Colocation & Hyperscale REITs

Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI have launched the AI Energy Management Alliance, or AEMA, a coalition that dynamically manages the electricity use of data centers in response to grid conditions. Emerald AI founder and CEO Varun Sivaram said the alliance's founding members are joined by a cohort of 20 launch partners, including the AI lab Anthropic, the semiconductor firm Analog Devices, and the energy companies AES, NRG, Constellation, RWE and National Grid. Sivaram said Emerald AI, which was founded under two years ago, is building with Nvidia and Digital Realty the world's first from-the-ground-up power-flexible AI data center, a 100 megawatt facility in Manassas, Virginia, that comes online later this year. He said Google, one of the founding members, has already done a gigawatt of demand response for its data centers, while Emerald and Nvidia have completed six demonstrations around the world, in London, Phoenix and Virginia. Sivaram said the alliance is talking to the FERC commissioners, state regulators and the administration about a grand bargain in which flexible AI data centers act as good citizens to grids and communities in return for faster and larger connections to the power grid.

CleanSpark Inc.'s debut junk-bond offering for a data center tied to Meta Platforms Inc. drew orders of about $10 billion, more than four times the deal's size, according to people familiar with the matter. The five-year notes were set at almost $2.28 billion and launched at 98.5 cents on the dollar to yield 8.25%, roughly 1.75 percentage points above the average for BB rated firms tracked by Bloomberg. The fundraising, led by Morgan Stanley, will help finance construction of a data center in Sandersville, Georgia, that has been fully leased to Anviran LLC, a Meta subsidiary, under a $6.6 billion, 20-year contract. The facility is expected to begin operations in the fourth quarter of 2027, with Meta guaranteeing rent and operating expenses. Data center developers have now sold more than $3 billion of high-yield bonds so far this year, most backed by long-term leases with hyperscalers including Oracle Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.

Meta Platforms raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion, including principal payments on finance leases, narrowed from a prior $125 billion to $145 billion range in its Q2 2026 report on July 29, 2026. The forward guidance nearly doubles Meta's full-year 2025 capex of $72.215 billion, and Q2 capital expenditures alone reached $31.1 billion, driven by servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. To fund the build, Meta ended Q2 with $90.3 billion in cash and marketable securities and $83.7 billion in debt, and announced a strategic venture with BlackRock to develop a one gigawatt data center in El Paso, Texas. CFO Susan Li said Meta is demand constrained today, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is receiving quite a number of offers at a meaningful premium over what we paid for the compute, framing direct compute sales as one leg of a portfolio that also includes APIs, business agents, productivity tools, and subscriptions. The strain is visible in the quarterly numbers: Q2 free cash flow was $784 million, down 91.31% year over year, and operating margin compressed to 31% from 43%, even as Q2 revenue reached $60.801 billion, up 27.96% year over year and above the $60.286 billion consensus, with advertising revenue of $59.4 billion, up 27%.

Amazon Web Services posted $42.23 billion in revenue, growing 37% year over year, the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters, with a 39.4% operating margin and a $496 billion contracted backlog. Amazon's chips and AI businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion in the second quarter, both growing at triple-digit percentages year over year, while 98% of Amazon's top 1,000 EC2 customers use Graviton and Anthropic and OpenAI have made multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium. Q2 operating income landed at $27.46 billion, up 43.2% year over year, and advertising is a $70 billion-plus trailing-twelve-month business growing 26%. Capex reached $54.21 billion in a single quarter, up 68.4% year over year, and free cash flow swung to negative $7.6 billion on a trailing-twelve-month basis, though most AI capacity is contracted for at least five-year terms. Since Amazon reported Q2 on July 30, 2026, AMZN moved from $230.08 to $251.19, while SPY went from $747.03 to $762.70 and QQQ went from $687.99 to $716.92. Andy Jassy said AWS could become a few hundred billion dollar revenue business and now believes it will be at least double that and very possibly a trillion dollar annual revenue business in time.

CleanSpark has signed a 20-year, $6.6 billion triple-net lease for its Sandersville, Georgia, site, a deal the company expects to generate $330 million in annual revenue. Chairman and CEO Matt Schultz said the site includes a fully energized 250-megawatt substation, that CleanSpark secured an additional 122 acres with community support, and that the tenant received short-term exclusivity for up to 885 additional megawatts in Texas, with the first data hall targeted for delivery in December 2027. The announcement came during an H.C. Wainwright panel where mining and AI infrastructure executives described a broad pivot from bitcoin operations toward AI colocation, cloud services and GPU-as-a-service. Core Scientific's Russell Cann said direct-liquid-cooled construction costs have climbed from roughly $4.5 million per megawatt for early projects to about $10 million to $10.5 million per megawatt for facilities turned on this year and $12 million to $13 million per megawatt for projects expected to start operating in 2027. Cann also said Core Scientific recently announced a roughly 500-megawatt agreement with AMD, with AMD holding rights to the next 2,000 megawatts across sites in Hunt County and Pecos, Texas, and Muskogee, Oklahoma, under a 15-year triple-net lease at $125 per megawatt or a modified gross structure at $145 per megawatt. Executives pushed back on AI bubble concerns, with Cann noting roughly 5 gigawatts of rack space is delivered annually against approximately 15 gigawatts of annual chip demand, while cautioning that many power requests may be duplicative or unsupported by actual transmission, substations or fuel supply.

Planet Communications Asia, or PLANET, disclosed that its data center in the Eastern Economic Corridor, or EEC, is drawing strong interest from both domestic and foreign investors, with operators continuously approaching the company to negotiate service use and joint investment. The momentum is driven by rapidly expanding demand for data, cloud, and AI technology in the region, along with government support through changes to laws, regulations, and investment incentive measures in the EEC. PLANET currently provides co-location data center services under the name STP Planet DC in Ban Chang district, Rayong province, supporting a maximum IT load of 600 kW per data hall, and plans to accommodate an expansion of total gross load of up to 6.8 MW to meet demand and support the future growth of enterprise customers and large cloud service providers.

