Daily Briefing
Thursday, March 19, 2026
166 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— NTT Global Data Centers CEO Doug Adams told Bloomberg the company is working to double its current capacity to 4GW in as little as two years, with plans to offer 'well over 5GW' in five years across 34 active projects, more than 70 percent of which have secured contracts.
— EdgeConneX has broken ground on a 200MW AI-ready data center campus in Kyotanabe in Greater Osaka, Japan, in partnership with Kagoya Asset Management, with the first 28MW phase expected to be ready in Q1 2028.
— WBS Power has announced plans for a 3.2GW data center campus called the Baltic Data Center Campus near Choczewo, Poland, to be built in 800MW stages, with Phase I estimated to cost between €6.9 billion and €8.6 billion, subject to formal planning approval.
— Shinsegae Group and Reflection AI have signed an MoU to establish a joint venture to build a 250MW sovereign AI data center in South Korea, with the project expected to cost at least 10 trillion won ($6.8bn).
Power & Grid News
— WBS Power's planned Baltic Data Center Campus in Choczewo will draw power from the nearby Choczewo Power Station, with the company's CEO stating it aims to contract up to 40 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources via PPAs, supplementing the rest with grid consumption.
— Canaan has acquired a 49 percent equity interest in a joint West Texas cryptocurrency mining venture from Cipher, comprising three sites with a combined power output of 120MW and an average power rate of sub-three cents per kWh.
— Industry disclosures suggest that by the end of the decade, a meaningful share of new data center capacity could be partially or fully off-grid, posing new cost and planning risks for utilities.
Planning & Permits
— A planning and zoning meeting in Franklin County, Missouri ran for 11 hours before commissioners postponed decisions on two proposed data center rezonings — one by Provident Data Centers covering approximately 575 acres and one by BLE Landholdings covering 490 acres — with more than 174 residents registering to speak, the majority in opposition.
— Ohio residents are proposing a ban on data centers with a capacity greater than 25MW, representing the latest sign of growing community opposition to large-scale server farms in the US.
— KDDI has reportedly acquired the Republic campus in Tower Hamlets, East London, for around £250 million ($333.8m), a site that has planning consent in place for a 376,000 sq ft data center.
Hyperscaler Activity
— Microsoft has vowed to no longer ask local governments to sign NDAs regarding its data center projects, and is working to identify and terminate any active NDAs currently in place with local governments.
— OpenAI has restructured its compute and infrastructure teams into three groups — data center design, commercial cloud and chip partnerships, and data center operations — with Sachin Katti, formerly of Intel, now overseeing all three Stargate groups.
— Amazon CEO Andy Jassy forecast during an internal all-hands meeting that AWS cloud revenue could reach $600 billion in annual sales within the next decade, attributing the growth largely to AI demand.
Investment & M&A
— Nebius has launched a private offering of $4 billion in convertible senior notes split into two tranches — $2.25bn due 2031 and $1.75bn due 2033 — with net proceeds expected to range between $3.96bn and $4.55bn, to be used to finance data center build-out and hardware investments.
— Liquid cooling vendor Frore Systems has raised $143 million in a Series D round led by MVP Ventures, valuing the California-based company at $1.64 billion and bringing its total funding to $340 million.
— Canaan has acquired a 49 percent equity interest in a West Texas joint mining venture from Cipher Mining for $39.75 million, funded through the issuance of 806,439,900 Class A ordinary shares priced at $0.7394 per ADS.
— On-demand GPU startup Andromeda AI has closed a new funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, with capital provided by Paradigm, though the exact dollar value of the deal was not disclosed.
Policy & Incentives
— UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves stated the UK will 'achieve the fastest AI adoption in the G7,' identifying it as one of the three biggest opportunities for economic growth in the country.
— A Democratic House bill backed by 122 members aims to reinstate clean energy tax credits and grants while seeking to speed grid interconnection to an expanded transmission system, countering Trump administration electricity policies.
— Twenty-four executives from European cloud and digital service providers have signed an open letter urging the European Commission to legislate for real technology sovereignty in the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), opposing what they term 'sovereignty-washing' by big tech.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Photonic chip company Q.ANT has deployed its second-generation Native Processing Units at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center in Stuttgart, Germany, with the hardware demonstrating more than 50x higher throughput of matrix multiplications and 6x lower energy consumption compared to its first-generation NPUs.
— Nvidia is working with Samsung to bring its third-generation LP30 chips — based on Groq's LPU architecture acquired in a $20 billion deal — to market in the second half of 2025, with CEO Jensen Huang stating this would likely occur in Q3.
— Terawulf has engaged Fluor for preconstruction services, including master planning, on a $3 billion data center campus in Kentucky.
Cooling & Sustainability
— Microsoft has revealed it is developing a data center networking technology using micro LED combined with 'imaging fiber,' which early lab testing indicates could consume approximately 50 percent less energy than conventional optical systems, with commercial availability targeted for late 2027.
— Frore Systems has released LiquidJet Nexus, an integrated liquid cooling system for AI data centers that uses a semiconductor-manufactured coldplate designed to map the shape of chips such as Nvidia GPUs, eliminating the need for hoses, connectors, and manifolds found in standard liquid cooling systems.
— WBS Power's planned Choczewo data center campus remains undecided on whether to include a waste heat reuse scheme for the local community, according to the company.
Connectivity & Networking
— Ciena CTO for EMEA Jürgen Hatheier stated that hollow core fiber, which offers 33 percent lower latency than traditional single-mode fiber and allows light to travel 50 percent faster, is being actively tested by Ciena for low-latency applications including data center interconnects and AI networking.
— The MANTA subsea cable consortium, comprising Liberty Networks, Gold Data, and Sparkle, has chosen MDC Data Centers to develop two Cable Landing Hubs in Mexico.
— Claro Ecuador has announced a $600 million investment plan over the next three years focused on network modernization, expansion of mobile coverage, and the progressive rollout of 5G in Ecuador.
Colocation & Leasing
— NTT Global Data Centers secured 115MW worth of data center leases across campuses in Virginia, Illinois, and California earlier in March 2026.
— Nebius, which operates data centers in Finland, the UK, Iceland, France, New Jersey, and Missouri, has revealed plans this year for a 240MW data center in France and two additional facilities in Alabama and Missouri.
— Meta has signed a contract with Nebius under which Meta will spend up to $27 billion on Nebius' AI cloud infrastructure over a five-year period — $12bn for access to Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs starting in 2027, and $15bn on any excess capacity — spanning multiple locations.