Thursday, October 15, 2026
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Bill Gates-founded TerraPower plans to announce its first data center project this year, betting that its molten-salt energy storage gives its nuclear reactor an edge over rivals competing to power AI infrastructure.
Relativity Networks raised $22 million in SAFE note funding to deploy hollow-core fiber that transmits data 50% faster than conventional fiber.
Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, down from $6.9 billion last September, to fund its shift from building AI chips to running a neocloud on Nvidia hardware.
Nvidia will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the SoftBank- and OpenAI-linked data center developer building a facility that could scale up to 8 gigawatts.
A new forecast from energy research firm Noreva warns that natural gas prices could triple in parts of the U.S. as AI data center demand collides with tightening supply.
Nvidia secured up to $500 billion for AI data centers, backed by a promise to cover up to 25% of value lost on GPU collateral.
AI nuclear power firm Fermi has hired Lee McIntire as CEO, more than three months after firing co-founder Toby Neugebauer, as it lands its first customer lease.
Battery startup Form Energy raised $750 million to expand manufacturing of its iron-air batteries, which can discharge power for up to 100 hours.
Amazon's planned on-site power plant for a Pecos County, Texas data center is permitted to release 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the New York Times reports.
AI lab Mirendil has signed a multiyear Google Cloud partnership worth upward of $100 million to scale its self-improving AI research, TechCrunch has learned.
Anthropic has reportedly signed a $10 billion, six-year cloud-compute deal with AI cloud startup Volta, according to Bloomberg, as part of a broader push to expand its compute capacity.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state's utility commission and grid operator to audit every new data center project after ERCOT's connection-request queue swelled to 474 gigawatts this year.
AI infrastructure company Runware announced on Tuesday the launch of Sonic Inference Pod, a single transportable modular data center it says can offer inference at higher quality but lower cost than other serverless inference platforms and GPU clouds.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a startup founded in May, emerged from stealth with $10.75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz to build a network of laser-equipped satellites linking data centers from orbit.
Superblocks has signed a multiyear joint marketing agreement with AWS that lets its vibe-coding tool run inside the private clouds of AWS enterprise customers, part of a broader push by cloud providers to keep AI orchestration and app-building tools off frontier labs' platforms.
Nuclear startup Valar Atomics has raised $1 billion in equity in a round led by Sequoia, with partner Shaun Maguire joining its board, plus a $200 million credit line from Erebor and other banks.
SpaceX says it will remove the unpermitted gas turbines powering xAI's Memphis-area data centers, but the last of them won't be gone until July 2027.
Amazon's stock jumped nearly 10% after strong cloud growth, underscoring a pattern where investors reward AI infrastructure providers even as they stay skeptical of the AI labs and startups actually driving the spending.
British AI neocloud Nscale is reportedly paying $1.65 billion for Anyscale, the AI workload-scaling startup behind the open-source Ray framework, as it looks to capture more of its customers' AI spending.
PJM, the largest US grid operator, will curtail power to data centers and other large users during shortages starting June 2027, after a capacity auction fell short.