— We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure, Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen says in a statement.
Continue reading “The EU plans for «technological sovereignty» with huge investments”
For the first phase, SoftBank is offering €45 billion to build 3.1 GW of capacity at various sites in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031, ramping up at a later date.
— SoftBank Group’s AI data centers will support growing demand for high-performance computing from AI companies, cloud providers, enterprises, public institutions and research organizations, they write in their release.
France was selected because of its wide manufacturing base, but another important factor is it advanced power grid, fueled by generous amounts of nuclear energy.
SoftBank will partner with Schneider Electric on the project, which will also create «thousands» of advanced, high-skilled jobs, requiring local universities, engineering schools, and training institutions to step up.
SoftBank is a major investor in OpenAI and is deeply involved in the Stargate program to build out compute capacity. This effort seems separate from both.
Read more: SoftBanks release, Reuters, and TechCrunch.
— That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute, says CEO Dario Amodei, revealing their strain on infrastructure since at least April.
The company has now made a deal with SpaceX for instant access to their entire Colossus 1 supercomputer, consisting of some 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, totaling more than 300 megawatts.
Using all of that capacity should immediately improve access for Anthropic’s users, and they are already doubling rate limits for the Pro and Max plans, and is «considerably» increasing API rates, while removing «peak hours» restrictions.
Elon Musk says he approved the deal after evaluating Anthropic’s altruism, that xAI will be known as SpaceXAI and that they have already moved Grok training to the Colossus 2 cluster.
Read more: SpaceX announcement, Anthropic’s announcement, Anthropic on X, CNBC, Engadget.
The AI lab says 1 gigawatt of the new capacity on Amazon’s custom silicon will come online in late 2026, and is committing to spending $100 billion on Amazon over the next decade to «train and run Claude.»
The deal also includes an initial investment of some $5 billion from Amazon which will scale to $25 billion «in the future,» tied to «commercial milestones.»
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, has taken some flak for their gigantic $200 billion spend on AI infrastructure, but with this deal, they are recouping half of that:
—Anthropic’s commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon, Jassy says.
Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, Amazon’s release. Writeups on CNBC, TechCrunch, and Engadget.
— We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch, he writes according to CNBC. — We’re not going to be conservative in how we play this — we’re investing to be the meaningful leader, and our future business, operating income, and [cash flow] will be much larger because of it, he continues.
There are already deals incoming to support this claim, he writes, noting a $100 billion commitment from OpenAI for AI compute on their server farms.
AI server use at Amazon’s cloud unit has reached more than $15 billion in annualized revenue, Jassy writes, and now represents about 10% of the total for AWS, Reuters reports.
Read more: The shareholder letter (long), writeups on CNBC and Reuters.
They are also announcing that they are brining in new compute capacity, based on next generation Google TPUs that will start coming online in 2027.
The companies offer no detail the cost of the «partnership» or how much compute they are actually buying, but Broadcom Is hinting it’s around 3.5 GW, according to CNBC.
Anthropic also say they have doubled the rate of customers spending more than $1 million per year to 1,000, in just two months.
Claude now runs on Amazon’s Trainium chips, Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs. The latter are more used, and Amazon remains their primary cloud provider, Anthropic says.
Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, CNBC adds numbers.
The French AI lab is hoping to secure 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027, Reuters reports.
— Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe, says Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch.
The news comes hot on the heels of Mistral’s February startup of a €1.2 billion data center in Sweden, according to CNBC.
Mistral is the largest European AI lab, has contracts with the French armed forces, and has secured $3.1 billion in funding so far, TechCrunch writes.
Read more: Reuters, CNBC and TechCrunch.
This will then be attached to a 300 megawatt iron-air battery from Form Energy, ensuring continuous service to operations.
That will be the world’s largest commercially deployed battery, and can provide power to the data center for a whopping 100 hours, TechCrunch notes.
As part of their buildout, Google is announcing that they will pay for their electricity in full, and will also invest $50 million in Xcel Energy’s green energy program to place batteries across their grid.
— Google’s partnership with Xcel Energy reimagines how data centers can be served, Google writes.
Read more: Google’s announcement, Xcel’s presser, CNBC and TechCrunch.
