From Nvidia’s record milestone and a shift in grid connection approvals to massive new builds and the repurposing of old jet engines to power data centers, it’s been another busy couple of weeks in the data center sector. Here’s a roundup of the latest news shaping the industry.
Record Highs and Market Momentum
It’s been another stretch of big deals and bigger spend. Google and Anthropic announced a cloud deal worth tens of billions, giving Anthropic access to up to one million custom-designed TPUs and bringing more than a gigawatt of compute online in 2026. It represents one of the largest single-company TPU deployments to date.
Meanwhile, Meta formed a $27 billion joint venture with Blue Owl Capital to develop the Hyperion AI campus in Louisiana. As part of the agreement, Meta will retain 20% ownership and provide construction and property management. Meta is set to lease all of the campus’s facilities once construction is complete.
Nvidia has been making headlines across multiple fronts: It became the first company to reach a staggering $5 trillion valuation, cementing its role at the center of the AI revolution. Nvidia also announced a $1 billion investment in Nokia that targets AI networking and 6G readiness, while a rumored $1 billion infusion into AI startup Poolside could quadruple the startup’s valuation. Lastly, Nvidia is partnering with Oracle and the U.S. Department of Energy to build and power two AI supercomputers at Argonne National Laboratory.
Global Outages and Updates
South Korea’s devastating government data center fire continues to have consequences: Five individuals have been charged with professional negligence for their role in the incident that left most of the country’s digital public services offline. Roughly 60% of services have since been restored and work continues to bring the rest back online, according to officials. Amid the restoration efforts, AWS separately announced plans to invest $5 billion in South Korea data centers, building on a previous $4 billion commitment to the country made in June.
Alaska Airlines is conducting a wide-scale review of its IT systems after two major outages in three months, including one that grounded flights for eight hours in October. The airline said it’s examining critical systems that support operations to prevent future disruptions.
Amazon has released a detailed post-mortem report following its massive outage in late October, and it’s leaving some industry analysts uneasy – and unconvinced that the tech giant is doing enough to prevent it from happening again.
Keeping Pace with Growing Energy Demands
In energy news, The DOE is urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to fast-track grid connection approvals for new data centers and hybrid facilities over 20 MW. Under the proposed rules, review times could drop from years to just 60 days, and facilities would pay for any required network upgrades upfront.
Google signed a PPA with NextEra to restart Iowa’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, securing low-carbon power for AI workloads by 2029. At the same time, Fermi America signed two agreements to supply nuclear reactor equipment for its giant 11 GW campus in Amarillo, Texas, while also acquiring natural gas turbines for near-term operations.
Meanwhile, Meta secured 600 MW of solar energy from Engie, and Parker Hannifin will supply more than 1 GW of gas turbines to Stargate’s Abilene campus. Utility DTE Energy also finalized a 1.4 GW power deal with an unnamed hyperscaler, signaling continued large-scale energy procurement across the U.S.
This comes as OpenAI calls on the U.S. to significantly increase its investment in new energy capacity to support the AI boom. The company said the U.S. should add 100GW in new energy per year to help close the "electron gap" with China.
Local Development, Site Plans, and Policy
On the site development front, Google confirmed plans for a 390-acre campus in Morgan County, Indiana, joining its Fort Wayne project. Applied Digital secured a $5 billion, 15-year lease with an unnamed hyperscaler for 200 MW of IT load at its Polaris Forge 2 campus in North Dakota. Elsewhere, Amazon won a tax break for a $3 billion data center campus in Sidney, Ohio, and launched its second Secret Region in the U.S., dubbed AWS Secret-West, to support mission-critical workloads at the Secret US security classification level.
Not all projects are moving smoothly, however. In Georgia, developers withdrew a rezoning request in Jones County, while Athens-Clarke County denied a 2 million sq ft project. In other pushback news, Pennsylvania lawmakers have proposed a new rate class to prevent data center energy costs from burdening ratepayers.
Recycled Jet Engines and Quantum Connections
In innovation news, ProEnergy is repurposing jet engines into 48 MW gas turbines to provide temporary or supplemental power for data centers in a creative solution to ongoing turbine shortages. To make the jet engines suitable for use as power generators, they are modified with an expanded turbine section to convert engine thrust into shaft power.
Meanwhile, Nvidia unveiled NVQLink, which supposedly enables ultra-low-latency connections between quantum processors and traditional GPUs and CPUs. The company is calling it the start of the “quantum-GPU computing era.”
Lastly, Crusoe Energy Systems announced plans for limited GPU compute in orbit through its Starcloud satellite, expected to launch in late 2026 and offer space-based processing by 2027.