Daily Briefing
Thursday, March 26, 2026
175 articles scanned · 10 sections
New Builds & Expansions
— CyrusOne has broken ground on MIL1 in Milan, a three-story facility offering 27MW of IT capacity across 7,000 sqm of technical space, with the first phase expected to be live by Q3 2027.
— Tetracore Energy Group has announced plans to develop a $400 million, 20MW data center in Atakobo, Ogun State, Nigeria, in partnership with Huawei and Inspirive Technologies, with construction expected to take between 10 and 12 months.
— German data center firm Maincubes has broken ground on its BER02 campus in Nauen, west of Berlin, with the new substation supporting a 200MW campus that has potential to scale to 400MW; the first phase is due to launch in December 2027.
— Prologis has received unanimous approval from Allen Township, Pennsylvania to convert part of its 1 million sq ft Prologis Lehigh Valley East 16 warehouse into a data center using a closed-loop cooling system with partial solar energy supply.
Power & Grid News
— US data centers currently consume 4.4 percent of the nation's electricity, projected to rise to between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028 according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data, while grid interconnection timelines are stretching to five years nationally.
— Tetracore's planned Nigeria data center will be powered by a 100MW on-site independent power plant located within its gas-powered energy park, which has a capacity of 6.2 million standard cubic feet per day.
— NextEra announced plans to develop 9.5 GW of gas generation in Texas and Pennsylvania as part of a $550 billion deal with Japan that also includes 3 GW of nuclear in Tennessee and Alabama and 9.2 GW of additional gas generation.
— Panasonic has indicated that datacenter batteries are selling years in advance due to AI-driven demand, with the company shifting production from automotive to compute applications.
Planning & Permits
— A proposal to build a data center on a 14.4-acre parcel at 11031 and 11081 Shoemaker Street in eastern Detroit near Coleman Young Airport has been received by the City, though details about capacity, developer, and end-user remain undisclosed under RFP restrictions.
— The Detroit City Council passed a non-binding resolution asking Mayor Mary Sheffield to consider imposing a temporary moratorium on data centers to allow the city to study their impact.
— CyrusOne acquired an 18.5-acre site in the Municipality of Segrate, East Milan in December 2024 and is investing €6 million in local infrastructure improvements including the redevelopment of Via delle Regioni.
Hyperscaler Activity
— Microsoft has signed a deal with US biochar firm Liferaft for 1 million carbon removal units over a 10-year period, to be delivered through Liferaft's biochar facilities in Iowa and Illinois.
— The UK's HMRC has awarded AWS a contract worth nearly £500 million to migrate services from three Fujitsu-run datacenters and host them for up to a decade, with AWS being the only remaining bidder.
— Meta has begun laying off employees as it focuses more spending on building out datacenters, training large language models, and recruiting AI talent, with the number of job cuts believed to reach approximately 700.
— Google has power purchase agreements with a Maryland-headquartered renewable energy developer for electricity from two Texas solar installations.
Investment & M&A
— Vertiv has entered into an agreement to acquire Italian cooling firm ThermoKey, founded in 1991, with the deal expected to close in Q2 2026; terms were not disclosed.
— Singapore-based real estate investment firm RealVantage is allocating $7 million towards a 21MW data center at 1001 3rd Ave S in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was acquired by Cloud Capital and Arcapita earlier this year with plans to expand the site to 31MW.
— Distributed power delivery startup Scalvy has raised $13.9 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Climate Capital, Silicon Badia, and Skyriver Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to approximately $17 million.
— AI chip startup Epic Microsystems has raised $21 million in a Series A round led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from Intel Capital, AICONIC Ventures, and Cambium Capital, bringing total funding to $26 million.
Policy & Incentives
— The European Central Bank restricted eligibility for the digital euro project's cloud infrastructure to EU-based providers only, selecting French companies OVHcloud and Scaleway to provide sovereign European cloud infrastructure.
— The UK government has published a planning document calling for housing developers to install solar panels and heat pumps in all new homes in England starting in 2028.
— Michigan and New York lawmakers are considering virtual power plant bills that would prohibit utility ownership of participating distributed energy resources and require reasonable access for third-party providers.
AI & HPC Infrastructure
— Bell Canada and Buzz HPC have expanded their partnership with Buzz securing 6.5MW of capacity at Bell's Merritt, British Columbia facility to deploy GPU clusters for sovereign AI infrastructure, with the site expected to come online in the coming weeks.
— Ericsson has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Forschungszentrum Jülich to use the Jupiter supercomputer — the world's fourth fastest and Europe's fastest — to train large-scale AI models for 5G and 6G network development.
— Arm has unveiled its first homegrown 136-core AGI CPU, with flagship customer Meta set to deploy it at scale later this year; Arm claims the chip delivers more than twice the performance per server rack compared to Intel silicon.
— Normal Computing has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Samsung Catalyst, with participation from Galvanize, Brevan Howard Macro Venture Fund, and ArcTern Ventures, to address the energy demands of AI chips.
Cooling & Sustainability
— atNorth has begun delivering waste heat from its FIN02 data center in Espoo, Finland to a neighboring Kesko retail site, with the recovered heat expected to reduce emissions associated with district heating by around 200 tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually.
— Vertiv's acquisition of ThermoKey is intended to expand its thermal management portfolio and manufacturing capabilities in EMEA, particularly to support liquid cooling with dry coolers and microchannel heat-exchange solutions.
— CyrusOne's MIL1 facility in Milan is designed to recover and reuse waste heat, initially for use within ancillary spaces on site, with the potential to supply a district heating network if available.
Connectivity & Networking
— Colt Technology Services has revealed plans to launch new subsea and terrestrial network routes connecting the US West Coast to Asia, citing accelerating demand driven by AI.
— The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has completed a major refresh of its 17-site interconnected network in London, selecting Nokia as its technical partner for the upgrade.
— Telesat is adding 500 MHz of military Ka-Band spectrum to the first 156 satellites in its Lightspeed LEO constellation at a cost of approximately $25 million, representing less than 0.5 percent of the total program budget.
— Fastweb+Vodafone has informed Inwit that it intends to terminate its Master Service Agreement with the cell tower provider at the end of March 2028, following the announcement of a tower joint venture with Telecom Italia covering up to 6,000 new mobile phone towers.
Colocation & Leasing
— HostDime suffered downtime at its London data center after an unnamed colocation facility operator abruptly shut off all power and network access to its server cages due to a contractual dispute, with issues first confirmed on March 18.
— Buzz HPC has secured 6.5MW of capacity at Bell Canada's Merritt, British Columbia facility with the option to increase capacity as it becomes available, marking an expansion of their existing partnership that previously deployed Nvidia AI infrastructure in Manitoba.