From Anthropic’s reported second $45 billion compute deal and Google Cloud’s Vera Rubin launch to Trump’s “dividend” pitch and Amazon’s Germany pledge, it’s been another busy stretch for the sector. Plus, a generator that pulls water out of the air? Here’s a roundup of the latest data center developments.
Market News: Anthropic’s Second Nscale Deal, Vera Rubin Goes GA
Anthropic is reportedly in talks to lease more capacity from Nscale in a deal worth up to $45 billion, according to Bloomberg – its second agreement of that size with the neocloud. The 460MW lease would cover a second building at Nscale’s West Virginia campus and include Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips.
Google Cloud, meanwhile, announced general availability for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 platform via bare-metal A5X instances starting next month. Built for large-scale reinforcement learning and agentic AI, the architecture pairs Vera CPUs and Rubin GPUs with Google’s Virgo networking and liquid cooling, scaling to 80,000 GPUs per site and 960,000 across multi-site clusters.
In outage news, Google Cloud experienced a major outage in its London region on October 20th, disrupting UK banks, businesses, and courts. The disruption hit services including GKE, Cloud Run, and BigQuery Data Transfer Service, according to The Register. Google says it resolved the issue in roughly eight to nine hours.
Policy and Regulation: Dividends, Moratoriums, and Grid Caps
President Trump suggested that developers pay local residents a “dividend” to win over communities, arguing that unpopular projects can gain support once a financial deal is struck. Local officials, meanwhile, are testing the brakes. Memphis councilors split 6–6 on an 18-month moratorium and instead approved a 135-day pause on new applications. In Virginia, Sen. Russet Perry proposed a three-year statewide moratorium, which would start July 1, 2027.
Overseas, governments are tightening grid and power requirements. Israel capped new data centers at 200MW and will require NIS 2 million in guarantees per requested megawatt. Greece drafted legislation that would require 60% renewable power and make investors cover grid connection and reinforcement costs.
Energy and Power: SMRs, PPAs, and Record Power Failures
In energy news, Amazon and utility AEP are partnering to explore up to 960MW of X-energy SMRs in Indiana, with 12 Xe-100 units supplying Amazon’s data centers and AEP’s regional grid. Amazon will fund the project and be the first offtaker. Microsoft, meanwhile, signed a 20-year deal with NiSource starting in 2028, adding roughly 1.1GW to the utility’s portfolio for its northern Indiana campus.
Google signed a 20-year PPA with AEP for a 702MW Bloom Energy fuel cell project in Wyoming, and expanded its Entergy Arkansas partnership with a 440MW solar PPA for its West Memphis campus. In Indiana, regulators approved AES Indiana’s $1.3 billion solar, storage, and transmission project for Google’s Monrovia site – with Google covering all costs.
On the grid and hardware side, FERC approved PJM’s data center database but rejected proposals that would have let PJM temporarily cut power to facilities during peak demand. Vantage signed a 1GW solid-state transformer deal with Heron Power to support 800 VDC racks, with Heron targeting over 98.5% efficiency.
Reliability continues to be a concern. According to new data, data center fires and power failures have more than doubled since 2024, with UPS and battery rooms being the most common failure points. Lastly, AT&T reiterated its commitment to modernizing its technology, saying just 1% of eligible customers still use legacy copper.
US and International Development: Public Land Bids, Amazon’s $16B Germany Pledge
The US Bureau of Land Management is considering 35 data center-related applications on public land, according to the Center for Western Priorities. That includes 17 campuses and a 9,000-plus-acre proposal in Utah. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, is seeking a builder for a $4 billion mission-critical Space Command facility in Alabama, due by December 2031.
Digital Realty is eyeing a gigawatt-scale campus in Kokomo, Indiana, and Meta was named as the company behind a nearly 3,000-acre project in Mason County, Kentucky. In Texas, Soluna filed for a 112MW facility in Willacy and is teaming up with Applied Digital on a 50MW site. Not every plan survives, though: Amazon withdrew its Ashburn, Virginia application after pushback from local officials.
Internationally, Anthropic was named as the end user of EverWind’s Nova Scotia project under a 20-year lease. Amazon pledged €16 billion in Germany for 2027, covering data centers, AI infrastructure, Amazon Leo, and Prime Video, with €4.8 billion earmarked for AWS’s Frankfurt-area expansion. And a 1GW campus was proposed beside a solar farm in Norfolk, UK.
In Australia, Iren targets a 900MW campus near Wagga Wagga, while DigiCo leased 71MW of its Sydney SYD1 facility to an unnamed tech firm, leaving it fully leased. Construction also advanced on Digital Realty’s 22MW site in Ankara, Turkey, NorthC’s facility in Geneva, Switzerland, and atNorth’s 40MW expansion in Espoo, Finland.
Next-Gen Tech: Water from Air, AI-RAN Milestone, Meta’s Advancements
Aquaria launched a pilot of its Hydrogrid system, a modular atmospheric water generator that pulls moisture from the air to produce water on-site. Each stackable 40-foot container yields up to 5,300 gallons daily and can be retrofitted without altering existing cooling plumbing, giving operators a way to sidestep municipal water constraints.
Riverway Group and Offshore Data Center, meanwhile, are planning lightweight floating platforms that burn “stranded” offshore natural gas – gas too remote or undervalued to pipe to shore – to power on-board data centers and industrial units. A closed-loop system uses surrounding seawater for cooling, avoiding long transmission lines and pipelines.
Meta detailed its next-gen AI networking roadmap, including custom 102.4 Tb/s switches, a flattened network design, and a layer linking gigawatt-scale campuses into one training network. T-Mobile, Nokia, and Nvidia claimed the world’s first AI-RAN voice call on a live commercial network. Finally, the DOE awarded $159 million to 12 Genesis Mission projects. The initiative pairs federal supercomputers with AI foundation models to speed up research in areas like fusion energy, geothermal, and quantum computing.