Daily Briefing
Friday, March 20, 2026
170 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— QTS has acquired approximately 1,700 acres in Salem Township, Pennsylvania for more than $500 million via Salem Township Holdings LLC, with a planned campus that could reportedly see 12–17 data centers built.
— Nxtra Africa's EKO1 hyperscale data center, currently under construction in Eko Atlantic City, Lagos, is designed to a 40MW capacity with over 3,000 racks and AI-ready high-density modules to Tier III+ architecture.
— T1 Energy has secured 50MW of grid power from Norway's national grid operator Statnett for its existing 926,000-square-foot industrial building in Mo i Rana, with the site remaining in the interconnection queue for 396MW.
— European cloud company Scaleway has launched a cloud region in Milan, Italy, with the first availability zone operational in Settimo Milanese and two further zones planned in Basiglio and Milan as part of Iliad Group's €3bn investment programme.
Power & Grid News
— Google announced it has integrated a total of 1GW of demand response capacity into long-term energy contracts with multiple US utilities, including new agreements with Entergy Arkansas, Minnesota Power, and DTE Energy.
— T1 Energy's 50MW grid allocation in Mo i Rana is classified as N-0 power, requiring UPS and step-down transformer infrastructure to serve data center loads, with power available as early as Q2 2027 and the temporary allotment running through end of 2033.
— The US Department of Energy has issued more than 40 emergency orders and extensions under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act since May 2025, more than in any comparable period in the past two decades.
Planning & Permits
— Ohio residents are proposing a ban on data centers with a capacity greater than 25MW, the latest sign of growing opposition to large-scale server farms across the US.
— QTS's Salem Township, Pennsylvania site is listed on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Office of Transformation and Opportunity website and is located within the township's Overlay Zone, which permits data centers as a primary use by-right.
— Blue Origin has filed with the US Federal Communications Commission to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites as part of its planned 'Project Sunrise,' operating in sun-synchronous orbits from 500–1,800 km.
Hyperscaler Activity
— Nvidia has struck a multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services under which it will deliver around one million AI processors by the end of 2027.
— Amazon owns a data center adjacent to Talen's Susquehanna Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania and is planning to develop more than a dozen buildings on approximately 1,200 acres of nearby land.
— Google's demand response capability allows it to limit or shift a portion of machine learning workloads in its data centers to help stabilize the grid during periods of peak use or reduced generation, with the company having originally demonstrated the capability with Omaha Public Power District in 2024.
Investment & M&A
— Infranity is leading a €375 million financing package for Retelit Datacenter in Italy, committing €175 million of the total, aimed at expanding existing facilities and supporting new site development across Italy.
— Energy management startup PADO raised $6 million in a seed round led by NovaWave Capital, with plans to use the funds to accelerate penetration into the mid-market colocation segment.
— A Supermicro co-founder and two others have been charged by the US Department of Justice with conspiring to divert servers fitted with Nvidia GPUs worth $2.5 billion to Chinese customers in violation of US export controls.
— 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
— The UK government has promised a different approach to tech procurement, with science minister Patrick Vallance telling MPs that future contracts would emphasise investment in UK technology and companies, following controversy over large contracts awarded to Palantir.
— The UK government has backed off plans to allow AI companies to access copyrighted material for free for training purposes by default, following a revolt from the creative sector.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Nvidia announced the Groq 3 LPX rack system at GTC 2026, packing 256 LP30 language processing units into a single system, with the chip based on Groq's second-generation LPU technology and built at Samsung's fabs.
— Alibaba's T-Head chipmaking business has shipped 470,000 AI chips, according to CEO Yongming Wu, who acknowledged the chips currently lag behind foreign counterparts and stated the company's strategy is to co-design chips with its cloud infrastructure and Qwen model.
— Fujikura announced it will invest a maximum of 300 billion yen ($1.9bn) to increase optical fiber and cable production capacity to approximately three times the current level at all of its manufacturing locations in Japan and the US, citing rising demand from AI data centers.
— Spanish quantum computing company Qilimanjaro has launched a Quantum-as-a-Service cloud offering called SpecQtrum, providing remote access to analog and digital QPUs and classical HPC accelerators from its data center in Barcelona.
Cooling & Sustainability
— At Tokyo Corporation has signed a virtual PPA with Mizuho Leasing and its subsidiary ML Power to offtake from a 28MW solar power plant in Japan, converting it from the FIT system to the FIP system.
— PADO's AI-powered SaaS platform claims to enable operators to unlock 30–60 percent more capacity within their existing footprint by continuously analyzing power consumption patterns and rebalancing workloads across IT and cooling infrastructure.
Connectivity & Networking
— BW Digital has successfully landed the 383-kilometer Hawaiki Tonga cable in Vava'u, giving Tonga a second international cable, with the project jointly funded by Australia and New Zealand and delivered in partnership with the Government of Tonga and Tonga Cable Ltd.
— A BT-operated subsea cable has suffered a major break between Evie and Westray in the Orkney Islands, leaving approximately 500 people on the North Isles without fiber and some mobile connectivity services for several days.
— SK Telecom and Ericsson have signed an MoU effective until March 2, 2031, covering joint R&D trials for 6G standardization, AI-RAN networks, and continued 5G development.
Colocation & Leasing
— Retelit Datacenter operates 38 data centers across Italy, including the Avalon Campus in Milan which hosts over 170 national and international operators, as well as a data center in Innsbruck, Austria.
— PADO stated it would use its $6 million seed funding to accelerate penetration into the mid-market colocation segment, citing that over 5,000 data centers in the US are utilising only half of their available power due to worst-case design assumptions.