Data Centers
NASDAQ: GSAT] 2025 Annual Report. Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, [GlobalStar's [NASDAQ: GSAT] CEO: “Throughout the year, we have made significant progress with our satellite and ground station partners and are now poised to deploy not only the satellites to replenish our existing constellation but also extend our reach with our third-generation system.
✅ Amazon launched its first low Earth orbit satellites into space last year for Amazon LEO, formerly Project Kuiper. The company planned to invest USD10 billion in building its constellation in 2020, but it's about to more than double its budget for the project.
Globalstar [NASDAQ: GSTAT has entered into a Definitive Agreement to be acquired by ✅ Amazon for about USD 11.6 billion [GlobalStar's [NASDAQ: GSAT] 14 Apr 2026]"
⏯️ How ✅ Nvidia GPUs Compare To ✅ Google’s And ✅ ✅ Amazon’s AI Chips [CNBC]
Spacex has acquired X.AI Corp, maker of the Grok large language model and owner of the X social network. [The Batch: 13 Feb 2026] The merged company may be called Spacex AI. At IPO the company is likely to use the name Spacex.
⏯️ Spacex preparing to launch a data center into Earth orbit. [⏯️ WAI: 10 Apr 2026]
The economic justification is based on reducing costs of energy and heat dissipation.
Sydney-based Pengana Capital Group (PCG.AX) has doubled the valuation of Elon Musk’s SpaceX to USD 800 billion (AUD 1.1 trillion), with its prized stake expected to generate big returns for Pengana as Spacex prepares for a blockbuster initial public offering (IPO) in June-July 2026. Pengana previously valued the hotly anticipated IPO at USD 400 billion, but has doubled its valuation to USD 800 billion following a secondary share sale in Dec 2025. In Apr 2026 suggested its secondary share sale for Spacex would value the company at USD 1.5 trillion (AUD 2.1 trillion) [Pengana, Inside Adviser: 16 Apr 2026]
⏯️ Elon Musk merged SpaceX and xAI in late Jan / early Feb 2026, with plans for space-based AI data centres. Musk says solar powered and space-based data centres are the only way to meet AI’s burgeoning energy demands. [More about the merger: WSJ 5 Feb 2026] [xAI: 12 Feb 2026]
To achieve this, SpaceX wants to launch a constellation of 1 million satellites that will orbit Earth and harness the sun to power AI data centers, according to an 18 Sep 2025 filing at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and GN Docket No. 25-302. [⏯️ WAI]
The filing was made by:
This filing has been accepted by the FCC for filing: 30 Sep 2025
Companies (in addition to Spacex) with credible proposals for orbital data centers include:
Google SunCatcher Orbital DataCenter ✅ Google's Project Suncatcher consists of a constellation of networked satellites, likely operating in a dawn–dusk sun-synchronous low earth orbit, where they would be exposed to near-constant sunlight. This orbital choice maximizes solar energy collection and reduces the need for heavy onboard batteries. [Google: 4 Nov 2025]
👆 Apple Suncatcher Orbital Data Center [Image by AeroNaut]
Some arguments from proponents, supporters and implementers of extra-terrestrial data centers [Ezra Feilden, Adi Oltean, Philip Johnston: Starcloud team: Sep 2024]:
⏯️ TED Lecture: Philip Johnston [Reuters/ChatGPT]
Blue Origin has been working on technology for AI data centers in space, building on Jeff Bezos' prediction that giant gigawatt data centers in orbit could beat the cost of their Earth-bound peers within 10 to 20 years by tapping uninterrupted solar power and radiating heat directly into space.
Starcloud has already offered a glimpse of that future: its 60KG Starcloud-1 satellite, launched on a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket on 2 Nov 2025, carries an ✅ Nvidia H100 - the most powerful AI chip ever placed in orbit - and is training and running ✅ Google’s open‑source Google’s open large language model, Gemma, as a proof of concept.
Progress & Developments:
👆 This project marks the first time a high-powered AI model has been operated in space. [Starcloud White Paper, Sep 2024]
The company ultimately envisions a modular “hypercluster” of satellites providing about five gigawatts of computing power, comparable to several hyperscale data centers combined. [Reuters/ChatGPT] [White Paper: Aug 2024]
👆 Spacex orbital data centers
Space data center startup Starcloud has revealed plans to launch ✅ Amazon Web Services (AWS) on-prem/Edge offering, ✅ AWS Outposts, in space, as well as its long-term goal of an 88,000-satellite constellation. [GitHub White Paper: Sep 2024 ]
Co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, Philip Johnston, revealed the partnership with ✅ AWS in a LinkedIn post on 9 Feb 2026. I am excited to share that Starcloud will be the first to launch the ✅ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outpost hardware to space on our second satellite launching in October 2026, further enabling high-performance computing in space!
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outpost are rack and server-level offerings from ✅ AWS, enabling customers to bring ✅ AWS Outpost capabilities to their own data center or Edge location. Launched in 2018, the cloud giant unveiled a new generation in April 2025 that could support AWS' seventh-generation x86-powered ✅ Amazon EC2 Electronic Cloud Compute EC2 instances, beginning with the C7i compute-optimized instances, C7i general-purpose instances, and R7i memory-optimized instances. About instance types.
Spacex is seeking Federal Communications Commission approval for a satellite constellation of unprecedented scale intended to function as an orbital data center.
