From Nvidia lining up half a trillion dollars in outside financing and Governor Abbott hitting pause on nearly 50GW of Texas interconnection requests to Amazon posting a record-breaking AWS quarter and a mass PJM outage still sparking reliability concerns, it's been another eventful stretch in the industry. Plus, a floating data center that makes its own drinking water? Here's a roundup of the latest data center developments.

Market News: $500B Nvidia Blitz, AWS Record Revenue, T-Mobile Cuts

In market moves, Nvidia struck partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure buildouts. It’s a clear signal that even Nvidia doesn't want to fund the AI boom alone. On the hyperscaler side, AWS posted $42.2 billion in quarterly revenue, its fastest growth since 2021, as parent company Amazon's annual capex marches toward $220 billion.

In leasing news, Fermi America signed TensorWave to up to 650MW at its Project Matador site in Texas. At the same time, T-Mobile US cut more than 4,500 jobs in the first half of the year as parent Deutsche Telekom pushes a broader "workforce transformation."

Policy and Regulation: Texas Interconnection Audit, Polysilicon Tariffs

In policy news, Washington and state capitals both made big moves. President Trump signed an executive order imposing a 15% tariff on polysilicon – the raw material behind chips and solar panels – effective December 4. In Virginia, regulators ordered Dominion Energy to directly assign transmission costs to the data centers driving them, rather than spreading the bill across residential ratepayers.

The bigger story, however, is in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott directed the PUCT and ERCOT to audit every data center project seeking a grid connection before it can proceed. BloombergNEF estimates the pause puts roughly 20% of the U.S. data center pipeline at risk, with nearly 49.8GW of projects exposed and potential costs topping $8 billion by early 2027.

Energy and Power: Grid Failures, Bring-Your-Own-Power Boom

In utility news, grid stress remains front of mind following PJM’s largest outage on record last month, which saw nearly 4GW of data center capacity drop offline after a transmission line tripped and forced facilities onto backup power. Publicly addressing the incident, PJM noted that while the grid avoided major reliability impacts, it suffered sharp voltage and frequency swings, prompting the RTO to evaluate tighter interconnection reliability requirements and ride-through standards for large data center loads.

Meanwhile, Dominion Energy's pipeline has grown by more than 5GW since year-end, while Duke Energy's has expanded by 2.7GW, bringing its total electric service agreements to 7.6GW. Increasingly, operators aren't waiting on utilities at all. As Elon Musk's xAI began removing 69 unpermitted gas turbines in Memphis ahead of a permanent 1.2GW plant, SpaceX announced plans to power its TeraFab chip campus in Texas entirely off-grid. Fermi America also tapped Hillcore Energy Capital to build a 2.6GW gas plant feeding its Project Matador campus, Energy Vault signed a 1.25GW battery and grid-forming power deal with an unnamed Texas developer, and South Korea's HD Hyundai Heavy Industries agreed to supply 1GW of natural-gas engines to U.S. developer Corban Energy.

On the cleaner side of the ledger, Google signed a 155MW solar PPA with RWE in Oklahoma, Orange Polska extended a wind PPA with EDF through 2035 in Poland, and Poland-based developer Citylink struck a deal to route server waste heat into Wrocław's district heating network.

US and International Development: Record Absorption, Local Hurdles, Australian Expansion

In development news, recent reporting shows demand continuing to outpace supply across the globe. JLL reports North American data center absorption doubled year-over-year to a record 25GW in H1 2026, with vacancy pinned at 1% for a third straight year. CBRE strikes a similar tone, noting data centers will keep the U.S. real estate market resilient even as other commercial sectors stay cautious.

Not every U.S. project is landing, though: AWS walked away from a planned campus near Maryland's Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant, and Air Products dropped a 2.6 million sq ft proposal outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, after local officials rejected it.

Overseas, the global pipeline continues to expand. AI cloud startup Firebird.ai launched a 300MW Nvidia-powered facility in Armenia and developer Comtel unveiled a solar-powered "zero-impact" data center near Florence, Italy. And development is booming in Australia: GreenSquare proposed a 240MW campus in Melbourne, Centuria outlined plans for more than 250MW across existing and redeveloped sites, and Australia's CDC stayed busy on two fronts – filing for a 144MW campus in Sydney and eyeing a New Zealand site with Contact Energy.

Next-Gen Tech: Ammonia Engines, Drinking Water from a Data Center

In next-gen technology, two innovations are worth watching this week. Amogy and 2G Energy successfully tested an ammonia-to-power system called AMMDrive, designed to let operators skip multi-year grid queues by running on natural gas today and clean ammonia later.

Floating data centers are not a new concept, but Optimal Transit is adding an unusual twist to the offshore pitch: drinking water. It unveiled "Kraaken," a self-powered floating AI platform that combines ocean thermal energy with server waste heat. Beyond bypassing multi-year grid queues, a dual-purpose variant aims to export up to 40MW of clean electricity and 30 million liters of desalinated drinking water daily to coastal communities – while retaining 60MW for compute.