs, Nscale, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Switch, Trane Technologies, Vertiv, and others, alongside the generally available Nvidia Omniverse DSX Blueprint digital twin.
— Nvidia's Vera CPU has entered full production and is expected to be available in the second half of 2026, featuring 88 custom Nvidia-designed Olympus cores in a liquid-cooled rack housing 256 Vera CPUs.
— Nvidia announced the Groq 3 LPU, available in liquid-cooled LPX racks featuring 256 LPUs with 128GB of on-chip SRAM and 640 TBps of scale-up bandwidth, targeted at low-latency AI inference workloads and available in the second half of this year.
— Micron has begun volume production of HBM4 36GB 12H for the Nvidia Vera Rubin CPU-GPU, claiming greater than 2.8 TBps bandwidth, 20% better power efficiency, and 11 Gbps pin speeds.
Cooling & Sustainability
— Schneider Electric stated that cooling accounts for roughly 40% of a data center facility's electricity consumption and is the third largest capital expense after IT hardware and electrical systems, with today's advanced AI factory data centers using a mix of liquid and air cooling typically split 80/20.
— Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack is 100% liquid-cooled and features cable-free modular tray designs, which Nvidia claims will reduce installation times.
— Switch has integrated the Nvidia Omniverse DSX Blueprint into its EVO AI Factory architecture, which the company claims can support up to 2MW per rack, using Nvidia Omniverse libraries and OpenUSD for digital twins.
— Chip cooling startup Frore Systems raised $143 million at a $1.64 billion valuation in a Series D round to scale its AI chip cooling solutions for the data center market.
Connectivity & Networking
— Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI have joined the OCI-MSA consortium to standardize optical interconnects for AI clusters, targeting speeds of up to 800 Gbps per fiber and a roadmap toward 3.2 Tbps and beyond.
— Nokia unveiled a new range of optical networking products ahead of the Optical Fiber Conference in Los Angeles, including a 1.6T-capable coherent pluggable, a 2.4T-capable coherent pluggable, and a 3.2T-capable coherent lite solution.
— Cisco has rolled out a new multi-rail optical system that supports up to 128 fiber pairs per rack and is designed to reduce data center power consumption.
— TelCables Brasil has started operating three new Points of Presence in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to expand connectivity across Latin America.
Colocation & Leasing
— Microsoft has signed a letter of intent with Nscale to lease 1.35GW of AI compute capacity at the Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia, based on Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs.
— Roche has deployed more than 3,500 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments in the US and Europe, claiming this represents the greatest announced GPU footprint available to a pharmaceutical company.