From Schneider Electric's biggest acquisition ever and Anthropic's $11.6 billion Akamai deal to AWS stopping NDAs, the stalled Ratepayer Protection Act, and a wave of gigawatt-scale nuclear and gas campuses, it's been an unusually eventful stretch for the sector. Plus, could your local EV charger double as a data center? Here's a roundup of the latest data center developments.

Market News: $22.6B PTC Deal, Akamai's $11.6B Anthropic Contract

Schneider Electric has agreed to buy industrial software firm PTC for $22.6 billion, its largest deal to date. It follows the $3.1 billion Cognite acquisition earlier this year and helps give Schneider an impressive end-to-end AI stack. Meanwhile, Anthropic will lease Akamai compute capacity in a seven-year, $11.6 billion deal that could reach roughly $20 billion. It isn't ironclad, though: Akamai's filing ties the commitment to delivery and availability requirements, and either side can exit under certain conditions.

On the silicon side, Synopsys and Amazon signed a $1 billion multi-year IP agreement for custom chips, with Amazon as lead customer for Synopsys' silicon IP business. Qualcomm and Huawei also struck a multi-year patent license spanning 5G, compute, AI, and networking, though the exact terms weren't disclosed. And in outage news, a cooling system failure and failed backup knocked out a data center in Basilicata, Italy, in late September, disrupting regional healthcare bookings. Officials ruled out a cyberattack.

Policy and Regulation: AWS Drops NDAs, Senate Blocks Ratepayer Bill

AWS says it has stopped using nondisclosure agreements with government agencies on its data center projects, per a blog post from CEO Matt Garman. The pledge came with familiar commitments, including covering utility upgrade costs so residents' bills don't rise. Last year, Microsoft also said it would no longer ask local governments to sign NDAs.

In Washington, Senate Democrats blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act in a 57-43 vote, calling it too weak and ineffective. The bill, which cleared the House 417-3, would have made data centers cover the full cost of grid and generation upgrades but didn’t require states to adopt the standards. Meanwhile, Denmark adopted an "emergency plan" that replaces first-come, first-served grid access with prioritization, pushing large data centers to the back of the queue starting October 12.

Energy and Power: Nuclear PPAs, Enhanced Geothermal Goes Live

Nuclear energy led this week's power deals. First, Google signed a massive 3.6GW package of agreements with Constellation. It includes a 20-year, 890MW nuclear PPA backing $4.3 billion in upgrades at 11 units across Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, plus a 15-year, 2.7GW deal across PJM that isn't tied to a specific plant. Not to be outdone, Amazon signed a 20-year, 690MW PPA for Maryland's Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant, enabling more than $3 billion in investment.

Google-backed Fervo Energy has made history in Utah, achieving first power at Cape Station to become the world’s first utility-scale enhanced geothermal project to reach commercial operations. Amazon also signed a PPA for Statkraft's Mossy Hill wind farm in Shetland, pushing its UK carbon-free portfolio past 1GW. On the grid side, the DOE unveiled $1.9 billion for 31 projects across 26 states under its SPARK initiative. With cost-share, the total commitment reaches $5.25 billion, aiming to unlock 23GW of capacity.

U.S. and International Development: Gigawatt Campuses, Growing Pushback

AWS filed a plan for a 36-building campus in Homer City, Pennsylvania, powered by a 4.5GW gas plant under construction. It's part of a roughly $20 billion Pennsylvania commitment Amazon pledged last year. Utah's proposal is even bigger: Valar Atomics' 9.4GW Project Beehive, first reported by NPR, would pair data centers with roughly 456 SMRs, fuel production, and waste storage on federal land.

In Texas, Google was named end user of Crusoe's 1GW-plus Goodnight Campus, a $29 billion project in Amarillo. Crusoe also filed for a $4.8 billion campus in Jayton, Texas. Applied Digital revealed its $3.2 billion Delta Forge 2 will be built in Alabama and added 75MW in North Dakota. In Canada, EverWind Fuels is eyeing data centers at its Nova Scotia green fuels plant.

Internationally, CX Tech filed plans for a £16.5 billion, 1GW campus at the former Chapelcross nuclear site in Scotland. In Finland, Applied Digital secured access to up to 1GW in its first non-U.S. project, and atNorth is planning a €2 billion, 75MW site in Salo, Finland. Italy could also get its largest data center, a 576MW Moncalieri facility, and Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is planning a €24 million AI data center. In Australia, CDC is exploring a gigawatt-scale campus in Wagga Wagga and HyperDC filed for a 400MW campus near Melbourne.

But friction sprang up elsewhere. Google's Finland buildout is under investigation after about 300 hectares of forest were cleared before environmental assessments finished. Residents fear a 1,000-year-old castle in Fife, Scotland could be destroyed to make way for a 600MW data center project. And in Sydney, Goodman pulled its 90MW application, citing an "evolved" regulatory environment.

Next-Gen Tech: EV Charger Edge Pods, Graphene Coolant

EV charging provider Xeal has launched Laitent, a platform that deploys waterless, parking-space-sized data center pods taking advantage of unused power capacity across 1,600 existing EV charging stations. Xeal claims EV chargers typically only use under 10% of their permitted load. The model could offer a shortcut around multi-year grid queues and water availability constraints for edge inference workloads.

Zella DC launched stackable micro data center boxes that offer 3kW to 15kW densities with hybrid air and liquid cooling. Meanwhile, advanced materials firm Haydale says its graphene additive boosts glycol coolants’ thermal conductivity by 28%, matching water’s cooling performance without thickening the fluid. And in San Francisco Bay, NetworkOcean ran a customer's AI workload on a single H100 powered by a 20kW floating solar array, with a 1MW deployment targeted for next year.