Orbital Data Centers may be maintained by NASA's Integrated System for Autonomous and Adaptive Caretaking (ISAAC), which is a project aimed at developing autonomous robots to maintain space stations. The ISAAC project, based at NASA’s Ames Research Center and Johnson Space Center, developed technology for autonomous caretaking of spacecraft, primarily during uncrewed mission phases. ISAAC aimed to integrate autonomous intra-vehicular robots with vehicle infrastructure.
Elon Musk Merges XAI with Spacex Ahead of IPO
As of March 2026, SpaceX has acquired AI startup xAI, creating a combined entity valued at approximately USD 1.25 trillion to USD 1.8 trillion. This merged entity plans to pursue an IPO later in 2026, aiming to develop space-based AI data centers using Starlink. The move combines profitable rocket tech with high-cash-need AI. [KraneShares: 11 Jan 2026]
Anthropic on said it reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk's SpaceX, marking a détente with its one-time critic and a boost for both companies in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race. Under the agreement, Anthropic will use the full computing power of the SpaceX Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which houses more than 220,000 ✅ Nvidia (NVDA.O) processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month. [Reuters: 6 May 2026]
ChatGPT offers the following comments on some issues involved in a space-based data center:
Data bandwidth and latency
Round trip Earth surface to data centers (DC) in orbit, or moon, or Mars (calculated by ChatGPT):
In summary, ChatGPT outlines the following issues for orbital data centers - in descending order of difficulty:
SpaceX has developed a novel Space Situational Awareness (SSA) system, called Stargaze, that significantly enhances the safety and sustainability of satellite operations in low Earth orbit (LEO), and its screening data will be made available to the broader satellite operator community free of charge in the coming weeks.
Practices such as leaving rocket bodies in LEO, operators maneuvering their satellites without sharing trajectory predictions or coordinating with other active satellites, and countries conducting anti-satellite tests—have heightened the risk of collision, necessitating improvements in space-traffic coordination. Conventional methods typically observe objects only a limited number of times per day, causing large uncertainties in orbital predictions, further compounded by volatile space weather. [Spacex]
Stargaze delivers a several-order-of-magnitude increase in detection capability compared to conventional ground-based systems. Stargaze uses data collected from nearly 30,000 star trackers, each of which makes continuous observations of nearby objects, resulting in approximately 30 million transits detected daily across the fleet. Reuters 13 Feb 2026
❗️ NASA Artemis 2 will launch four astronauts on a 10-day voyage around the moon in early April 2026. The mission's purpose is to validate Orion, SLS and the mission operations needed for future landings. While Artemis 1 successfully flew Orion around the moon without astronauts in 2022, Artemis 2 will be the first time humans travel aboard the spacecraft and venture beyond low Earth orbit in more than 50 years.
During the mission, astronauts will travel thousands of miles beyond the moon, experience deep-space radiation, and test life-support, navigation and communications systems in real flight conditions.
Artemis 2 will not land on the moon. Instead, it serves as a critical stepping stone toward future Artemis missions that aim to put astronauts on the lunar surface later in the decade.
NASA, and several tech companies, such as Intuitive Machines [NASDAQ: LUNR] and Japan's ispace have been attempting to land vehicles on the moon - unsuccessfully. However it is apparent that there is investment-justification in establishment of a presence on the lunar surface.
NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines a USD 180.4 million lunar payload contract. [Reuters: 25 Mar 2026]
Elon Musk has discussed the step beyond data centers orbiting Earth is even larger computers in deep space. And furthermore, Musk says the best way to achieve that is to build a city on the moon to manufacture space computers and hurl them into the solar system using a big maglev train. [TechCrunch, Spacex: 12 Feb 2026]
Moonbase Alpha: LEV FLOAT Lunar Transport
In an X.com post on 8 Feb 2026, Elon Musk explained the focus on the moon as a higher priority than Mars:
...Spacex has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years. The mission of Spacex remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars.
It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.
That said, Spacex will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilisation and the Moon is faster.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announces a shift on NASA's implementation of the National Space Policy and how they are accelerating preparations for America’s return to the surface of the Moon by 2028, and advancing science and discovery. ⏯️ NASA Spacex Moonbase Directive
Jared Isaacman reveals a new NASA Directive. Initiatives include:
⏯️ Elon Musk prioritises Moonbase Alpha [17 Feb 2026]
SpaceX proposes to conduct ⏯️ Starship/Super Heavy launch operations from the ⏯️ Boca Chica Launch Site in Cameron County, Texas. SpaceX must apply for and obtain an experimental permit(s) and/or a vehicle operator license from the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation to operate the ⏯️ Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle ... SpaceX is developing a new rocket, ⏯️ Starship/Super Heavy, with the goal of traveling to Mars. FAA 13 Feb 2026
⏯️ Spacex Starship vs NASA SLS
Elon Musk plans to build a massive chip manufacturing plant — starting with a smaller advanced technology fabrication plant in Austin — as he looks to put AI data centers in space. It is expected to be capable of 20,000 WSPM (wafer starts per month), or roughly 240,000 wafers per year: [Assessment].
Musk unveiled plans for his “Terafab” on Saturday from the historic Seaholm Power Plant in downtown Austin. This facility would be a joint effort of his companies Tesla, xAI and SpaceX, and it would eventually produce enough chips for 1 trillion watts, or 1 terawatt, of compute each year.
