Data Center Infrastructure
Articles (30)
Brookhaven's GridFM 2.0 Award Tests AI Against the Interconnection Bottleneck
DOE is funding a grid model designed to evaluate 1 billion scenarios a day. But queue delays arise as much from process, staffing, speculative requests, and construction as from solver time.
Who Pays for the Wires: The AI Power Question Moves From Generation to Rate Design
Four jurisdictions, four approaches: an unapproved Ohio settlement, a TVA board-set rate, a contested FERC proceeding in Wisconsin, and a Texas audit of its large-load queue.
Bitcoin Miners Didn't Bring AI Compute. They Brought Grid-Connected Megawatts.
Eight converted bitcoin miners hold about 5.7 GW of AI leases. Under 1 GW is live. The rest is contracted and awaits phased construction and energization.
Quantinuum Formalizes Quanta Manufacturing Partnership, but Production Terms Remain Undisclosed
Joint engineering is underway. No volumes, economics, dates, or component assignments disclosed. The IPO prospectus already named Quanta Computer a partner.
U-M Selects Preferred Site for Its Supercomputing Center, Beyond Local Zoning Review
Michigan law gives the university broad control over its land, but utility service, environmental permits, and political challenges remain unresolved.
OCP Maps the Co-Packaged Optics Stack. Photonic Die Testing Remains an Open Problem.
Open Compute Project's 294-page vision assigns an owner to each layer of the co-packaged optics stack, except one: photonic die testing, which the paper itself labels unowned.
A New Bottleneck for AI Power: A 2031 Gas-Turbine Slot
As data-center developers add on-site generation to bridge utility delays, the grid queue is being joined by queues for turbines, air permits, gas infrastructure, storage, and EPC capacity.
Sophia Space's Orbital Data Center Patent Trades Compute Density for Radiator Area
A worked example budgets 259 W of solar output per square meter of tile, implying a similar heat load. SpaceX's draft AI1 makes the opposite supercomputing bet: hotter liquid cooling and pumps.
FERC's grid fast lane comes with a curtailment clause
FERC is pushing grid operators to create faster paths for large loads. The price may be flexibility when the system runs short.
AI's Power Moat Is Already Held: Contracted Megawatts Are the Buildout's Scarcest Asset
Shells rise in 18 to 24 months; grid power averages four years. The biggest AI builders have already contracted the firm megawatts everyone else is still queuing for.
NVIDIA's 45°C Cooling Spec Isn't New Physics. It's a Forcing Function for the Supercomputing Data Center.
NVIDIA specs every MGX rack (GB200, GB300, Vera Rubin) for 45°C inlet water. Warm-water cooling is a decade old; the default on 200 kW-class racks is what's new.
One GPU in Orbit, a Million Satellites on Paper: Inside the Orbital Data Center Filing Arms Race
Since Starcloud flew the first H100 last November, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Starcloud, and a five-month-old startup have filed with the FCC for constellations totaling more than a million satellites. The physics hasn't moved as fast as the paperwork.
The Electrician Bottleneck: Skilled Trades Increasingly Gate the AI Supercomputer Buildout
The GPU supply chain has the industry's attention. But the constraint that increasingly decides when an AI factory energizes is no longer the chip. It is power delivery, and the licensed electricians who commission it.
Kajaani: a sovereign-plus-EuroHPC supercomputing campus comes into focus
Finland's new 33.9 PF Roihu supercomputer triples national capacity and shares its hydroelectric Kajaani site with EuroHPC's LUMI - a two-tier sovereign-plus-EuroHPC campus under one operator.
The 800V DC Rack Transition: How Rubin Ultra Is Rewiring the Supercomputing Industry's Last 50 Feet
NVIDIA has published the architecture. OCP and the supplier alliance have published the spec and the timeline. The colocation operators have published, so far, very little.
AI Training Power Demand Is Outrunning Grid Build Times. xAI Bet It Could Outrun Regulators Too.
xAI operates 46 unpermitted gas turbines at its Southaven power plant. A federal court ruling will determine if the turbine-first playbook is viable.
Nebius's $50 Billion Sells Out. Public Science Gets None of It.
Nebius's $50B backlog: 94% to Meta and Microsoft, zero to NAIRR, CloudBank, or DOE Genesis. The largest neocloud sells out before science can access it.
Apple's Mac Shortage Signals Memory Supply Chain Has Reorganized Around Data Center AI
Apple cut Mac memory ceilings and delayed M5 Ultra by four months as HBM production for data center AI consumes edge LPDDR5X allocation.
Orbital Compute in 2026: What Has Flown, What Is Slideware, and What the Physics Allows
Hardware has reached orbit and SpaceX has filed for a million-satellite constellation. Thermal physics, launch cadence, and bandwidth still push gigawatt orbital AI to post-2030, at best.
When the Grid Says No: Denmark and the New Shape of the Power Question
Energinet didn't pause grid connections in a contested metro or a zoning fight - it paused them because 60 GW of queued demand met a 7 GW national peak, and the math stopped working.
Vera Rubin's Memory Stack Is Korean. How Three Vendors Got There Tells You Why It Will Stay That Way.
Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron converged on SOCAMM2 mass production within six weeks for NVIDIA's Vera Rubin. Korean suppliers now control both memory tiers.
Slingshot Held Performance Under AI Traffic Patterns That Collapsed InfiniBand by 5x on Production Exascale
ISC 2026 research on LUMI, Leonardo, CRESCO8: Slingshot held performance; InfiniBand collapsed 5x under Incast, the AI gradient-sync traffic pattern.
HBM Allocation, Not HBM Supply, Is the 2026 AI Infrastructure Story
HBM scarcity has moved beyond semiconductor supply into system planning. Accelerator availability, server bill-of-materials, cluster economics, and 2026 data center buildouts are all being rewritten around memory - not compute.
Anthropic Locks 3.5 GW of Google TPU Capacity as Commercial AI Pre-Purchases Infrastructure Scientific Computing Will Need
Broadcom will supply Anthropic with 3.5 GW of Google TPU capacity through 2031; ~23-35x the power of DOE's largest planned science supercomputer.
Nvidia's $1 Trillion Backlog Hits the Grid Capacity Wall
Nvidia projects $1T in Blackwell orders through 2027, but 72% of operators cite grid capacity as the primary constraint. Power now limits AI.
A Missile Can Take Down an Availability Zone. That's Enough.
Iranian drone strikes took down AWS availability zones in Dubai and Bahrain, forcing a global reassessment of data center siting.
100 Gigawatts: The Data Center Supercycle That's Rewriting Energy Policy
Power has replaced transistor density as the binding constraint on computing growth. The consequences are reshaping everything from real estate markets to geopolitics.
ORNL's Next-Generation Data Center Institute: National Lab Expertise Meets the AI Buildout
The people who built Frontier - the world's first exascale supercomputer - are now designing the next generation of AI data centers. The hyperscalers should be paying attention.
Agentic AI in 2026: The Infrastructure Isn't Ready for What's Coming
Chatbot inference is stateless and cheap. Agentic AI is persistent, multi-step, and compute-hungry. The data center architectures built for one don't work for the other.
NVIDIA's Vera Rubin Is a Capex Grenade - and Every Hyperscaler's 2027 Budget Knows It
The Blackwell-to-Rubin transition is a forcing function for the entire data center industry.