BBC reporting shows China’s data center boom is spreading from coastal megacities into rural plains in the north and northwest, tying AI compute expansion to national energy layout and regional rebalancing goals.
NVIDIA officially launched on September 13 the RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell professional graphics card targeting professional workstations, edge computing and mid-scale inference scenarios. The card features the same core count as the consumer flagship RTX 5090 but comes with 96GB of ECC memory, approximately 40% improvement in double-precision floating-point performance, and a stricter power-management scheme, mainly targeting computer-aided design, building information modeling, complex scientific computing and mid-scale AI inference workloads. This is the first time NVIDIA has adopted the same core count across its professional and consumer product lines, and is seen by the industry as a strategic signal of NVIDIA further squeezing its discrete-graphics competitors in the professional graphics market.
Qualcomm announced an AI chip agreement with Amazon on September 8 to provide custom AI inference chips for Amazon Web Services, while also granting Amazon a right to purchase approximately $4 billion in Qualcomm stock. The deal pushed Qualcomm shares up about 10 percent in after-hours trading, underscoring the intensifying AI computing arms race.
Chip giant Nvidia announced a $100 billion investment to build a hyperscale data center in Ohio in partnership with OpenAI, marking the largest single investment in AI infrastructure in history.
Crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital has acquired 500 acres of land in McGregor, Texas, for its second AI data center campus. The campus is expected to generate at least $130 million in local tax revenue.
[Brief] Microsoft Announces 2GW Data Center Campus in Texas Microsoft announced on June 22 it will build a new data center campus in Pecos, Texas, adding approximately 2GW of global data center capacity. This is the company’s largest single expansion in history, with tens of billions of dollars invested over five to seven years. Peak construction is expected to support over 6,000 construction jobs and create hundreds of permanent operations positions. ...
The U.S. Department of Justice has intervened in a pollution lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, citing national security concerns to block the case from proceeding. The move has sparked fierce debate over the balance between security and public health.
[Brief] Hut 8 Shares Surge Over 30 Percent on 9.8 Billion Dollar AI Data Center Lease According to CoinDesk, Bitcoin miner Hut 8 announced a long-term hyperscale AI infrastructure contract in Texas, including options that could bring the total value to $9.8 billion. Following the news, Hut 8 shares surged over 30 percent. The company is accelerating its transition from traditional mining operations to AI infrastructure. Source: CoinDesk
Hut 8 Secures Massive AI Data Center Lease Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 shares jumped over 30% after signing a long-term hyperscale AI data center lease built to NVIDIA specifications in Texas, with a total potential value of $9.8 billion. This marks Hut 8’s significant pivot from crypto mining to AI infrastructure.
AMD posts record Q1 2026 revenue as AI accelerator demand surges, continuing to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the data center AI chip market.