#data-centers

#data-centers

"If you subscribe to our worldview that bringing superintelligence at scale at very low cost is going to be transformative, you try to figure out - how can I invest in that and take the least amount of risk?"

Antin is a European infrastructure investor with offices in Paris, London, and New York. The company focuses on investments in sectors such as digital infrastructure, energy, transportation, and social services. In the digital domain, Antin has previously invested in data center and connectivity companies in various European countries, including a regional data center platform in the United Kingdom. This has given the company experience in scaling up colocation and network services within regulated and competitive markets.

As data center power density and uptime expectations rise, it's predicted that we'll see a rapid growth in the use of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in the next three to five years. While there are utilities working on flexible load tariffs for which data center operators could use storage when called upon instead of curtailing, many are turning to off-grid solutions because interconnection for new loads is taking too long, says Allison Weis, Global Head of Energy Storage, Power, and Renewables at Wood Mackenzie.

Enhanced geothermal startup Fervo Energy has raised $462 million to complete its first large-scale power plant and begin development on several others as it races to provide electricity to a power-hungry grid. The new funds will help the company continue work on its 500-megawatt Cape Station power plant in Utah while starting development on several others, Sara Jewett, senior vice president of strategy at Fervo, told TechCrunch.

San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, is now ground zero in California's battle over how to govern the rise of data centers used to power artificial intelligence. The county seat of Santa Clara is touting its partnership with Pacific Gas & Electric, claiming the city is "the West Coast's premier destination for data center development." The investor-owned utility now estimates it has enough capacity in its planning pipeline to push the city's electricity use to almost three times its current peak.

More than 230 groups including Food & Water Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Greenpeace are demanding a pause on the construction of any new data centers in the US until stronger regulations are in place to prevent soaring electricity rates, water use, and pollution.

AI preemption would not apply to local infrastructure. That's a separate issue," Sacks wrote. "In short, preemption would not force communities to host data centers they don't want.

Civil rights groups say these impacts resemble earlier patterns seen with highways, refineries and manufacturing: pollution concentrated where political resistance is weakest and property values are lowest. Data centers can also consume millions of gallons of water per day and use as much electricity as a small city, driving up energy and water use costs for poor residents. Zoom in: A supercomputer data center built by Elon Musk's xAI in Southwest Memphis, a historically Black neighborhood, faces a legal challenge from the NAACP.

Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI's strain on power grids. AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday.

The data center boom is fully underway, and the numbers are staggering: billions of dollars in costs, millions of square feet worth of buildings, gigawatts of energy, and millions of gallons of water used per day. But before these AI-fueling behemoths can get up and running, there's an extensive amount of prep work needed to build the infrastructure those data centers rely upon, with a whole other set of staggering costs, material flows, and resource requirements.

In a complaint filed on November 25 with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Monitoring Analytics, LLC, an independent market monitor for PJM, requested that the regulator mandate that the energy wholesaler only add large data centers to its system if all customers can be reliably served. "PJM is currently proposing to allow the interconnection of large new data center loads that it cannot serve reliably and that will require load curtailments (black outs) of the data centers or of other customers at times," the complaint read.

Before getting into the details, Roberto Ytaysaba, who is from Brazil, wants to make one thing perfectly clear: neither he nor the Anace Indigenous people, whom he leads, are against progress. We're not against progress if it respects the communities, nature, spirituality, the autonomy of [native] peoples and Convention 169, he clarifies, one recent morning in his village. They've had electricity here since the 1980s. The school teaches ethnomathematics to the children.

During the months following OpenAI's announcement of its blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT just over three years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai pulled the fire alarm. The search giant's management issued a "code red " over what Pichai saw as an imminent disruption to its core business - a warranted level of caution, in retrospect, considering ChatGPT's meteoric rise in popularity and influence.

For two decades, the playbook for Big Tech was fairly simple and extremely successful: Create disruptive innovations, deliver blinding growth rates and keep a lid on spending. A handful of behemoths like Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. used this formula to seize market share from legacy businesses and power the US stock market to record after record.

Doherty's story began when he noticed a rise in bizarre medical conditions among the county's 45,000 residents, linked to toxins in the local water. Working with the county health office, the rancher-turned-official began a survey of 70 wells throughout his jurisdiction - 68 of which, his testing found, violated the federal limit for nitrates in drinking water. Of the first 30 homes he visited, Doherty told RS that 25 residents had recently had miscarriages, while six had lost a kidney.

Digital Realty and a consortium of Equinix and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board are both trying to acquire the Scandinavian company atNorth. Partners Group, the owner of atNorth, is reportedly aiming for around €4.5 billion for the pan-Nordic data center operator. This is according to Bloomberg, based on sources. atNorth operates data centers in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. Partners Group acquired the company in January 2022.

That's the warning from Wall Street and investors, if the recent pace of mega bond offerings from the likes of Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. continues in 2026. These sales have capped a record year of global issuance. With tech firms expected to turn to debt for as much as $1.5 trillion by 2028 to fund expansion in artificial intelligence and data centers, that could widen spreads across the whole market, Morgan Stanley argues.

Global investors are focusing on Samsung Electronics as the group sets out a five-year artificial intelligence investment programme worth $310 billion over the coming five-year period, with analysis from Sunnov Investment Pte. Ltd. highlighting how the plan reshapes expectations for capital spending across the semiconductor industry. The commitment concentrates on AI specific semiconductors and on domestic manufacturing capacity in South Korea.

A Texas company has paid well over $90 million to buy a pair of data centers in Santa Clara in a sign that investors still hunger for these sites amid the artificial intelligence boom. The data centers are located at 4650 and 4700 Old Ironsides drives in Santa Clara, a short distance from Levi's Stadium. Centersquare, a Texas-based data center-oriented real estate firm, acted through affiliates to pay $97 million in cash for the adjacent data centers,