“This is really going to take things to the next level,” Musk said during his presentation livestreamed on X. [Houston Chronicle: 23 Mar 2026]
The space race between US billionaires is heating up, with Elon Musk's SpaceX planning to build a lunar base and Jeff Bezos pushing Blue Origin's ambitions as both companies aim to return humans to the moon ahead of a planned mission by China in 2030. Reuters 13 Feb 2026
Elon Musk has stated that within 2-3 years — potentially by 2028 or 2029 — the cheapest place to run AI will be in space, powered by abundant solar energy and enabled by Starship launches. [FinTech Weekly: 23 Mar 2026]
Latency is a crucial consideration when you’re dealing with Moonbase data centers. The distancebetween the Moon and Earth is roughly 384,400 km on average, and even though it sounds like a short distance in space terms, the speed of light—which is how signals travel—means that the round-trip time for data would still introduce a noticeable delay.
Latency from the Moon to Earth
Light Speed: Signals traveling at the speed of light (approximately 299,792 km per second) would experience a one-way latency of about 1.28 seconds.
Round-trip Latency: That means the round-trip time for data (from the Moon to Earth and back) would be around 2.56 seconds. While this isn’t terribly long compared to some deep-space missions, it could still introduce noticeable delays for certain real-time applications.
Impact on Real-Time Applications
For most general applications, a 2.5-second round-trip delay might not be a dealbreaker, but for certain high-speed or time-sensitive processes—like real-time video streaming, interactive gaming, or live communications — this latency could be significant.
How to Address Latency
To make lunar data centers more effective despite latency, there are a few potential solutions:
Tradeoffs Between Orbital vs. Lunar Data Centers
Compared to orbital data centers, the Moonbase still has the advantage of being physically closer to Earth and potentially benefiting from continuous solar power. But when you weigh that against the latency, it becomes a tradeoff between geographic proximity and communication speed.
Orbital Data Centers: These could have lower latency (since they're closer to Earth), but they may still face challenges related to solar availability and radiation. They also would need to deal with issues like space debris and maintenance.
Moonbase Data Centers: The closer distance to Earth means potentially more reliable communication (though still with latency), but there are environmental challenges like temperature extremes, radiation, and micrometeorites that orbital data centers don’t face. A lunar base could be an ideal location for long-term storage, backup, or special-purpose computing tasks—especially ones that can be run autonomously or involve specialized data from space exploration missions.
Use Cases for a Moonbase Data Center
Given the latency challenge, a Moonbase data center may be better suited for specific use cases rather than general-purpose cloud computing. Potential uses include:
With Artemis, NASA will establish a long-term presence at the Moon, opening more of the lunar surface to exploration than ever before. This growth of lunar activity will require new, more robust communications, navigation, and networking capabilities.
NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program has developed the LunaNet architecture to meet these needs.
LunaNet will leverage innovative networking techniques, standards, and an extensible framework to rapidly expand network capabilities at the Moon. This framework will allow industry, academia, and international partners to build and operate LunaNet nodes alongside NASA. These nodes will offer missions four distinct services: networking, navigation, detection and information, and radio/optical science services. [NASA: 7 Oct 2021]
So, basically, LunaNet interplanetary communication would involve hops from space or between planetary orbital systems (like Starlink) to/from the lunar network and then to/from Earth.
LunaNet could also facilitate communication and edge processing by spacecraft while in transit or in orbit
DataCenters.com lists 9,786 data centers in 2,890 cities in 150 countries of which 4,213 are in USA and 270 are in Australia. That requires a lot of electricity - representing potentially related opportunities for investment in power generation.
📰 DCD Data Center News and White Papers
AMAZON CORPORATE SERVICES [AFR: 7 May 2026]
✅ Amazon’s data centre arm, Amazon Corporate Services Pty Ltd, had the standout year, growing annual revenue to $2.2 billion, up 61% from $1.4 billion in 2025.
Amazon Corporate Services’ accounts say it provides “data hosting services to related parties”. Those related parties spent almost $1 billion last calendar year – AUD 976 million – buying data centre capacity in advance, which is recorded as unearned revenue.
At least AUD 1 trillion has been poured into AI development over the past 3 years in the United States, leading to an explosion in the growth and development of data centres which house the physical infrastructure to process, store and distribute data.
PROJECT MAVEN [US Department of Defense]
Project Maven is a Defense Department effort for the military to incorporate AI into its systems. One aim was to work with Silicon Valley to build software to swiftly process images such as drone footage for intelligence purposes. When word spread inside ✅ Google about Project Maven, employees protested, saying a company that had once pledged “Don’t be evil” should not help identify targets for drone strikes. Google eventually backed away from the project.
In 2019, ✅ Palantir, a data analytics company co-founded by tech investor Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund, took over Maven.
New defence tech start-ups such as Anduril also emerged, supplying the federal government with AI-backed sensor towers along the southern US border.
