Data centers & fiber: archive
Every Data centers & fiber story in Infrastructure, newest first. 573 stories
4 stories
Meta bets new glass beats cheaper electronics upgrades
A 7,000km, 48-pair system landing in France in 2029 commits Meta to fiber geometry it owns rather than capacity it renegotiates on someone else's route.
AI's fiber ceiling is set in a shed the industry barely counts
The long-haul routes feeding AI traffic run into their real ceiling at the amplifier huts spaced every 80 to 100 kilometers, where power draws are climbing from hundreds of watts to 12-kilowatt cabinets and no capex line obviously owns the bill.
Data centre demand shifts; the binding constraint does not
Principal's training-to-inference split pushes the buildout onto already queued grids, where a two-layer demand story doesn't diversify one delivery constraint.
Abbott freezes Texas data center permits, making grid access a state grant
The audit's ownership question turns a permit into a disclosure document, and 49.8GW of Texas projects now wait on a December deadline.
10 stories
BDx's 640MW campus is an 845MVA grid trade
BDx signed 1.2GW of power contracts before breaking ground. Early 2027 will show whether the demand existed.
California hands data centers the grid bill
Seven new laws move transmission, generation and wildfire-liability costs onto developers and turn monthly energy reporting into a permitting condition — a template other states can lift.
Alibaba promises 20GW of cloud by 2032 and names no grid
The chip arrives as an unverified performance claim; the 20 gigawatts will need a utility, a site and an energization schedule before anyone can underwrite the target.
Walbridge's L5 Mission Critical hires JLL's data center chief
The new unit is selling the last unsold stretch of a build—the handoff from commissioning to energized capacity—at the moment delivery risk concentrates there.
AT&T's 55-license lease is capacity without a construction bill
The 25-state 3.45GHz lease adds roughly 20MHz of midband in most markets over installed radios, a cheaper path to depth than buying at auction.
Polcom plans 40MW in Poland with itself as the anchor tenant
At roughly $1 million a megawatt, the Skawina project asks whether Polcom's sovereign cloud can fill six halls before 2030.
A 200MW data center clears the grid in Lower Saxony, then waits on a tenant
Green Datacenter Development now has the scarce asset—an approved grid connection—and the unnamed customer is where the project's risk sits.
Morphotonics raises €46m to print the optics bottleneck
The Dutch toolmaker's Series B is public money placed on European manufacturing capacity, and the waveguide line is where co-packaged optics either scales or stalls.
Telesat locks up the ground before its satellites fly
Orange's Tier-4 teleport near Troyes turns certified downlink into the scarce asset in sovereign satellite connectivity.
Brussels is writing the data center scorecard that will price power
A 500kW disclosure threshold pulls colocation into a public European dataset just as the Commission's consultation on minimum performance standards decides what those numbers will eventually have to be.
12 stories
Flag lights 400/800GbE on Google and Meta's Echo cable
The upgrade shows trans-Pacific capacity now grows on glass already in the water, and that pricing power sits with whichever party controls the electronics.
Texas cuts the cost of holding a power queue position
Cheaper deposits and a two-year energization grace period arrive while the state is still counting how many of ERCOT's 474 GW are real projects.
Valorem is building Finland's data centers from the power side first
Zoning and grid rights are the first half of the trade; the unnamed offtaker is the half that decides whether these become infrastructure.
Kodiak's 76MW West Texas gas deal is underwritten by its credit chain
The 2GW target matters less than how many loads arrive with an investment-grade offtake and a lease guaranty attached.
Nscale's New York listing tests public equity's appetite for AI capacity
A hyperscaler files to list with no raise size, valuation or timetable, asking public buyers to price AI capacity before the blank columns get filled.
Amazon buys Generac's generator slots and pays in vesting stock
A $2.4 billion two-year tranche against an $8 billion expectation, with equity that releases only as the generating sets ship.
Five Tonbridge cells matter less than the council agreements beneath them
The build is incremental; Freshwave's council contracts are the asset, and Kent is the latest test of small cells let like real estate.
The hyperscaler now buys raw materials the way it buys power
Prysmian and Rio Tinto will put inert-anode aluminum into an Ohio data center, and Amazon's direct-input contracting now reaches the smelter.
O-Green's 200MW target is demand for its own electrons
A state-backed Omani generator is integrating forward into AI compute, which puts it in the same trade as the hyperscalers building their own power — minus a tenant, a price, or a site.
OData's $630 million retrofit buys Aligned a captive cooling customer
Two operating Latin American data centers get a retrofit that turns grid-constrained power into AI capacity—and Aligned gets a regional reference customer for the liquid cooling system it wants to sell across the region.
Madrid's power queue is the asset Nabiax is buying for €800 million
The 100MW Alcalá hall prices at roughly $9.2 million a megawatt, and the announcement names no tenant.
Eutelsat orders 229 more OneWeb satellites, extending the fleet to 2034
The €1 billion order was already in the financial plan, which makes the hosted-payload slots the part to watch.
14 stories
Data center growth is outrunning the people who run it
More than two-thirds of developers and operators report staffing below what their halls require, and the scarcest skills are the ones that turn a queue position into a running megawatt.
Brazil is buying data center capacity with tax relief
The ReData law trades five years of suspended import and consumption taxes for reserved domestic capacity, renewable electricity and a water ceiling that shapes the engineering before it shapes the tax line.
PGIM's Munich exit proves the permit is the product
A value-add fund bought raw land in 2024 and sold an entitled 30MW site in 2026, the merchant-development model compressed into one trade.
Eveo's Recife data center leans on Northeast geography
Distance makes a second Northeast site defensible, but the disclosure still leaves lenders and tenants underwriting Eveo's own demand claim.
Microsoft's appeal window is really a fight over how data centers pay
The hyperscalers accept that data centers should cover their connection costs; the fight is whether those dollars land on a tariff schedule or in a bilateral agreement.
Gazprom turns a depleted Siberian gas field into a data-center power plant
A depleted Siberian gas field becomes a power source for a modular data center; the template it sets will not travel intact.
VodafoneThree's $1.3bn core is a take-rate bet
Ericsson's 9Tbps core is priced and contracted; now it has to be filled by a slicing service whose customers can leave without a fee.
Carr's $100bn spectrum target is the entry fee
Licenses are the small check in a wireless build; the auction calendar decides what is left for the towers, fiber and power under them.
Kyiv strike claim puts sovereign cloud's risk premium on the table
Both militaries have now claimed strikes on data center sites inside a single year, and the siting math that governs Ukrainian digital infrastructure has acquired a row nobody built a diligence process for.
CoreWeave's 15-year lease turns a Niagara cryptomine into credit
The anchor deal prices a decommissioned power plant's grid connection at AI rates and makes the tenant's contract stack the collateral.
Bitdeer's second Johor building is a queue-skipping product
Bitdeer AI buys a 2027 delivery date in Malaysia and leaves the customer names off the page.
Crusoe's $30.9bn price is a bet on unbuilt gigawatts
With just over 1GW in service against 6GW under contract, the round underwrites a pipeline whose cost, debt and offtake the coverage never states.
Zettabyte and Bowrington explore a Taiwan GPU build with asset-level capital
An MoU with no sites, no megawatts and no money still shows where compute capital is landing: on the GPUs themselves.
Asp prices a NOK2bn backlog, not a named tenant
The Stavanger raise shows Nordic capacity now clears on secured power and contracted revenue, with lenders carrying the forecast until a counterparty actually signs.