Daily Briefing
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
164 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— Princeton Digital Group (PDG) has acquired land in Mumbai and Hyderabad, India, adding 210MW of capacity — a 90MW three-building campus in Hyderabad and a 120MW single five-story building in Navi Mumbai — bringing its stated India footprint to up to 1GW.
— Digital Realty has acquired two parcels in Abbiategrasso, southwest of Milan, with plans to develop an initial 8MW facility targeted to launch in 2028, with further expansion on the larger plot enabling up to 84MW of capacity.
— Metrobloks has announced plans to invest $1.4 billion in a three-building, 568,800 sq ft campus in Liberty, Missouri, north of Kansas City, having already secured planning permission for the first 177,000 sq ft building.
— PowerHouse Data Centers has received approval from the Joliet City Council to annex land for a $20 billion, 795-acre campus in Joliet, Illinois, comprising 24 two-story buildings and delivering up to 1.8GW of capacity across four phases.
Power & Grid News
— Google has signed two long-term PPAs with Sunraycer Renewables for the Lupinus and Lupinus 2 solar projects in Franklin County, Texas, with a combined capacity of approximately 400MWac and commercial operation expected in Q4 2027.
— Crusoe has expanded its partnership with Redwood Materials from four to 24 Crusoe Spark modular data centers, building on a 12MW/63MWh microgrid system that delivered 99.2 percent operational availability over seven months, and has separately signed a 12GWh deal with Form Energy.
— SoftBank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy land in Ohio for a datacenter campus described as 10GW in scale, with 10GW of new generation and a $4.2 billion grid upgrade planned alongside it.
— OpenAI is reportedly in discussions to purchase electricity from fusion startup Helion Energy, with sources telling POWER that a deal would provide as much as 5GW of power by 2030 and up to 50GW by 2035.
Planning & Permits
— Property developer Drox Group LLC has submitted a rezoning request to Forsyth County to build four two-story data center buildings totalling 1.3 million sq ft on a 129-acre parcel in Rural Hall, North Carolina, with the Planning Board set to review the proposal on April 9.
— The Joliet City Council approved annexation of a land parcel on S. Rowell Road and Bernhard Road on March 19 for the Joliet Technology Center campus, with development to be handled by PowerHouse Data Centers across four phases each accompanied by a six-acre substation.
Hyperscaler Activity
— HMRC has awarded AWS a £472.8 million contract — with AWS the only bidder — to migrate services from three Fujitsu-run datacenters and host them for a minimum of seven years from April 2026, with the Fujitsu datacenter exit targeted by June 2028.
— The Marshall Islands will join Google's Pacific Connect initiative by deploying the Iokwe subsea fiber-optic cable system, which will connect the island nation directly to Google's Halaihai cable, with a feasibility study funded by the US Trade and Development Agency.
— AWS confirmed a disruption to its Bahrain region following nearby drone activity, marking the second such incident affecting its infrastructure in the Gulf this month.
Investment & M&A
— Chinese utility Yuneng Holdings has agreed to invest RMB 1.1 billion ($160 million) for a 42.3 percent stake in Xiantian Computing Power Henan Technology, which will in turn acquire a 91.2 percent stake in Zhengzhou-based data center operator Heying Data for around RMB 9.5 billion ($1.4 billion).
— PDG has committed to investing $2.5 billion in developing its India data center portfolio, which it says will reach up to 1GW of capacity with the addition of the new Mumbai and Hyderabad sites.
— Leon Capital-backed advisory firm Xynteo has spun off PoweringAI, a new pan-European data center developer launching with a stated 350MW pipeline of brownfield industrial and port site projects.
— AI-native insurance provider Shepherd has raised $42 million in a Series B round led by Intact Private Capital, with participation from Spark Capital and Costanoa Ventures, bringing its total funding to $67 million, focused on underwriting AI infrastructure.
Policy & Incentives
— The Trump administration announced plans to create a voluntary consortium to invest $4 trillion in energy projects, minerals, and semiconductors, growing out of the Pax Silica initiative, with the US government contributing $250 million and SoftBank, Temasek, and Mubadala named as founding members.
— The UK government has published a planning document requiring housing developers to install solar panels and heat pumps in all new homes in England starting in 2028.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Arm has launched the AGI CPU, its first self-produced data center chip, co-developed with Meta, featuring up to 136 Neoverse V3 cores running at up to 3.7GHz, a 300W TDP, 96 lanes of PCIe 6.0, CXL 3.0 support, and built on TSMC's 3nm process node.
— Alibaba's DAMO Academy has revealed the XuanTie C950, described as the most powerful RISC-V server chip ever produced, designed to natively support large models such as Qwen3 and DeepSeek V3 with hundreds of billions of parameters.
— SK Hynix has filed to spend 11.95 trillion won ($7.97 billion) on an EUV lithography scanner from ASML, to be delivered by December 2027, to expand memory chip production, with SK Group's chairman stating the current memory shortage is now expected to persist until 2030.
Cooling & Sustainability
— Arm's AGI CPU has been validated in two OCP rack designs: a 36kW air-cooled system with 30 compute blades totaling 8,160 cores per rack, and a 200kW liquid-cooled configuration.
— Crusoe's expanded microgrid partnership with Redwood Materials is based on a system using solar power and repurposed electric vehicle batteries, which the companies say achieved 99.2 percent operational availability over seven months of continuous operation.
Connectivity & Networking
— Conecta Infra has confirmed it will invest $350 million to deploy more than 6,000km of long-haul network across South America — linking Argentina, Chile, and Brazil — with the rollout to be implemented progressively through 2028.
— BT Group has signed a contract worth up to £200 million ($267 million) with Northern Ireland Electricity Networks to provide connectivity, cybersecurity, and IT services for an initial five-year term with an option to extend by up to ten years.
— Edge data center firm Armada has signed an agreement with Aker BP to deploy a Galleon modular data center on a rig on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, beginning with a single reference unit that will act as a blueprint for further deployments.
Colocation & Leasing
— Digital Realty's planned Milan campus in Abbiategrasso will add to an existing development pipeline that includes ROM1 in Rome, which broke ground last year and is set to launch in early 2027 with 3MW of capacity on a 22-hectare campus planned for up to 2.3 million sq ft at full build-out.
— The Joliet Technology Center's backers stated that the campus would generate $310 million in property taxes and $40 million in utility taxes over 30 years, according to a staff report submitted as part of the annexation approval process.