Some of USA's largest data center operators include:
This is an investor's view of investment opportunities in AI technical infrastructure, prepared with data from ClaudeAI and Blackridge [6 Feb 2026]. [Report]
| Data Center | Mkt Cap | Location | Sites | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 365 Data Centers [Not listed] | Private | Connecticut | ||
| ✅ Alphabet [NASDAQ:GOOG/L] | ~USD 1.9 trillion | |||
| ✅ Amazon [NASDAQ:AMZN] | ~USD 1 trillion | ⏯️ >900 | ||
| Broadcom [NASDAQ:AVGO] | ~USD 1.59 - USD 1.62 trillion | Oracle | ||
| Cologix [NASDAQ:COGIX] | Colorado | 29 | ||
| Core Scientific [NASDAQ:CORZ] | Colorado | |||
| CyrusOne [NASDAQ:CONE: KKR and GIP] | CAD 92.4bn+3.2m | Texas | 25 | |
| Databank [Not listed] | Texas | 23 | ||
| Digital Realty Trust Inc [NYSE:DLR] | USD 60.5 bn | Texas | 115 | |
| Equinix Inc [NASDAQ: EQIX] | USD 90.8 bn | Redwood | 200 | |
| Flexential [NASDAQ:FLEX] | USD 24.3 bn | North Carolina | 40 | |
| IBM [NYSE:IBM] | USD 112 bn | 11 | ||
| Iron Mountain [NYSE: IRM] | USD 31.3 bn | Massachusetts | 25 | |
| Microsoft [NASDAQ:MSFT] | ~USD 2.9 trillion | Microsoft Azure | ||
| ✅ Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA] | ~USD 4.0-5.1 trillion | Nvidia | ||
| Oracle [NYSE:ORCL] | ~USD 434 billion | Oracle | ||
| QTS Technology Centers [Private] | Private | Kansas | 40 | |
| Vantage Data Centers | Private | Colorado | 25 |
Exits:
👆 ✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META] data center
[✅ NASDAQ:META] operates 104 owned and operated data center facilities across 20 U.S. campuses and 4 international regions (Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, Singapore), with a total investment of USD 29.8 billion and a footprint of 53.4 million square feet.
✅ 🇺🇸 Meta Platforms [✅ NASDAQ:META] share price jumped 5.1% after Reuters reported that Meta plans to shrink its workforce by 20% or more to offset costly AI infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. [Reuters 13 Mar 2026]
✅ Meta Platforms [✅ NASDAQ:META] is rapidly expanding its global data center infrastructure to support massive AI workloads, transitioning toward gigawatt-plus, super-intelligence facilities. Key 2025-2026 projects include massive sites in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas, utilizing 100% renewable energy. These AI-optimized, sustainable, and locally-supported data centers drive ✅ Meta's Compute division, focusing on large-language models and future AI, with the company spending over $600 billion in the US by 2028.
👆 ✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META]'s USD 27 billion Hyperion 2,250-acre, 4-million square foot data center in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana [Fortune: 26 Mar 2026] 
⏯️ Amazon’s New AI Data Center For Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] 13 Mar 2026
Softbank Group [OTC:SFTBY], SSB Energy Holdings LLC, and OpenAI Partner will build and operate next-generation AI data centers to advance Stargate [Press release: 8 Jan 2026] However OpenAI has said it is pausing its Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure project in the UK, as it reins in ambitious spending plans ahead of a highly anticipated public listing. [
Softbank Group and American Electric Power [NASDAQ:AEP] plan a massive 10GW gas powered data center campus on federally owned land in Piketon, Ohio. Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) is a former uranium enrichment facility located in Piketon, Ohio, on a 3,777-acre federal reservation in rural Pike County. [Reuters 20 Mar 2026] 
Softbank
👆 Austin data center under construction in Texas [Houston Chronicle: 23 Mar 2026]
Oracle has agreed a 6-year contract worth AUD 2.3 billion with Datapod, a Canberra-based modular data centre manufacturer. Datapod primarily supplies to the Australian government and military intelligence services, and has been in discussions with Oracle about a potential deal for more than two years. [AFR: 27 Apr 2025]
The Datapod System provides customers with advanced performance, flexibility, and deployability specific to the new supercomputer needs. The combination of less cost and speed to deployment means organisations can begin to think in real time as opposed to the lengthy plan/design/build delays familiar to legacy data center projects. The modular approach means a High Performance Computing solution can practically be purchased off the shelf and significantly reduces the time associated with planning and implementation. []
Several Australian companies are launching portable, containerised data centers. These include:🇦🇺 Portable Data Centers
👆 Armada Edge Platform (AEP) portable data center convoy.
WinDC aims to place data center infrastructure at power generation sites and will deploy 11MW of modular data centers designed and built by Armada and its partners across renewable energy sites in New South Wales and other locations in the National Energy Market Operator's systems, as well as in Western Australia. Armada Edge units are currently built in the United States and Europe. DCD 16 Mar 2026
Proximity to fiber optic networks: Cities like Ashburn, Silicon Valley, and Dallas are known for their interconnectivity.
Energy supply: Sustainable, renewable energy is becoming a key factor in investment decisions.
Local regulatory environment: Different states have varying regulations on data privacy and energy usage that could impact long-term operational viability.
Future growth plans: Many of the major players are expanding or making significant upgrades to their existing campuses.
TIER 1 - Mission Critical (Highest AI Value):
TIER 2 - Highly Important:
TIER 3 - Supporting Infrastructure:
Vertiv (VRT) - Liquid cooling & power infrastructure for AI datacenters
Eaton (ETN) - Power distribution critical as clusters scale
Coherent (COHR) - Optical transceivers (competes with Marvell)
ASML (ASML) - ⏯️ EUV extreme ultra violet photo lithography monopoly (enables everything, though not US-listed):
✅ Nvidia (Nvidia) - The elephant in the room for GPUs. Nvidia has kicked off the next generation of AI With Rubin 6 new chips, one incredible AI supercomputer. Rubin is in full production, and Rubin-based products will be available from partners in the second half of 2026. The Rubin platform uses extreme codesign across the 6 chips — the Nvidia Vera CPU, Nvidia Rubin GPU, Nvidia 6 Switch, Nvidia ConnectX®-9 SuperNIC, Nvidia BlueField®-4 DPU and Nvidia Spectrum™-6 Ethernet Switch — to slash training time and inference token costs. [Nvidia press release: 5 Jan 2026]
AMD (AMD) - MI300X competing with ✅ Nvidia.
