From California and Texas both tightening data center oversight to Microsoft laying out a 38GW five-year roadmap and Bell Canada quadrupling capacity on its expected $50 billion Saskatchewan campus, power and politics are setting the pace for the industry. Plus, is the first petabit-scale transatlantic cable coming? Here's a roundup of the latest data center developments.
Policy and Regulation: California's Cost Shift, Texas' Permitting Freeze
Regulators continue to tighten the screws. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping seven-bill package that shifts grid-upgrade costs for facilities of 25MW or larger onto operators, mandates power and water disclosures, and strips data centers of blanket environmental review exemptions.
Texas, meanwhile, hit pause entirely: Governor Greg Abbott froze new data center permits pending a large-scale ERCOT audit that he ordered last month. There are more than 474GW of interconnection requests – more than 90% tied to data centers – backing up the grid operator's queue. Elsewhere, Virginia's Loudoun County, the center of the data center industry, voted 7-1 to pause new applications for one year.
Overseas, the European Commission proposed disclosure rules for facilities above 500kW as the bloc seeks to triple its compute capacity. Victoria, Australia has proposed new rules that would require operators to bring their own renewable power and cooling water.
Energy and Power: Renewable PPAs Meet Gas and Nuclear Deals
On the renewables side, Oracle signed 1.7GW of wind agreements across ten Texas projects to feed its Abilene campus, and Meta signed a 144MW solar PPA with Apex Clean Energy in Texas – its seventh deal with the developer. Google is backing nuclear power uprates at Georgia Power's Vogtle and Hatch plants – adding roughly 96MW to the grid – pending state regulatory approval.
Gas continues filling in where renewables can't move fast enough. Developer New Era Energy & Digital locked in a 20-year gas PPA with Vistra subsidiary Luminant for its campus in Ector County, Texas. Kodiak Gas Services will supply 76MW behind-the-meter to an unnamed West Texas site backed by an investment-grade hyperscaler.
Market News: SpaceX's $41B Compute Business, Crusoe's $3.9B Raise
SpaceX's compute business keeps compounding: CFO Bret Johnson told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference that annual AI compute contract revenue has hit $41.1 billion, following a fresh $13.3 billion-a-year deal set to start billing this December. Developer Crusoe, meanwhile, raised $3.9 billion in a Series F, pushing its valuation to $30.9 billion, with Nvidia and Qatar's QIA among the backers funding both its megasite in Abilene, Texas and its truck-transportable "Spark" modular factories.
Global Development: Microsoft's 38GW Roadmap, Bell Canada's Mega-Build
Despite localized regulatory pushback, hyperscaler expansion isn't slowing down. Microsoft is reportedly targeting 38GW of capacity by 2032 – more than triple its current footprint, per Bloomberg – and just filed to develop ATL50, a two-building campus outside Atlanta. Aligned Data Centers broke ground on Project Phoenix, a 2GW, self-powered campus in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Meta is expanding its Eagle Mountain, Utah campus – the fourth expansion at the site – with closed-loop liquid cooling. Not everyone's cashing in, though. A Kentucky family turned down a $26 million offer to develop a data center on part of their farmland near Maysville.
Underscoring the long-term momentum in Texas regardless of the current permitting freeze, the state keeps racking up commitments. Digital Realty, CoreSite, DataBank, Colovore, and Hut 8 have collectively filed for over $1.6 billion in new projects spanning Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and Corpus Christi. North of the border, Bell Canada more than quadrupled its planned Saskatchewan campus to up to 1.2GW – a project that could top $50 billion at full buildout.
Internationally, Spain's Nabiax broke ground on a 100MW Madrid site, Poland's Polcom will build 40MW in Skawina, and Digital Realty entered Turkey through a joint venture for a 22MW campus in Ankara. Not every plan has survived: Developer East Gate withdrew its application for a 120MW site in Lombardy, Italy, after failing to submit required environmental data.
Next-Gen Tech: Quantum Comes to the Data Hall, Meta's Petabit Cable
IonQ will deploy its first on-premise quantum computer at Nvidia's Accelerated Quantum Research Center in Boston in 2027, co-located with a GB200 NVL72 rack to trial real-time quantum error correction. It’s one more sign that specialized compute is moving into the data hall alongside GPUs.
Meta unveiled Petal, a planned subsea cable set to become the first transoceanic link to reach petabit capacity between the US and France. Vodafone and Ericsson demonstrated network-native AI for real-time call translation, and LG launched an oil-free, refrigerant-free centrifugal chiller it says can cut cooling energy use by up to 30% compared to traditional free cooling that requires liquid.