5 Notable Data Center Links, Nov. 1
Another Stargate Campus, Equinix Goes Big. Also, an AI-Powered SRE?
Another active news week, with NVIDIA GTC followed by hyperscale earnings.
Each week I curate 5 links from the data center sector that I find particularly interesting, with my commentary on why they merit your attention.
Sound interesting? Subscribe and get them each week.
5 Notable Links
Stargate Selects Related Digital for Michigan AI Campus - On Thursday OpenAI, Oracle and Related Digital announced plans to develop a Stargate campus in Saline, Michigan with 1 gigawatt of data center capacity. DTE Energy will supply 100% of the power for the 250-acre campus through a combination of grid power and new battery storage capacity. “The Related Digital team has decades of combined experience in site acquisition and development, partnering with utility providers, and delivering data centers for leading hyperscalers on time and on budget,” said Brent Behrman, CEO of Related Digital. “We look forward to beginning construction in early 2026.”
Equinix Announces MegaCampus in UK - Equinix has acquired an 85-acre site in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom and plans to invest £3.9 billion ($4.5 billion) to deliver 250+MW of compute capacity to the UK’s critical national infrastructure. The company intends to build 2 million square feet of data center space on the site, which was developed by DC01UK. Equinix is stepping up to larger campus builds, with progress on an xScale project in Georgia and approvals in place for a megacampus in Minooka, Illinois in the Suburban Chicago market.
An AI SRE? Startup Targets Data Center Outage Resolution - Startup Wild Moose emerged from stealth mode this week with an “AI-Powered Site Reliability Engineering” platform. The company has raised $7 million in seed funding from investors including iAngels, Y Combinator and others. Wild Moose says its AI can serve as “first responders” to outages, using generative AI to quickly gather data, identify likely root cause candidates and shorten resolution time. “I’ve spent enough time in the trenches at Reddit and Netflix to know what actually matters when things are on fire,” said Jeremy Edberg, angel investor in Wild Moose and founding SRE at Reddit and Netflix. “Most observability tools just throw more dashboards at you, but Wild Moose actually learns how your systems work and acts like having another senior engineer on call.”
How a Flexible AI Factory Will Work in Tandem With the Grid - This piece provides new details on the NVIDIA “Aurora” data center at a Digital Realty campus in Manassas, focusing on the advanced power management and grid flexibility features, enabled by startup Emerald AI. It’s a good overview of how flexible loads can be implemented, and how that technology fits into NVIDIA’s larger strategy for modernizing data center “co-design” using digital twins and standards.
How Data Center Power Demand Could Help Lower Electricity Costs - Amid all the “DATA CENTERS = HIGHER POWER PRICES” media coverage, there have been several studies from utilities suggesting that new data centers can actually bring rates down. A new study from Lawrence Berkeley Labs and Brattle is getting visibility and prompting some media outlets to re-examine previous coverage of data centers and retail power pricing. This PBS story is one example, and the study also got coverage in The Washington Post. The gist of it is that data centers can bring lower rates in markets with power capacity, but that can be offset if new transmission is needed.
If you found 5 Notable Links useful, please subscribe so you can get it each week!
The DTE Energy angle here is underrated. They're positioning themselves as the go to utility for hyperscale AI projects in the Midwest, and that 1GW commitment backed by new battery storage shows they're serious about reliability. This could set a precendent for how other utilities structure their data center partnerships moving forward.
Fascinating. What if that Stargate 1 gigawatt is just the warm-up act? The power draw for these future models is gonna be wild.