Super Micro (SMCI) - AI server integration
Dell/HPE - AI infrastructure deployment
And also:
✅ We are investors in these companies
Sidebar: ⏯️ About chip production [ASML] by Veritasium
Stargate AI Data Center in Abilene, Texas is the first and flagship site of a USD 500 billion national AI infrastructure initiative announced in Jan 2025. Located on a 1,000–1,100 acre tract known as the Lancium Clean Campus (also called the Crusoe Abilene Campus), the facility is under construction and nearing completion.
Objectives: Stargate will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
Capacity: The facility is designed to deliver 1.2 gigawatts (1.2 GW) of power at full scale, with 200 MW already deployed as of early 2025. It is powered by a combination of renewable energy and on-site natural gas generation, utilizing Lancium’s Smart Response™ technology for grid optimization and decarbonization.
Key Partners The data center is being developed by Crusoe Energy Systems LLC and operated in partnership with OpenAI and Oracle. The site is a cornerstone of the Stargate project. The initial equity funders in Stargate are:
SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility.
As part of Stargate, Oracle, ✅ Nvidia, and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and ✅ Nvidia going back to 2016 and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.
This project also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services.
Lancium report on provision of clean energy for the Abilene facility. [Lancium: 18 Mar 2025] Lancium has secured USD 600 million debt financing for 1.2GW clean energy development for the Abilene project [Lancium: 18 Oct 2025]
Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's CEO will be the chairman.
Oracle has committed to developing 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity for OpenAI, with this Abilene site being a major component. OpenAI signed a deal to purchase USD 300 billion in computing power30 b from Oracle over 5 years, starting in 2027 [WSJ 10 Sep 2025].
Economic Impact: The project has created approximately 6,000 construction jobs and is projected to generate $4 billion in economic impact over the next two decades. It has boosted local spending, tax revenues, and spurred infrastructure development, including a new 1,000-unit housing project.
Expansion Plans: OpenAI and Oracle have abandoned plans to expand the facility from 1.2 GW to 2 GW due to financing challenges and shifting demand forecasts. However, ✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META] is evaluating a lease for the additional capacity, with Nvidia facilitating discussions and having paid a USD 150 million deposit to Crusoe to secure its interest.
Challenges: The project has caused traffic disruptions, environmental concerns, and a housing crisis in Abilene due to the sudden influx of workers. Some data center buildings experienced outages in early 2026 due to winter weather affecting liquid cooling systems, though both Crusoe and Oracle report strong ongoing collaboration.
The Abilene Stargate site is a pivotal hub in the global AI infrastructure race, combining massive scale, renewable energy integration, and complex logistics, even as expansion plans have been paused. [Lancium: 18 Mar 2025]
Project Financing Problems: Some partners are reconsidering their commitment to Stargate. Oracle and OpenAI have abandoned plans to expand the Stargate AI data center after negotiations dragged over financing and OpenAI's changing needs. [Bloomberg: 7 Mar 2026]
The collapsed talks created an opening for ✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META] to step in and consider leasing the planned expansion site in Abilene, Texas, from developer Crusoe, with ✅ Nvidia helping facilitate Meta’s discussions.
✅ Nvidia paid a USD 150 million deposit to Crusoe and began helping court ✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META] as a tenant for the expansion, to ensure its products would still fill the expanded data center rather than that of rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Status as at 30 Sep 2025: The site is operational with 10 buildings under construction, and two buildings are already up and running. The campus is expected to be fully completed by the end of 2026.
Status as at Mar 2026: Oracle and OpenAI have abandoned plans to expand their 1.2 GW AI data center in the Stargate project, from 1.2 GW to 2 GW due to financing negotiations and shifting infrastructure needs. The initial 1.2 GW site remains active as part of the Stargate AI project, with ✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META] now considering taking over the expanded capacity.
Status as at Mar 2026:
Wall Street Millenial [W M] is now referring to OpenAI's USD110 billion funding round as mostly fake, and refers to Stargate as a hoax. W💲M alleges that Sam Altman is not an AI expert, and has no formal education in AI. ⏯️ W💲M discusses OpenAI's funding situation. ColdFusion reports that OpenAI may start incorporating advertisements in its responses.
Crusoe has officially confirmed that Microsoft has signed on to take the remaining capacity at its Abilene, Texas, campus. Microsoft has signed an agreement for 900MW of capacity, including two new buildings and an on-site power plant. Each of the two new buildings will offer 336MW of IT capacity. The lease will bring the total projected capacity at the site to 2.1GW. [DCD: 27 Mar 2027]
Microsoft's data centers will sit on land adjacent to the existing Abilene campus, being used by OpenAI and Oracle. Land works are already underway, and the first building is expected to be energized in mid-2027.
✅ Amazon's 1,200 acre Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] 2.2GW data center in Northern Indiana will support 500,000 ✅ AWS Trainium 2 and ✅ AWS Trainium 3 chips. This number will increase to 1 million chips by the end of 2025.
