From massive Oracle layoffs and Anthropic’s plans to sue the U.S. government to telecom updates from Mobile World Congress and a slew of infrastructure and energy investments, it’s been another packed stretch for the sector. Plus, powering AI with fly brains? Here’s a roundup of the latest data center developments.

AI Infrastructure Spending Hits New Highs

AI infrastructure investments show no signs of slowing down. OpenAI announced plans to use 2GW of Amazon Trainium accelerator capacity and expand its cloud agreement with AWS by as much as $100 billion. The deal commits OpenAI to both current Trainium3 chips and next-generation Trainium4 processors expected later this decade.

Meanwhile, Meta and AMD struck a multi-year agreement covering up to 6GW of AMD Instinct GPUs, aligning their hardware and software roadmaps to build AI systems tailored to Meta’s workloads. AMD is also expanding its ecosystem strategy through a $250 million partnership with Nutanix, which will integrate AMD’s Epyc CPUs, Instinct GPUs, and ROCm software into Nutanix cloud and Kubernetes platforms for agentic AI workloads across edge, on-prem, and cloud environments.

Nvidia, for its part, is strengthening its supply chain. The chip giant announced a $2 billion investment in optical networking specialist Coherent, securing capacity for advanced laser and optical components increasingly critical to AI clusters.

Policy, Politics, and Industry Tensions Surface

One of the more dramatic developments involves Anthropic, which plans to sue the U.S. government after the Department of Defense labeled the company a “supply chain risk.” The designation followed a dispute over the potential military use of the Claude AI model for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weaponry. Anthropic reportedly refused to remove those "red lines" in its terms of service, which the DOD took issue with. The unprecedented situation raises broader questions about whether AI developers can enforce ethical guardrails once their technology enters government systems.

Elsewhere, Oracle is reportedly preparing thousands of layoffs as it attempts to free up capital for a rapidly expanding AI data center buildout. Some reports suggest the layoffs could impact up to 30,000 employees.

At the policy level, telecom leaders speaking at Mobile World Congress warned that Europe’s ambitions for digital sovereignty could falter without regulatory reform allowing greater consolidation and infrastructure investment.

Telecom Players Accelerate the Road to 6G

Speaking of Mobile World Congress, the event also produced a cluster of announcements centered on AI-native telecom infrastructure. Nvidia announced an alliance with companies including Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, and Nokia to develop open-source 6G platforms, embedding AI across RAN, edge, and core telecom systems.

Separately, Ericsson and Intel are partnering to accelerate the industry’s readiness for AI-driven 6G deployments, focusing on cloud-native networking, compute infrastructure, and platform-level security.

AT&T, meanwhile, reported that it has completed more than 50% of its nationwide radio replacement program as part of its Open RAN rollout, recently completing a live Open RAN call on its commercial network using Ericsson basebands and Fujitsu radios. And in Europe, Samsung and Orange are expanding their virtualized RAN and Open RAN deployments following successful pilot programs across the continent. Intel also introduced its Xeon 6+ CPUs, designed to support AI-driven telecom and edge workloads.

Complementing these initiatives, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to hold a vote later this month to speed up the retirement of legacy copper lines in favor of new, high-speed networks.

Energy Deals Surge

A consortium led by BlackRock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT has agreed to acquire renewable power producer AES in a $33.4 billion take-private deal, one of the largest private-equity transactions in the U.S. power sector. The move signals strong investor confidence that AI-driven electricity demand will continue to surge.

Meanwhile, French utility Engie agreed to acquire UK Power Networks for £10.5 billion, gaining control of the largest electricity distribution network in the UK. Another major investment in Europe came from energy giant E.ON, which plans to spend a staggering $56 billion upgrading European electricity grids to handle growing AI data center demand.

Big players are also securing more renewable capacity. Meta signed an 80MW solar power purchase agreement with MN8 Energy in Pennsylvania to help support its data center operations. And in Norway, Bulk Infrastructure signed a 10-year hydropower PPA with Å Energi tied to the development of a new hydroelectric plant supporting its Vennesla data center campus.

At the White House, leaders from major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon signed a voluntary, non-binding pledge to fund energy and transmission infrastructure needed to support their expanding data center footprints and mitigate concerns of rising ratepayer electricity bills.

Global Data Center Development

Research from CBRE suggests that new capacity under construction in primary U.S. markets has declined slightly for the first time since 2020, largely due to power procurement and permitting delays.

Despite these speed bumps in mature markets, the global construction pipeline remains active. Notable international developments include AWS committing €33.7 billion to data center infrastructure in Spain’s Aragón region and Vantage Data Centers and Altarea’s 400MW facility planned in Bordeaux, France. There’s also a 500MW hyperscale campus planned in Bełchatów, Poland, set to be one of Eastern Europe’s largest. Meanwhile, Digital Realty is expanding into new markets, acquiring a facility in Lisbon, Portugal, and purchasing Bulgarian operator Telepoint. Elsewhere, Australian developer Goodman Group broke ground on a 61MW Sydney data center, while operator CDC Data Centres opened a 155MW campus in Melbourne.

AWS is planning a $12 billion data center expansion in Louisiana, with projects across Caddo and Bossier parishes. Elon Musk’s xAI is also expanding its Tennessee footprint, proposing a $659 million building near its Memphis data center cluster. Google, meanwhile, announced its first data center in Minnesota and confirmed it’s behind another controversial, 403-acre campus project in Hermantown, Minnesota. Google has also acquired 900 hectares of land in Finland for future development.

Innovations Push the Boundaries of Compute

Several experimental technologies also surfaced this week. First, taking direct inspiration from the neural architecture of fly brains, DARPA launched the O-CIRCUIT program, which aims to develop biological processing units built from living neural tissue. The “wetware” this program hopes to create would be capable of performing machine learning tasks at extremely low power levels, targeting AI training and inference at the edge.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s Taara unveiled an integrated silicon photonics chip designed to move data using light rather than electrical signals, potentially reducing interconnect power consumption by up to 90%. By integrating optical components directly into the chip, Taara hopes to bypass the scaling limits of copper to deliver terabit-scale bandwidth for AI clusters.

Another unconventional concept comes from startup Aikido, which introduced a floating offshore wind platform with an integrated modular AI data center inside its hull.

On a lighter note, a new data center simulator game – aptly named Data Center – is set to launch soon, letting players design and operate their own facilities.