Daily Briefing
Saturday, March 21, 2026
157 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— SoftBank's SB Energy is planning to build a 10GW data center campus at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio, on federal DOE land, with construction expected to begin this year under a public-private partnership with the DOE, Department of Commerce, and AEP Ohio.
— A Google-affiliated entity, Shenandoah Computing LLC, has purchased 430 acres of land near Kansas City International Airport for Project Kestrel, with current plans including five 500,000 sq ft buildings developed in phases.
— Miami-based Revitalization Unlimited is proposing to demolish the existing three-story Western Newspaper Union Building in Kansas City, Missouri, and replace it with a 20-story, 30MW, 142,085 sq ft data center facility with 18 floors dedicated to data center use and ground-floor retail.
— Egypt's Renergy Group may develop a data center alongside its $15 billion green hydrogen and solar power plant in the El-Tor area of Sinai, with an initial footprint of 10,000 sqm and potential expansion to 500,000 sqm.
Power & Grid News
— SB Energy plans to build 10GW of new power generation — including 9.2GW of natural gas — to connect to the local grid and power the new data center campus at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, with the $33.3 billion in Japanese funding for the gas generation previously announced as part of the U.S.-Japan Strategic Trade and Investment Agreement in February.
— Google has signed agreements totalling 1GW of data center demand response capacity with utility partners across the United States.
— A proposed data center campus of up to six 72MW buildings on a 130-acre site in Ashburn, Virginia is expected to receive grid power in the mid-2030s.
Planning & Permits
— Crow Holdings Development and CHI/Acquisitions has withdrawn its appeal to build a data center on a 37.4-acre parcel on Highway 85 North in Fayetteville, Georgia, after the city's planning and zoning commission rejected the site plan in late January.
— Blue Origin has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission for Project Sunrise, which would consist of up to 51,600 satellites in sun-synchronous orbit to support space-based data centers.
— Site plans seen by DCD indicate up to six data center buildings could be developed across a 130-acre residential site in Ashburn, Loudoun County, Virginia, though no applications have yet been submitted to county representatives for consideration.
Hyperscaler Activity
— A Google-affiliated company, Shenandoah Computing LLC, officially acquired 430 acres near Kansas City International Airport for Project Kestrel; the project has been awarded a 35-year exemption of real and personal property taxes as well as sales taxes for construction materials.
— 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.
— Microsoft claimed to be the first hyperscaler to bring an Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 system online, while Google has also detailed plans for deployment of the platform.
— One of the major US cloud providers is set to lease a proposed 432MW campus in Ashburn, Virginia, working through a data center developer that will lease the site to the hyperscaler, though both parties have denied their involvement when asked for comment.
Investment & M&A
— Water treatment firm Ecolab is set to acquire liquid cooling vendor CoolIT Systems from KKR for $4.75 billion, with the deal expected to close later this year; Ecolab said CoolIT is likely to generate $550 million in sales over the next 12 months.
— Bitcoin mining company Sphere 3D is set to combine with Cathedra Bitcoin in an all-stock deal, with Cathedra security holders receiving 49 percent of the combined business; on closing, the merged company is expected to manage 53MW of power capacity across five data centers in Iowa, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
— Constellation Energy has agreed to sell approximately 4.4GW of natural gas-fired generation capacity in PJM Interconnection to LS Power Equity Advisors for $5 billion as part of divestitures required to resolve antitrust concerns from its $26.6 billion acquisition of Calpine Corporation.
Policy & Incentives
— The White House released a policy document with suggestions on how Congress should regulate artificial intelligence, fulfilling a directive from a December executive order signed by President Trump.
— Google's Project Kestrel in Kansas City has been awarded a 35-year exemption of real and personal property taxes as well as sales taxes for construction materials; in November 2025, a local commissioner spoke out against the tax breaks.
— The UK government has backed off plans to allow AI companies to access copyrighted material for free for training purposes by default, following pressure from the creative industry.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Nvidia updated its data center product roadmap through to 2028, announcing the Nvidia Groq 3 LPU for release in the second half of 2026 in liquid-cooled LPX racks featuring 256 LPUs with 128GB of on-chip SRAM and 640 TBps of scale-up bandwidth, as well as the Vera Rubin platform and the Rubin Ultra GPU successor set for the second half of 2027 featuring four compute chiplets and 1TB of HBM4E memory.
— Alibaba Cloud's T-Head chip division had cumulatively shipped 470,000 AI chips as of February 2026, with more than 60 percent of those chips serving external customers; CEO Eddie Wu set a target of $100 billion in combined cloud and AI external revenue within five years.
— Sphere 3D and Cathedra Bitcoin said their merged platform has a pipeline of more than 100MW of potential expansion opportunities and will also assess opportunities in high-performance compute and AI infrastructure.
Cooling & Sustainability
— Ecolab is acquiring CoolIT Systems for $4.75 billion, stating the deal will double its addressable market in the cooling space from $5 billion to $10 billion; CoolIT designs liquid cooling solutions including split-flow direct liquid cooling technology.
— Google's Project Kestrel campus in Kansas City is planned to use at least 50 percent of its energy from carbon-neutral sources.
— The proposed Kansas City data center at the former Western Newspaper Union Building would reportedly be equipped with natural gas fuel cells.
Connectivity & Networking
— Duos has deployed its second containerized edge data center module in Amarillo, Texas, located on Potter County land adjacent to the largest colocation facility in the Texas Panhandle, with the module expected to be fully operational in the coming months.
— TIM, Fastweb, and Vodafone have signed a non-binding agreement to build and run new mobile towers in Italy, with plans for up to 6,000 sites.
Colocation & Leasing
— The Regency residential community in Ashburn, Loudoun County — comprising around 150 homes on a 130-acre site — is in discussions to sell to a data center developer once planning permission is in place, with residents reportedly being offered around $4.4 million per acre, suggesting a total purchase price of around $576 million.
— Boosteroid expanded its data center server capacity in France, Poland, and the Czech Republic, with capacity at all three locations increasing 'two to three times' across each country; the company had an estimated 13MW of capacity running at the time of a previous DCD interview.