Power for the data center will be provided by Northern Indiana Public Service Co (NIPSCO). To support the energy requirements of that data center, NIPSCO Generation will build about 3 gigawatts of new generation capacity, including new gas-fired power plants and battery storage systems. [ChatGPT]
The initial cost of the Rainer data center campus and related facilities is estimated to be around USD 26 billion:
https://techinvestment.com/images/gen/aws_indiana.png
🇺🇸 ✅ Amazon plans to spend USD 12 billion on AI data centers in the Caddo and Bossier Parishes of Northern Louisiana. [CNBC 23 Feb 2026]
✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META] Hut-8 Louisiana Data Center
Hosting Certification Framework
The Australian Government's Hosting Certification Framework will monitor the credentials of company directors and the nationality of investors. AFR reports the rules will impose stricter security requirements for big data centre players such as AirTrunk, CDC Data Centres and ✅ NextDC, and tech giants like ✅ Amazon AWS, ✅ Google and Microsoft, which host sensitive government information.[AFR: 21 Apr 2026]
The machinery-of-government change involves the functional transfer of:
Data centers in NSW
Microsoft will invest AUD 25 billion over the next 3 years in data centers in Australia
The $25 billion spend trumps an earlier commitment by Microsoft’s rival, ✅ Amazon Web Services (AWS), to spend AUD 20 billion on local data centers in the same period.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella was in Sydney on 23 Apr 2026 to announce the investment. Nadella said he knew big technology companies had to convince the public that they had a “social licence” to build AI infrastructure amid concerns that data centers consumed too much power and water, and many workers feared that AI would take their jobs. [AFR: 23 Apr 2026]
Amazon Web Services Data Centers in Australia
✅ AWS has a significant infrastructure presence in Australia with multiple data centers and facilities [AWS 23 Apr 2026]:
AirTrunk Operating Pty Ltd operates as a technology company. The company offers a platform for cloud, content, and large enterprise customers. AirTrunk Operating serves clients in Australia and Asia.
Updates
30 Apr 2026: AirTrunk will invest AUD 4.2 billion to build 2 giant data centres in Malaysia, as its existing campuses in the country near capacity amid booming demand for facilities that can power artificial intelligence. [AFR: 30 Apr 2026]
6 Apr 2026: AirTrunk is seeking to list a portfolio of up-and-running data centres in a property trust, rather than the underlying AirTrunk business. Bloomberg reported it had tapped three investment banks to oversee the mooted USD 1.5 billion (AUD 2.2 billion) Singaporean REIT IPO later in 2026. [AFR: 7 Apr 2026]
Updates
31 Mar 2026: Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] Would Like to Open an Office in Australia
Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] CEO Dario Amodei has been meeting with Australian policymakers as a deal for using local data centre capacity to run some of its AI models is expected. Alongside political meetings, the boss of the USD 380 billion (AUD 555 billion) AI company is meeting executives from Australian data centre firms, including ✅ NextDC [NXT.AX], AirTrunk and CDC Data Centres.
Anthropic's [ANTH.PVT] initial focus will be supporting its enterprise, startup, and research customers. Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] already works with some of Australia and New Zealand's most innovative organizations—from enterprises like Canva, Quantium, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia [CBA:AX], to startups pioneering new AI applications across diverse fields such as agtech, physical AI, climate tech and more.
Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] has committed to paying for new power generation and upgrading local energy grids if it builds data centres in Australia, after announcing it will open a Sydney office later this year. Evan Frondorf, Anthropic's [ANTH.PVT] head of external partnerships and policy, told a Senate committee the company would take the same approach to its global data centre rollout. [AFR: 12 Mar 2026]
Australia and New Zealand rank 4th and 8th globally in Claude.ai usage, relative to population, according to our latest Economic Index. Both countries show strong use of Claude for computer and coding tasks, along with educational instruction and research, and Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] has already begun building out a local team and partnerships aligned with these trends.
🇦🇺 Anthropic's [ANTH.PVT] report on Australia suggests that its usage is the 4th highest of 166 countries. Report: 15 Jan 2026 Update: 10 Mar 2026
🌏 Claude says Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] has offices in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Washington D.C. Anthropic's European footprint includes offices in London, Dublin, Zurich, Paris, and Munich. In Asia-Pacific Anthropic has offices Tokyo, Bengaluru (India), and Seoul.
Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] is planning to open an office in Sydney. A major problem is the uncertainty of tax liability if the Australian Taxation Office [ATO] decides that Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] is subject to resident tax under the Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law (MAAL). The MAAL counters the erosion of the Australian tax base by multinationals using artificial and contrived arrangements to avoid the attribution of profits to a permanent establishment in Australia.
Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] has announced a USD 50 billion investment to develop, own, and operate its own data centers in the United States, starting in Texas and New York, in partnership with UK-based Fluidstack. Anthropic's [ANTH.PVT] approach is a hybrid model: relying on massive, existing infrastructure from ✅ AWS and ✅ Google (1M+ chips), while simultaneously building a USD 50 billion custom-operated, AI-optimized data center footprint via Fluidstack to ensure long-term, independent scaling. [Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] clients include Poolside, ✅ Nvidia [NVDA:NASDAQ], ✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META], Cognition [CGTX:NASDAQ] and Black Forest Labs [a href= https://www.fluidstack.io/gpu-clusters target=x>]
Dario Amodei met with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Industry Minister Tim Ayres in Canberra on Wednesday morning to sign a memorandum of understanding between Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] and the government. Anthropic [ANTH.PVT] has announced it is committed to paying for new power generation and upgrading local energy grids if it builds data centers in Australia. [AFR: 22 Mar 2026]
CDC is privately owned by Infratil Limited [ASX:IFT] and the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation. [AFR: 31 Mar 2026].
