Market Shifts and Collaborations
First, research firm Omdia expects global data center capex to hit $1.6 trillion by 2030, carried by a 17% CAGR. While concerns about an AI bubble persist, Omdia notes that actual order pipelines and underlying demand across the industry remain strong. Not everyone is convinced, however. Oracle has emerged as a flashpoint for investor anxiety, with its stock sliding amid concerns over high debt levels and the long-term return on aggressive AI spending. Is the AI bubble about to pop?
That growth is also forcing cloud giants to think differently about interoperability. In a win for enterprise customers, AWS and Google Cloud are now partnering on a multicloud networking solution that can connect the two cloud environments in minutes via AWS Interconnect and Google’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect.
In other collaboration news, HPE plans to adopt AMD’s new Helios rack-scale architecture and integrate a custom Juniper switch for high-bandwidth Ethernet connectivity. Micron, meanwhile, is steering even harder into the enterprise AI wave, exiting the consumer memory market to prioritize large data center customers.
And in outage news, Cloudflare reported additional dashboard and API issues just weeks after its major outage—fueling ongoing debates about hyperscale resilience.
Global Investment and Policy
India is becoming the latest AI super-magnet, attracting massive hyperscaler investments. Amazon has committed $35 billion to its Indian operations over the next four years—including $7 billion for data centers in Hyderabad—while Microsoft announced it’s planning a $17.5 billion AI infrastructure investment by 2030. Microsoft is also continuing its European expansion, confirming a new Denmark data center region slated for 2026.
Global chip policy brought its own complications. According to Bloomberg, U.S. lawmakers have rejected the GAIN AI Act, a proposed export-control bill that chipmakers like Nvidia opposed. And in a related update, President Trump will now allow Nvidia’s H200 GPUs to be sold to “approved customers” in China – provided they pay a hefty 25% export tax.
Power Moves and Energy Updates
In energy-related news, NextEra Energy is making headlines on several fronts. First, it announced a partnership with Google on multiple gigawatt-scale campuses while outlining plans to deliver 15GW of new data center power by 2035. Then, ExxonMobil has also revealed it’s teaming up with the energy company to build a 1.2GW natural gas plant with carbon capture tech aimed at hyperscale buyers. Lastly, Meta signed 2.5GW worth of PPAs and storage agreements with NextEra.
Meanwhile, Georgia Power proposed a $16 billion, 10GW power generation buildout directly aimed at supporting data centers. If approved, it would be one of the largest generation expansions in the state's history.
Geothermal startup Fervo Energy has raised $432 million, with backing from Google, to accelerate construction of its Cape Station project in Utah, which aims to become the world’s largest enhanced geothermal facility by the end of the decade.
Lastly, 200 environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on new U.S. data centers over concerns about unprecedented water and energy use.
Local U.S. Buildouts
Local-level development announcements are also making headlines. Google’s new $2 billion data center in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is now officially operational, fueling services like Maps and Gemini AI. In Texas, a $10 billion, 1GW Lacy Lakeview campus has won city approval—though local resistance is already bubbling up. Vantage has also broken ground on its 1.4GW Texas data center campus, which is set to host hardware for OpenAI.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced a new East US 3 cloud region coming to Atlanta in 2027 and Amazon reportedly backed out of Arizona’s ‘Project Blue’ data center campus following a change in cooling plans from water to air. Meta may now become the lead tenant, according to KJZZ.
Next-Gen: Orbital Milestone and Cooling Startups
Finally, on the R&D front, Starcloud, backed by Nvidia, has now run the first LLM inference on an H100 GPU in orbit, marking a milestone in the emerging “orbital data center” race.
Cooling startups have been busy too. Corintis raised $25 million for its in-chip microfluidic cooling with butterfly-wing-inspired coolant channels. And if you prefer your innovation a little colder, Nostromo launched an “ice battery” that can supposedly shift up to 40% of cooling load to off-peak hours—something utilities would surely appreciate. At the same time, new research from Johns Hopkins suggests brain-like architectures could significantly reduce compute footprints.
That wraps up this week’s roundup—there’ll be plenty more to watch in the weeks ahead.