From Anthropic's $45 billion compute agreement with Nscale and Nvidia's record-breaking quarter to OpenAI and Alibaba's custom silicon pivots and a slew of Australia developments, it's been another packed stretch for the sector. Plus, could a rice-grain-sized "rainbow" chip be the key to 6G? Here's a roundup of the latest data center developments.
Market News: Anthropic's $45bn Nscale Deal, Nvidia's Record Quarter
Anthropic has signed a massive $45 billion, six-year deal for 460MW of capacity at cloud startup Nscale's West Virginia campus, according to Bloomberg. This is one of more than a dozen reported lease commitments Anthropic has made recently.
Nvidia, meanwhile, blew past expectations again, posting a record $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue, up 106% year-over-year, with data center revenue alone hitting $89 billion. CFO Colette Kress now expects 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028. The company is putting some of that money behind SoftBank's Ports-Pike mega-campus in Ohio, confirming it will support the first 4.25GW of the facility – and reportedly provide a $120 billion backstop. Set to be fully leased to OpenAI, the Ports-Pike campus could eventually scale to 10GW.
Elsewhere, Charter Communications closed its $34.5 billion merger with Cox Communications alongside its Liberty Broadband acquisition, creating the largest US cable operator with a footprint spanning 45 states and integrating Cox's commercial fiber and cloud assets.
Chips and Hardware: OpenAI's Jalapeño, Alibaba's Silicon Pivot
In chip news, OpenAI revealed more details about Jalapeño, its custom inference ASIC co-developed with Broadcom. The 700W TDP chip actually draws closer to 550W under real workloads, yielding far higher tokens-per-watt than commercial GPUs. Alibaba Cloud is making a similar bet on vertical control, with CEO Eddie Wu telling investors the company will lean more heavily on its in-house T-Head chips to boost margins as they swap out third-party silicon.
Nvidia’s Groq-derived, liquid-cooled LPX inference racks have hit full production, promising 4x faster responsiveness for latency-sensitive workloads. Neocloud operator Nebius is among the first adopters. And IBM unveiled a mainframe chip that runs Arm and Z workloads on the same cores, pairing that with built-in AI inference for fraud detection.
Energy and Power: Renewable Mandates, Gas Deals and PPAs
In power news, global regulators are increasingly pushing green energy mandates for the sector. Spain is drafting rules requiring new data centers to source 80% of power from renewables on an hourly basis. The requirements are expected to apply to data centers with a capacity of 1MW or more. New South Wales, meanwhile, will require data centers to source at least 40% of their energy from wind power in exchange for an expedited route to market. And Ireland is reconsidering its decades-long nuclear ban as data center demand strains the grid.
Hyperscalers are responding by building their own supply. Microsoft expanded its Qcells power partnership under a "Bring Your Own Capacity" model that could also feed virtual power plants. NextEra secured $3.3 billion in state and Japanese government funding for 10GW of new natural gas capacity in Texas and Pennsylvania. On the PPA front, QTS signed 48MW of solar with Engie in Irving, Texas and Orange Slovakia inked a ten-year deal with Enery. TeraWulf also locked down a 482MW electrical service agreement in Kentucky, and five data center operators in Ohio (including Meta, Amazon, and Google) chipped in $18 million to help offset rising utility bills for local residents – a small but telling gesture as community pushback grows.
US and International Development: Texas Build-Out, Australia's Land Rush
In development news, new Synergy Research data shows that just 20 markets account for 60% of global hyperscale capacity – 15 of which are in the US. Northern Virginia alone reportedly makes up 11% of the worldwide total. Meanwhile, CBRE expects Europe's market to grow another 20% this year alone.
In the US, AWS is investing another $6 billion into its Shreveport, Louisiana campus, bringing its total commitment in the state to $18 billion. Prometheus Hyperscale and Istmo Energy are teaming up on an up-to-2.5GW gas-powered campus in West Texas, and Meta filed for a new subsea cable connecting the US and Denmark with nearly 500Tbps of design capacity. But not every project is landing softly: Officials in Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania, rejected plans for five data centers after nearly 18,000 residents signed a petition, and a rumored project in Modesto, California, is already drawing public outcry over water and energy use.
Internationally, Italy approved an AI data center in Lazio, while AWS switched on a new UK availability zone near Bristol. Australia, meanwhile, continues its remarkable run of activity: Applications are moving forward for a 200MW facility in Melbourne, a multi-building campus in Queensland, and a 10-story building outside Brisbane, while modular builder DXN landed contracts for both a containerized HPC pod and a prefabricated facility at Melbourne Airport.
Next-Gen Tech: 6G's Rainbow Chip, IBM's Quantum Cooling
A team from Loughborough University and partners built a rice-grain-sized "rainbow" photonic chip capable of generating multiple stable millimeter-wave frequencies at once – a potential building block for 6G and dense optical interconnects. And IBM successfully linked and cooled two modular cryogenic systems to below 15 millikelvin, a step toward the kind of scalable quantum infrastructure IBM will need for its 2029 Quantum Starling system.