Firmus has datacenters in Southgate and Singapore. It is in the process of a USD 5.5 billion (AUD 7.7 billion) IPO on the ASX, with reports indicating a planned listing in July 2026. Firmus is expected to be valued at nearly AUD 7 billion after ✅ Nvidia doubled its investment. [AFR: 29 Apr 2026]
Fluidstack is rapidly scaling its capacity to serve major clients like ✅ Meta Platforms [NASDAQ:META] and various AI startups.
TIER 1 - Mission Critical (Highest AI Value):
TIER 2 - Highly Important:
TIER 3 - Supporting Infrastructure:
Vertiv [NASDAQ:VRT] - Liquid cooling & power infrastructure for AI datacenters
Eaton [NASDAQ:ETN] - Power distribution critical as clusters scale
Coherent [NASDAQ:COHR] - Optical transceivers (competes with Marvell)
ASML [NASDAQ:ASML] - EUV extreme ultra violet photo lithography monopoly (enables everything, though not US-listed):
✅ Nvidia [[NASDAQ:NVDA]] - The elephant in the room for GPUs. [Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA]] has kicked off the next generation of AI With Google [NASDAQ:GOOG/L]: 6 new chips, one incredible AI supercomputer. Rubin is in full production, and Rubin-based products will be available from partners in the second half of 2026. The Rubin platform uses extreme codesign across the 6 chips — the Nvidia Vera CPU, Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA] Rubin GPU, Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA] NVLink™ 6 Switch, Nvidia ConnectX®-9 SuperNIC, Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA] BlueField®-4 DPU and Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA] Spectrum™-6 Ethernet Switch — to slash training time and inference token costs. [Nvidia press release: 5 Jan 2026]
Advanced Micro Devices [NASDAQ:AMD] - MI300X competing with ✅ Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA]
Super Micro (SMCI) - AI server integration
Dell/HPE - AI infrastructure deployment
And also:
✅ We are investors in these companies
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman in Seattle today to welcome AWS’s investment of AUD$20 billion into data centre infrastructure in Australia.
Over the next five years, this landmark investment will provide the world’s most advanced infrastructure that can support complex artificial intelligence (AI) and all other technology applications, enabling organisations across Australia to train and deploy AI models and continue to rapidly innovate. [Prime Minister Australia: 14 Jun 2025]
AWS data centers in Australia include:
✅ AWS said two UAE facilities were hit directly, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of its facilities caused physical impact damage to its infrastructure. AWS said the drones caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to infrastructure, and in some cases, required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.
✅ AWS added that it is working quickly to restore services to the affected areas, but that it could take time given the nature of the physical damage involved.
✅ AWS recommended that customers who use its services in the region back up their data and potentially migrate workloads to alternative AWS facilities in the rest of the world.
✅ AWS also warned that the ongoing conflict means the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable. [BBC: 1 Mar 2026]
Australia has 270 data centers, some of which are targetable as investments. The ASX lists 100 of those data centers, 13 of which are large cap companies.
Data Center's latest update reports that
Australia has 270 data centers [14 Mar 2026]
| Location | Number |
|---|---|
| Adelaide | 18 |
| Albury | 2 |
| Ballarat | 3 |
| Bendigo | 1 |
| Brisbane | 24 |
| Canberra | 18 |
| Christmas Island | 1 |
| Coffs Harbour | 1 |
| Darwin | 6 |
| Dubbo | 1 |
| Geraldton | 2 |
| Gold Coast | 1 |
| Grafton | 1 |
| Hobart | 5 |
| Launceston | 1 |
| Melbourne | 51 |
| Morwell | 1 |
| Moss Vale | 1 |
| Newcastle AU | 5 |
| Newman | 1 |
| Perth | 26 |
| Port Hedland | 1 |
| Sunshine Coast | 2 |
| Sydney | 91 |
| Tamworth | 1 |
| Toowoomba | 1 |
| Townsville | 2 |
| Wagga Wagga | 1 |
| Wollongong | 1 |
| Total Data Centers | 270 |
✅ NextDC Limited [ASX:NXT] has 22 data centers in Australia and others in New Zealand, Japan and Malaysia. It is planning to invest a further AUD 2.7 billion in data centers in 2026 to meet AI demand [AFR 25 Feb 2026]:
NextDC Fund Raising 2026
✅ NextDC has raised AUD 750 million from the bond market, expanding its war chest to AUD 6.6 billion following a fundraising drive to finance its planned digital infrastructure build-out. In the past three weeks, NextDC and its bankers at Barrenjoey have also raised AUD 1.7 billion through a 100-year bond anchored by Canadian pension investment giant La Caisse, and have launched a AUD 1.5 billion equity raising.
Including the new 4-year subordinated bond offer, NextDC has AUD 6.6 billion in cash and undrawn debt facilities, up from AUD 4.2 billion at 31 Dec 2026.[AFR: 24 Apr 2026]
NextDC reported its financial results for Q1/2026 on 25 Feb 2026. This report mentions a proposed partnership with third-party capital through a JVCo structure for data centers S4 and S7 through a 4-year and 7-year $500 million subordinated bond issue.