The agreement will see the first gigawatt of GPUs and CPUs delivered in the second half of 2026, and includes several as-yet-to-debut rackable chips.
AMD and Meta have long been partners in developing custom chips, but these are specifically built for inference, the process of creating answers for user queries.
— This is an important step for Meta as we diversify our compute, says Mark Zuckerberg on the deal.
AMD entered into a similar deal with OpenAI in October, 2025, meaning it might soon be 20% owned by AI labs.
Read more: AMD press release, Meta’s release, and Reuters report.
It’s OpenAI’s second biggest market and looks set for a massive buildout of AI capacity in the years leading up to 2035.
Adani dishing out the dollars
First out is the Adani Group, pledging $100 billion to build data centers by 2035, which they expect to trigger «an additional $150 billion in secondary investments.» This should scale their data center portfolio from 2 gigawatts to 5 GW.
Continue reading “The hundreds of billions in AI investments flowing into India”
Meta, already a top customer for Nvidia, will use their chips in a «large-scale deployment» to build out data centers «optimized for AI training and inference,» they say.
The cost of the deal will likely run into the tens of billions of dollars or more, CNBC reckons, and includes access to future chips as well as the current Blackwell and Vera Rubin generations.
— We do expect a good portion of Meta’s capex to go toward this Nvidia build-out, chip analyst Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies tells CNBC.
Reuters notes that Meta is likely one of the top three customers accounting for more than half of Nvidia’s sales.
Read more: Meta announcement, Nvidia announcement. Writeups on CNBC, Reuters and The Verge.
ByteDance has been known to work with US chip producer Broadcom, and started seriously hiring chip specialists in 2022.
The new chips are set to be produced with Samsung in a deal that includes memory chips, which definitely sweetens the deal.
Production is advanced enough that Reuters’ sources say engineering samples are due by late March, which is the last stage before production.
A spokesperson for the company does not deny the report outright, but claims the information is «inaccurate,» Reuters writes.
Most US frontier labs are developing their own chips, as is Alibaba and Baidu.
Read the scoop at Reuters.
This means for instance that they will cooperate with power utility companies at each site to ensure they are «paying our own way on energy.»
That could entail building out the infrastructure for each site where needed, or simply strengthening the grid.
They also address water usage, and note that Stargate Abilene will use as much water annually as the community uses in a day, thanks to «innovations in the cooling water systems design.»
OpenAI is even committing to slowing down workloads on days with adverse conditions, to lighten the load on the grid.
There have been at least 25 data center cancellations in the USA due to opposition from local communities, Gizmodo reports.
They are typically worried about rising electricity and water costs, which OpenAI is now directly addressing.
Read more: OpenAI’s blog, Reuters, Bloomberg.
Friar says revenue and compute grow in tandem with the advent of more powerful models — that they «scale with intelligence,» so to speak.
Looking at the numbers, compute has gone from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to 1.9 GW in 2025, growing about 3x every year since ChatGPT’s debut.
Financially, OpenAI now has $20 billion in revenue, following the same curve as the compute scale and growing about 3x per year from $2 billion in 2024.
All this is of course before ads arrive on the free tier, and before OpenAI sees any results from its global rollout of the go subscription on their revenue.
On the compute side, OpenAI is chasing infrastructure like there is no tomorrow, closing in on more than 30 GW before 2030 in what would be truly explosive growth — and we can only wonder as to how advanced frontier AI models will get by then.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, writeups on Reuters, .
They produce much too high levels of nitrogen oxides, and must be regulated as combustion engines, the EPA says.
That means Musk’s and xAI’s Colossus plant will have to rethink their energy use, as they make widespread use of natural gas turbines to generate electricity for their facilities.
They will basically have to get Clean Air Act permits, and prove they aren’t harmful.
The local population have long been complaining of a rotten-egg-like stench in the atmosphere, CNBC writes, and smog is supposedly prevalent.
xAI uses 15 turbines for Colossus 1 and at one point had 59 turbines for Colossus 2, The Guardian writes.
Read more: The EPA Rule. Writeups on CNBC, Gizmodo and The Guardian.