Weekly Data Centre News - 18/08/23

Weekly Update! The big news this week was rumours of Tesla entering the data centre sector. Are we going to see battery powered AI operated facilities? Also plenty of other news to digest.

What has happened this week?

Reports

The latest Knight Frank / DC Byte report is out. This quarter's report focuses on the EMEA region, with a market analysis focus on the emerging data centre markets of Bucharest, Cairo, Casablanca, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Manchester, Munich, Nairobi, Vienna, Warsaw, and Zurich. Read here.

Data Centre Magazine released the 2023 top 100 companies list. Read here.

Europe

CapitaLand Ascendas REIT announced it has completed the acquisition of a Digital Realty data centre facility in Watford, North-West London. Read here.

Principal Asset Management has acquired a logistics site in Amsterdam which will be converted into 42MW data center for Switch DC. Read here.

British Land in talks to sell Vodafone-occupied data centers to Realty Income. Read here.

Russia’s state Nuclear Energy Corporation has acquired a 36MW data center in Moscow. Read here.

A consortium of UK universities is seeking vendors for an upcoming data center contract. Read here.

Middle East & Africa

IXAfrica has signed a term sheet to purchase 11 acres of prime land for the construction of its second data centre campus in Nairobi, Kenya. Read here.

First phase of $348mln data centre opened in Salalah, Oman. Read here.

APAC

NextDC is to open an Edge data centre in Pilbara to service mining industry. Read here.

Chinese data center operator Chindata to go private in $3.16 bln deal. Read here.

India to get "million qubit" quantum computing-focused data center. Read here.

Construction begins on one of Japan's largest data centers in Tokyo suburb. Read here.

South Korean Gov't are to develop data centers with domestically made AI chips. Read here.

CDC Data Centres' New Zealand business made a pre-tax profit of $249.4 million. Read here.

North America

Tesla plot “first of its kind” data centre. Read here.

West Virginia has been selected for $2bn hydrogen production facility and data centre campus. Read here.

Loudoun County's Leesburg council has unanimously passed design guidelines for any data centers in the town's limits. Read here.

Brookfield and Digital Realty are reportedly eyeing acquiring struggling Cyxtera. Read here.

Google pours $350M into Iowa data center project. Read here.

US real estate advisory and services firm Newmark Group, Inc. has launched a data center practice group to offer consulting around data center finances. Read here.

Landover Mall site earmarked for FBI headquarters could become data center instead. Read here.

Virginia’s King George County looks to approve 7.5m sq ft data center park for Amazon. Read here.

Still no decision on Amazon data center proposal in Virginia's King George county. Read here.

South America

Google is set to land its Firmina subsea cable outside Buenos Aires in Argentina this week. Read here.

Cloud computing company Vultr has expanded its capacity in Sao Paulo, Brazil, by 200 percent, continuing its plans to develop its footprint in Latin America. Read here.

Other interesting articles

Schneider Electric launched the DDI Podcast to help demystify the sector. Read here.

Scotland’s climate, geography and natural resources point to bright future as ‘green’ data centre hub. Read here.

AI chips could save future data centres money: Nvidia. Read here.

Why it matters where your data is stored. Read here.

Using AI For Secure, Efficient, Resilient And Sustainable Data Centers. Read here.

Inside Data Centre Podcast

In this weeks episode I talk Data Center market intelligence with Colby Cox at DC Byte. Listen here.

Have a great week.