NextDC held a series of calls and meetings with credit investors across Australia ahead of its proposed 4-year and 7-year AUD 500 million subordinated bond issue. However, without an independent assessment of the proposal this program has been abandoned. [AFR 15 Mar 2026]
| Location | Data Center | Owner | Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Melbourne | AirTrunk MEL1 | AirTrunk | ~276 MW |
| Sydney | AirTrunk SYD2 | AirTrunk | ~158 MW |
| Sydney | AirTrunk SYD1 | AirTrunk | ~121 MW |
| Melbourne (West Footscray) | NEXTDC M3 | ✅ NextDC | ~150 MW |
| Sydney (Artarmon) | NEXTDC S3 | ✅ NextDC | ~80 MW |
| Sydney (Eastern Creek) | DC1-DC4 | Infratil | ~100 MW+ |
| Sydney (Alexandria) | Equinix SY5 | Equinix | large multi-hall colocation (~9,000 cabinets) |
| Sydney East/West | Global Switch | Global Switch | ~70 MW+ |
| Melbourne (Tullamarine) | NEXTDC M2 | ✅ NEXTDC | ~40 MW+ |
| Melbourne (Brooklyn) | CDC BK1 | CDC | ~780 MW+ |
Google, Amazon, Microsoft Investments in Australia
✅ Google, ✅ Amazon and ✅ Microsoft are investing billions of dollars in digital infrastructure in Australia, largely by leasing space from local data center operators AirTrunk, ✅ NextDC and ✅ CDC Data Centers. That also includes investments in chips, connecting cables and renewable energy.
The existing cloud data centers are much smaller than the AI and data center hub that Google is considering building and operating in Australia.
The proposed AI and data center hub would be of a similar scale to the huge 1 gigawatt AI data hub in India that ✅ Google committed to in October at an estimated cost of USD 15 billion (AUD 21.5 billion) between now and 2030. [AFR 16 Mar 2026]
🇲🇾 AirTrunk's Kuala Lumpur Data Center
Australia's Dynamic and Unpredictable Tax Policy
Australia has been more aggressive than many jurisdictions on:
That creates uncertainty, which is often worse than high tax rates.
Data Center Power and Water Usage Threat to Urban Population Resources and Supply
By 2027, AI and data centre operations globally are projected to consume between 4.2 and 6.6 billion cubic metres of water annually. That’s equivalent to around 30–45% of Australia’s entire yearly water consumption. This surge has occurred in just a few years, reflecting the exponential rise of AI workloads and the infrastructure needed to power them. [Sphere Infrastructure: 10 Sep 2025]
✅ Google has told the federal government that it is withholding an AUD 20 billion investment in a massive Australian artificial intelligence and data center hub because of the risk of exposing its broader operations to higher taxes. Google is assessing where to build its Asian hub, and Australia is among the leading candidates due to abundant land and sun, as solar power is likely to be used to power the data center.
Tax was one of the key discussion points, according to a Treasury briefing prepared for Treasurer Chalmers before the meeting and released on 7 Mar 2026 in response to a freedom of information request. Google is particularly sensitive about perceptions that it is seeking special tax treatment. [AFR: 12 Mar 2026]
AIRTRUNK
AirTrunk’s expansion in Melbourne follows last week’s announcement of a new hyperscale campus in Osaka, Japan, delivering up to 100MW of IT load in Japan and a AUD 3 billion+ new direct investment in Japan.
OSK2 and MEL2 – which will become AirTrunk’s 14th and 15th data centers respectively – expand the company’s hyperscale platform to deliver a total capacity in excess of 2.6 GW across six markets in Asia Pacific and Middle East: Australia, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.
AirTrunk’s Melbourne expansion comes as Australia advances its 📘 National AI Plan, released on 2 Dec 2025, which outlines the country’s ambition to become a global hub for artificial intelligence. The plan is built around three pillars:
By delivering a new hyperscale data centre in Melbourne, AirTrunk is directly supporting these national goals, enabling smarter government services, faster business innovation, and stronger human connection, while creating opportunities for local talent and suppliers.
👆 AirTrunk 24 Dec 2025
Airtrunk is a hyperscale data center specialist providing a secure and reliable solution for cloud, content and large enterprise customers to house high volumes of data and information. It is an example of strong private investment in data centers. AirTrunk was founded in 2015 by Robin Khuda and has remained privately owned for most of its life. Khuda was a founding member of ✅ NextDC. In Sep 2024, Airtrunk was acquired by funds manager >Blackstone Inc and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for about AUD 24 billion. Because of that buyout, Airtrunk continues to operate as a privately held portfolio company. ChatGPT comments: The landscape is oddly fascinating: real estate fused with hyperscale computing. [Blackstone's Sydney Office: Suite 5, Level 30, Governor Macquarie Tower, 1 Farrer Place, Sydney]
👆 Airtrunk's SYD3 data center in Western Sydney. Airtrunk is no longer listed on the ASX.
CDC develops, owns and operates large scale data centers across Australia and New Zealand. It is not listed on the ASX.
👆 CDC's SYD3 data center at Eastern Creek, Western Sydney.
Goodman Group operates data centers in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Frankfurt. It also operates data center power banks in USA (San Jose, Los Angeles), Europe (London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid), Hong Kong, Japan (Tokyo, Osaka), 🇦🇺 Australia (Sydney, Melbourne) and New Zealand (Auckland). Goodman is Australia’s largest developer of industrial property, strategically located with easy access to large consumer markets in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Goodman is listed on the ASX as ASX:GMG.
👆 Goodman's SYD-01 data center at 🇦🇺 North Sydney.
TechInvestment.com is an investor in ✅ NextDC.
✅ 🇦🇺 NextDC has 17 data centers in Australia: Sydney (7), Melbourne (5), Brisbane (3), Perth (2).
✅ NextDC will join OpenAI in Australia as an infrastructure partner.
✅ 👆 NextDC's Port Melbourne data center.
[This may be affected by NextDC's cancellation of its 2026 AUD 500 million fund raise]
