From AMD's blockbuster Advancing AI showcase and Meta and BlackRock's $14 billion El Paso joint venture to a voltage disturbance that rattled the grid from DC to Chicago, it's been another packed stretch for the sector. Plus, Nvidia chips are headed to the Moon. Here's a roundup of the latest data center developments.
Market News: AMD's ‘Advancing AI’ Blitz, More Multibillion-Dollar Deals, Cloud Outages
AMD used its Advancing AI event to unveil sixth-gen EPYC processors, the Instinct MI400 GPU family, and a new rack-scale AI architecture, all aimed at inference and agentic workloads. The company claims the rack-scale setup delivers up to 30% more inference tokens per dollar than rival systems. AMD also announced at the event that it will invest up to $5bn in Anthropic and deploy up to 2GW of MI450 GPUs, as well as a 15-year, 2.5GW hosting deal with Core Scientific worth more than $14 billion across five US sites.
Not to be outdone, Nvidia signed letters of intent for a $500 billion strategic partnership with SK Group, anchored by a 2GW South Korean AI data center built on its Vera Rubin platform and slated to enter service in 2027. The chipmaker is also reportedly weighing a $250bn backstop for OpenAI's planned 10GW Ohio megasite – the largest financial guarantee ever discussed between two private companies – and separately plans to pour $5bn into Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence to massively increase its GPU compute.
Elsewhere, Meta and BlackRock formed a $14bn joint venture for a 1GW El Paso campus, with BlackRock owning 80% of the venture. Alphabet hiked its 2026 capex guidance to $195–205bn – up sharply from last year's $91.45bn – despite shares dipping 3% on investor unease. And Verizon inked a $1bn fiber deal to connect Google data centers.
On the reliability side, Google Cloud suffered a nearly 15-hour outage in the Netherlands after a power-and-cooling failure, while Azure's West US region hit intermittent connectivity issues starting on July 23 – a reminder that scale doesn't buy immunity from bad days.
Policy and Regulation: Ratepayer Pledge Expands, UK Proposes Grid Queue Fee
The Trump administration expanded its Ratepayer Protection Pledge to over 200 signatories, including 150-plus utilities and 23 governors. Meanwhile, a House defense bill provision could bar Chinese equipment from private data centers on DoD land. Meanwhile, Michigan's Wixom City Council unanimously rejected a developer’s request to end the data center moratorium, and New Zealand's Green Party is pushing for a one-year build pause, backed by a petition that's gathered nearly 4,900 signatures. Across the pond, Ofgem proposed a data center commitment fee of up to £712,500 per megawatt to weed out speculative grid-queue applicants, after demand connection requests ballooned from 41GW to 125GW in under a year.
Energy and Power: A Concerning Grid Disturbance, Gas Bets Multiply
In energy news, a transmission fault sent more than 3GW of data center load offline across PJM Interconnection, the largest grid operator in the US. It triggered a voltage disturbance felt from DC to Chicago that took roughly ten minutes to stabilize – well beyond the usual few seconds – according to Reuters. Increasing load demand certainly isn’t helping: PG&E's data center power pipeline more than doubled to 12.7GW quarter-over-quarter, with 1.8GW expected to reach operational status by 2030. And BloombergNEF now projects US data centers could draw 194GW by 2035, roughly a fifth of national electricity use.
New Mexico regulators rejected a pipeline for Oracle's 2.5GW Project Jupiter, citing large-scale water use, rising CO2 emissions, and insufficient state revenue generation. Meanwhile, Beetaloo Energy and Halliburton are partnering to develop a 2GW gas-powered campus near Darwin, Australia, Munich-based Innio landed a 1.1GW gas engine order from a US developer, and PowerPlay AI and Sharon AI are planning 400MW of behind-the-meter gas power in Abilene. On the flip side, Crusoe is deploying 5GW of ON.energy's AI-tuned UPS systems to buffer grid faults, and Meta signed a 172MW solar PPA in Louisiana – even as it reportedly quietly exited the RE100 clean-energy coalition amid rising gas procurement.
US and International Development: OpenAI's Georgia Mega-Campus, Croatia's Grid Nod
Stateside, OpenAI unveiled a 3.2GW, $30bn-plus campus in Effingham County, Georgia – four buildings totaling 4.4 million sq ft, with a closed-loop cooling system. CyrusOne broke ground on its sixth San Antonio campus, Nebius detailed a 1.2GW Pennsylvania campus that could scale to 660MW by 2029, and Microsoft said it brought 88 data centers online in FY2026, including 31 in the fourth quarter alone across five continents, adding 1GW of capacity.
Internationally, Pantheon Atlas secured grid approval for a 1GW Croatia site, an AU$1.1bn project surfaced outside Melbourne, and Italy's Lombardy region keeps attracting builders – most recently a new 120MW facility near Travagliato and Poste Italiane's 70MW AI-training site. Norway's Polar DC is set to build a 40MW hydro-powered facility next to its flagship site.
Next-Gen Tech: Compute Heads to the Moon
Nvidia is partnering with Lunar Outpost to bring edge computing to the Moon, equipping lunar rovers with Nvidia's Jetson hardware so they can map terrain and navigate in real time rather than waiting on a delayed signal from Earth. The first test comes via the Lunar Voyage 2 mission, launching later this year to study Reiner Gamma, an anomalous lunar swirl.
Back on Earth, Asperitas is developing a compact, wall-mounted immersion tank dubbed Horizon. While immersion cooling itself isn’t new, Horizon’s 5U form factor – delivering up to 18.4kW – aims to be small and rugged enough to wall-mount directly on a factory or mine floor, fully sealed against dust and vibration. The company says it’s built for harsh edge environments that standard immersion setups weren't designed for.