Rubicon's 1 GW Storage Milestone Reflects AI Grid Constraints
📅 - Rubicon Professional Services says it has surpassed one gigawatt of installed battery energy storage capacity across US projects, as data center developers scramble for power that utilities cannot always deliver quickly. The portfolio spans critical infrastructure sectors, but AI-driven computing is making batteries increasingly more relevant to facility schedules, grid constraints, resilience planning and electricity costs nationwide.
The milestone puts a useful number against an infrastructure problem becoming harder for data center operators to ignore. Compute capacity can be ordered faster than utility infrastructure can necessarily be expanded. New substations, transmission capacity [...][... Check source for end of article ...]
📅 - Linux Kernel 7.2 Brings Btrfs, Scheduler and Networking Upgrades - Linux 7.2 arrives with scheduler, storage, networking, memory, security, and virtualization changes that could alter how Linux estates behave under load. The release brings cache aware scheduling, bigger Btrfs folios, leaner swap metadata, new encryption plumbing, expanded protocol support, and a build specific SBOM target, while stripping away legacy hardware and networking code from the kernel tree.
For enterprises, the important part is less any single feature than the direction of travel. The kernel is being tuned for larger memory footprints, denser compute, faster storage, and more complicated software supply chain requirements, while maintainers continue cutting compatibility code [...]
📅 - Malaysia Turns Palm Oil Into Data Center Cooling Fluid - Malaysia's palm oil research agency is positioning a palm-derived immersion fluid as a possible answer to the water and power demands of expanding data center infrastructure. Sawit EcoTherm replaces evaporative cooling with direct liquid immersion, targeting AI systems whose rising rack densities are forcing operators to reconsider how facilities remove heat from increasingly power-hungry computing equipment safely.
The Malaysian Palm Oil Board, or MPOB, developed the dielectric fluid using locally sourced palm-derived ingredients. Its argument is partly technical and partly national resource policy. Malaysia is attracting substantial data center development, while conventional cooling [...]
📅 - NVIDIA and Nokia Back Indosat's Indonesian AI Factory Platform - Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison has launched Zankore, an AI infrastructure platform backed by Ooredoo Group and built with NVIDIA and Nokia, targeting one gigawatt of NVIDIA DSX AI Factory capacity. The first 200 megawatts are scheduled for the first half of 2027, positioning Indonesia as the initial market for a broader Asia-Pacific compute buildout for regional enterprise workloads.
The number that matters first is not one gigawatt. It is 200 megawatts. That is the capacity Zankore says it expects to deliver during the first half of 2027, using NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems. The much larger figure describes where the platform intends to go rather than what customers can buy today.
Still, 200 MW [...]
📅 - Tencent Links AI Efficiency Gains to Its 2030 Climate Commitments - Tencent says it remains on course to reach carbon neutrality across its operations and supply chain by 2030, even as AI raises the energy intensity of its data centers. Its midterm climate report highlights higher renewable electricity use, denser computing infrastructure, AI based energy scheduling and climate technology programs, but leaves tougher questions around absolute power demand unresolved.
The uncomfortable arithmetic sits behind almost every figure in the report. Tencent says AI workloads can raise rack power demand from roughly 6 to 8 kW to 30 to 100 kW or more. That changes the engineering problem for operators. Power distribution, cooling capacity, grid connections and [...]
📅 - WhiteFiber Plans 200 MW North Carolina Data Center Expansion - AI infrastructure solutions provider WhiteFiber has agreed to buy two industrial properties in Yadkin County, North Carolina, for $60 million, with plans to convert them into data center campuses targeting AI and high-performance computing demand. The sites could provide at least 60 MW initially and potentially about 200 MW over time, with first service targeted for the third quarter of 2027.
The acquisition, being made through wholly owned subsidiary Enovum Data Centers, gives WhiteFiber a relatively direct route to expanding capacity without beginning from bare land. NC-2 and NC-3, as the planned campuses are being called, sit roughly 55 miles from the company's existing NC-1 site in [...]
📅 - Xpander Raises $7.5M to Expand Enterprise AI Agents Platform - Xpander has raised $7.5 million in seed funding to expand an enterprise AI platform designed to let companies build, deploy, and govern agents across models, clouds, and frameworks. The San Francisco startup is also introducing Omni, an AI agent aimed at accelerating production deployments, as enterprises struggle to move beyond pilots without adding infrastructure or governance headaches.
Pico Venture Partners led the round, with Emerge Ventures, Samsung Next, and SeedIL participating. The capital gives Xpander more room to chase a market crowded with startups, cloud providers, model companies, orchestration vendors, and security specialists all trying to become part of the enterprise [...]
📅 - Rubicon Professional Services says it has surpassed one gigawatt of installed battery energy storage capacity across US projects, as data center developers scramble for power that utilities cannot always deliver quickly. The portfolio spans critical infrastructure sectors, but AI-driven computing is making batteries increasingly more relevant to facility schedules, grid constraints, resilience planning and electricity costs nationwide.
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