Daily Briefing
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
172 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— GMI Cloud has launched a $12 billion sovereign AI infrastructure initiative in Japan, anchored by an AI factory in Kagoshima with an initial capacity of 350MW, developed in partnership with Wistron and housed within a site by Kai Shin Digital Infrastructure; development is set to begin in late 2026 with an ultimate target of 1GW.
— STT GDC has broken ground on its third Mumbai campus in Palava, a 46-acre site designed to scale to approximately 400MW of IT load, with the first phase delivering 50MW and a total investment commitment of Rs 5,000 crore ($540 million).
— Microsoft has commenced Phase 2 excavation and construction at its data center in Køge, Denmark, with works expected to be completed in April 2028; the company is also developing sites in Roskilde, Høje-Taastrup, Esbjerg, and Varde as part of its planned Denmark East cloud region.
— A 360MW campus comprising six 60MW buildings is planned in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, with a local company reported to be investing around €3.5 billion ($4.03bn) in the development.
Power & Grid News
— Google confirmed it is partnering with DTE Energy to bring 2.7GW of new clean resources to the local Michigan grid to power its 1GW Van Buren Township campus, including 1.6GW of solar, 400MW of four-hour energy storage, 50MW of long-duration storage, and 300MW of additional clean resources.
— Energy management startup GridBeyond raised $12 million in a Series D equity round with investors including Samsung Ventures, ABB, Constellation, and Act Venture Capital, and will use the funds to expand its optimization platform for battery storage and renewable energy assets in the UK, US, Australia, and Japan.
— New Jersey announced a 355MW storage procurement and solicited a further 645MW, alongside a 3GW expansion of its community solar program including 300MW on area landfills.
— PPL Electric reached a $275 million rate case settlement that includes a dedicated data center tariff, under which data centers and other large loads would need to sign agreements of not less than a specified term.
Planning & Permits
— Mason City, Michigan voted to repeal ordinance 266, which had created an M-3 Technology Innovation District to enable data center construction, after residents collected signatures for a referendum petition citing inadequate requirements and vague language; the city must now decide whether to draft a stricter ordinance.
— Google's $500 million data center project in American Township, Allen County, Ohio (Project BOSC) is awaiting a decision from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency on a draft air permit for 115 diesel-fueled generators before construction can begin, with a start targeted for sometime in 2026 and completion by 2030.
— Norwegian utility Østfold Energi is developing data center plots in Sarpsborg and Valer; the Sarpsborg project through DC Sarpsborg (66% Østfold Energi, 34% Sarpsborg Municipality) covers 1,740 acres and could support around 300MW, with final zoning consideration expected in 2027.
Hyperscaler Activity
— Google confirmed it is behind the 1GW Project Cannoli data center campus in Van Buren Township near Detroit, Michigan, to be built on around 130 acres with a total footprint exceeding 800,000 sq ft, with Walbridge serving as general contractor.
— Google has been confirmed as the company behind the $500 million Project BOSC data center in American Township, Allen County, Ohio, its third data center in the state, of which $50 million will fund local infrastructure upgrades and $13.6 million will go toward local water infrastructure.
— Nscale and Microsoft are collaborating with Nvidia and Caterpillar to deliver 1.35GW of Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs at a flagship AI Factory campus in West Virginia.
— Google has warned the Australian federal government that a 30 percent corporate tax rate could deter a planned AU$20 billion (US$14.2bn) Asia-Pacific AI and data center hub investment, while stating it is not seeking incentives, public funds, or changes to the treatment of its existing businesses.
Investment & M&A
— Nebius Group has secured a $27 billion AI infrastructure commitment from Meta Platforms, under which Nebius will provide Meta with $12 billion of dedicated AI compute capacity across multiple data center locations.
— Chip cooling startup Frore Systems raised $143 million in a Series D round, bringing its total valuation to $1.64 billion.
— Terawulf has tapped Fluor for preconstruction services, including master planning, on a $3 billion data center campus in Kentucky.
— KKR and Singaporean telecoms firm Singtel fully acquired STT GDC last month, according to the article reporting STT GDC's Mumbai groundbreaking.
Policy & Incentives
— Executives from 24 European cloud and digital service providers signed an open letter urging the European Commission to legislate for real tech sovereignty in the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), calling for control-based definitions and reserved procurement rather than what they termed 'sovereignty-washing' by big tech.
— The UK government announced £45 million in funding for a new AI-driven supercomputer called Sunrise, designed to model nuclear fusion physics, expected to come online this summer at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham campus.
— Google will provide $250,000 in annual funding to Elida Local Schools as part of a 15-year tax abatement offset agreement tied to its Lima, Ohio data center project.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— EuroHPC JU signed a contract with HPE to deploy the HammerHAI supercomputer at HLRS in Stuttgart, Germany; the system will be based on liquid-cooled Nvidia GB200 NVL architecture, interconnected by Nvidia Quantum-X800 InfiniBand, offer 15 exaflops of AI compute performance, and is expected to be operational in the second half of 2026.
— Samsung and AMD signed an MoU for AI memory collaboration under which Samsung will supply AMD with HBM4 for its forthcoming Instinct MI455X GPUs and DDR5 RAM for its sixth-generation Epyc CPUs (codenamed Venice), with the two companies also discussing a foundry partnership.
— Nvidia used its GTC 2026 keynote to announce the Groq LP30 language processing unit — developed following its $20 billion acquihire of Groq — targeting low-latency inference, with Samsung working with Nvidia to bring the LP30 chips to market in the second half of 2026.
— Fossefall is reportedly in discussions to repurpose a former Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk automotive plant in Rollag, Norway into a 15MW data center, as part of the company's broader plan to establish 500MW of clean AI infrastructure in the Nordics by 2030.
Cooling & Sustainability
— Google signed an agreement with Commonwealth Sortation LLC, an affiliate of AMP Robotics Corporation, to remove 200,000 metric tons of CO2e by 2030 by converting organic waste from municipal landfills in South Hampton Roads, Virginia into biochar.
— Frore Systems raised $143 million at a $1.64 billion valuation to develop chip cooling solutions at a time of rising data center compute density.
— InfraPartners and Emerald AI announced a partnership on 'Flex-Ready Data Centers,' a design linking InfraPartners' Building Management System with Emerald AI's Conductor platform to dynamically adjust power consumption in response to grid conditions, aiming to reduce energy costs and support faster grid interconnection.
Connectivity & Networking
— The MANTA subsea cable consortium, comprising Liberty Networks, Gold Data, and Sparkle, has selected MDC Data Centers to develop two Cable Landing Hubs in Mexico.
— Astound Broadband named Ettienne Brandt as CEO ahead of its planned merger with GFiber (formerly Google Fiber) to create an independent fiber provider majority-owned by Stonepeak; Astound currently serves about one million customers across 11 states with a fiber network passing more than four million premises.
— Cisco debuted a new multi-rail optical line system that supports up to 128 fiber pairs per rack, designed to reduce power consumption and footprint in AI data centers.
Colocation & Leasing
— Østfold Energi's KI Våler AS joint venture has granted Google the necessary rights to develop a data center project in Gylderåsen, Valer, with Google having applied for network capacity at the site.
— Amazon has also acquired land in Palava City, Mumbai for a data center development, according to the article reporting STT GDC's groundbreaking at the same smart city site.