Daily Briefing
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
136 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— SoftBank's SB Energy is leasing federal land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, to build a 10GW data center campus, alongside 10GW of new generation capacity, at least 9.2GW of which will be gas-fired.
— Filipino telco Converge ICT Solutions has opened a 12MW data center in Angeles City, Pampanga, north of Manila, marking its fourth data center in its portfolio.
— FuelCell Energy plans to expand its manufacturing facility in Torrington, Connecticut, by more than three times — from approximately 100MW to 350MW — to meet data center demand for its new 12.5MW modular power blocks.
Power & Grid News
— SB Energy and American Electric Power (AEP) Ohio have struck a $4.2 billion deal to upgrade and expand electrical transmission infrastructure across Southern Ohio, with AEP expecting power to reach the Piketon site by 2029.
— TotalEnergies has relinquished its Carolina Long Bay (Lease OCS-A 0545) and New York Bight (Lease OCS-A 0538) offshore wind leases to the US Department of the Interior, fully exiting the US offshore wind sector, and has committed to invest an equal amount to the recovered lease fees into US natural gas power production and exports.
— FuelCell Energy has launched a 12.5MW modular power block for the data center market, comprised of ten 1.25MW modules, with its business development pipeline reported to have increased by 275 percent since February 2025, with the majority of that increase coming from data center customers.
— Amazon-backed SMR company X-energy has filed for an IPO on Nasdaq under the ticker 'XE', with Amazon holding the option to deploy more than 5GW of X-energy's Xe-100 projects in the US by 2039; the first plant is planned at Dow's Seadrift Operations site in Texas and is under review by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Planning & Permits
— Helion Energy, which is developing its first commercial plant in Chelan County, Washington, still needs to secure final permits from the state government to energize the project but says it remains on track to deliver power by 2028.
— Australia's government announced a set of data center expectations, requiring operators to bring their own energy, pay their way, build green, or stay home, according to a government announcement.
Hyperscaler Activity
— OpenAI is in talks to purchase power from fusion energy startup Helion Energy, with reports indicating the deal could see OpenAI secure a guaranteed portion of Helion's production starting at 12.5 percent, accounting for up to 5GW of power by 2030 and scaling to 50GW by 2035.
— The National Geographic Society is migrating 15 petabytes of content to a custom media platform on AWS Cloud, with the Society generating around two petabytes of new video each year.
— AWS confirmed a disruption to its Bahrain region following nearby drone activity, marking the second such incident affecting its infrastructure in the Gulf that month.
Investment & M&A
— APG, on behalf of its pension fund client ABP and Swiss pension fund partners, has agreed to acquire a 37.5 percent stake in European data center firm NorthC from Antin Infrastructure Partners; terms of the deal were not shared.
— In-Q-Tel, a venture firm funded by the US CIA, has made a strategic investment in Wyoming-based data center developer Prometheus Hyperscale; terms of the deal were not shared, and IQT investor Sara A. Jones will join the company's board of directors.
— Poste Italiane has launched a €10.8 billion bid to acquire Telecom Italia in a state-backed consolidation of Italian telecoms infrastructure.
— Romanian network operator Digi Communications has acquired a 51 percent majority stake in UK fiber network provider Whyfibre Limited, marking Digi's entrance into the UK market; financial terms were not disclosed.
Policy & Incentives
— The FCC has updated its Covered List to include all foreign-made consumer routers, prohibiting the approval of any new models, following a determination by a White House-convened interagency body that foreign-produced routers introduce supply chain vulnerabilities and cybersecurity risks.
— The SoftBank Piketon data center project is framed as consistent with President Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which aims to shield consumers from price increases driven by surging AI infrastructure demand.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Nvidia's upcoming LPX rack, featuring 256 Groq LPUs, will have a power envelope of up to 160kW, be fully liquid cooled on the standard MGX architecture, and is expected to launch in the latter half of 2026 alongside the Vera Rubin NVL72.
— South Korean AI startup Upstage is in talks with AMD to purchase up to 10,000 MI355 accelerators for deployment across South Korea, including to support development of a sovereign AI model as part of Korea's government-led Proprietary AI Foundation Model project.
— Elon Musk announced a chip fabrication plant called Terafab, described as a $25 billion project aimed at manufacturing up to 1 terawatt of computing power annually, which would make it the largest semiconductor fab ever built.
— Gimlet Labs raised $80 million in early-stage funding to develop what it describes as the world's first multi-silicon inference cloud, bringing its total funding to $92 million.
Cooling & Sustainability
— Nvidia's LPX rack featuring 256 Groq LPUs will be fully liquid cooled and is built on the standard MGX architecture, with each tray containing eight LPUs, a host CPU, an FPGA, and a Bluefield 4 SuperNic.
— In-Q-Tel described its investment in Prometheus Hyperscale as supporting the development of next-generation, liquid-cooled hyperscale data centers designed to deliver sustainable, efficient, and scalable infrastructure for AI.
Connectivity & Networking
— Airtel Africa and SpaceX successfully trialed data and messaging services with Starlink Mobile in Kenya, testing in areas without terrestrial mobile network coverage, with connectivity supporting applications including WhatsApp calling, maps, Facebook Messenger, and financial transactions via the Airtel app.
— Blue Origin has requested permission from the US government to launch a network of 51,600 data center satellites.
— Ciena reported that cloud providers, which accounted for zero percent of its total revenue eleven years ago, now represent over 50 percent of the company's business.
Colocation & Leasing
— NorthC currently operates more than a dozen data centers across the Netherlands, eight in Germany, and four in Switzerland, with more in development in all three markets.
— A panel at New York Build 2026 identified demand for data center construction as colliding with New York City's aging power grid, with the city's data center opportunity potentially lying on the 'edge.'