AXG and Digital Realty announced a partnership to help global system integrators and managed service providers deliver fully hosted, lifecycle-managed private infrastructure as a service across more than 30 countries. The joint offering combines Digital Realty's global data center platform, PlatformDigital, and its ServiceFabric interconnection and orchestration solution with AXG's multi-technology infrastructure-as-a-service model, covering data center space, power, cooling, connectivity, interconnection, and sovereign-ready colocation. Under the arrangement, GSIs and MSPs retain ownership of the customer relationship, solution design, managed services, orchestration, and the application layer, while AXG and Digital Realty provide the underlying hosting, commercial, and operational infrastructure. The offering targets four areas of enterprise and government demand: private AI, edge as a service, cloud repatriation, and neo-cloud capacity, and is available today across 31 markets spanning North America, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. Digital Realty's Jules Johnston, Senior Vice President of Channels and Alliances, said the combination creates a powerful new route to market, while AXG CEO Bo White said the partnership closes the gap between dedicated infrastructure economics and cloud-style simplicity.

Hyperscale Data said it has invested more than $70M in Alliance Cloud Services and its Michigan AI data center, with operations under a previously announced master services agreement expected to begin in November 2026. The investment has funded a substantial portion of the capital needed to prepare the facility for an initial 20 MW AI compute deployment to a California-based neocloud provider, and the company said it has acquired a substantial amount of the equipment needed to bring the contracted capacity online. The agreement covers an initial 20 megawatts of critical AI compute capacity for 10 years, with two five-year extension options, and if maintained for the full 20-year term is expected to generate more than $1.2B in revenue. The customer can expand the deployment to 52 MW, which could generate more than $3B in revenue over 20 years, while the Michigan facility has about 340 MW of potential capacity, leaving about 270 MW for future customers after a full 52 MW deployment. The stock price scaled about 4.4% on Thursday during pre-market trade.

Oracle beat Wall Street's revenue and earnings expectations for the first quarter of fiscal 2027, with total quarterly revenues rising 30% year over year to $19.3 billion and total cloud revenues climbing 62% to $11.6 billion. Within that cloud total, cloud infrastructure revenues more than doubled, up 121%, while cloud applications revenues grew 10%. Remaining performance obligations jumped by $209 billion year over year to $664 billion, and operating cash flow reached a record $23.1 billion, up 184%, even as free cash flow stayed negative amid a data center buildout that added 850 megawatts of new capacity in the quarter. Management guided full-year fiscal 2027 capital expenditures toward $90 billion to $95 billion, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2027 earnings stands at $8.10, implying 6.16% year-over-year growth. Oracle shares have lost 27.9% year to date, underperforming the Zacks Computer and Technology sector's 17.4% gain, and the stock trades at a forward 12-month P/E of 15.8X versus the Zacks Computer - Software industry average of 23.16X; ORCL currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Cipher Mining shares rose 9% to $16.42 in early Wednesday trading after the Electric Reliability Council of Texas disclosed conditional grid capacity covering 3.2 gigawatts across the company's Texas projects through the state grid operator's Batch Zero process, rather than through a company release. Peer names moved in sympathy on the same ERCOT read, with Core Scientific up 4% to $16.76 and IREN up 2% to $42.57, after all three sold off a day earlier as the artificial intelligence buildout trade came apart. The wider sector barely participated, with the Global X Data Center & Digital Infrastructure ETF up 1% to $27.47 and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust up 0.35% to $760, isolating Cipher's surge as a grid-access story rather than a broad market move. ERCOT created the Batch Zero process earlier this year to work through a queue of large-load interconnection requests dominated by data centers, and a base load classification covers power expected to be consumed continuously; the classifications are conditional and remain subject to verification and further audits, marking a position in a process rather than a completed grid connection. CoinShares, in its most recent quarterly Bitcoin mining report, estimated that artificial intelligence workloads generate annualized profit of roughly $1.5 million per megawatt against $0.5 million per megawatt for Bitcoin mining, and said Cipher expected mining to become immaterial to its business and was winding that operation down.

Blockfusion USA, Inc. announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, North East Data, LLC, has entered into a definitive anchor lease with CoreWeave, Inc. for capacity at Blockfusion's Niagara Falls, New York campus, alongside a companion expansion agreement. The two agreements convert the non-binding letter of intent announced on June 30, 2026, into definitive agreements, and the lease carries a 15-year initial term with two five-year renewal options. Blockfusion has transformed a decommissioned power plant into a low-carbon data center powered predominantly by hydroelectric power and is now adapting the campus for high-density, liquid-cooled AI infrastructure, benefiting from an existing grid interconnection, clean energy and redundant fiber infrastructure. Chief Executive Officer Alex Martini-Lo Manto called the agreement a defining milestone for Blockfusion and strong validation of the Niagara Falls campus, while Mayor Robert Restaino said the commitment creates opportunities for residents and businesses. The agreements also mark a step in Blockfusion's proposed business combination with Blue Acquisition Corp., which is expected to result in Blockfusion Digital Infrastructure, Inc. becoming a publicly traded company listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol BDI, with additional information to be included in an amendment to the registration statement on Form S-4 filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic has signed a lease for its first data center in Australia. According to two people familiar with the matter, the facility covered by the agreement has a planned capacity of 2.16 gigawatts, a scale comparable to the largest facilities currently operating anywhere in the world. The site is farmland about 250 kilometers from Brisbane, with operations scheduled to begin in 2027. The facility is being planned by Singapore-based developer Zera DC, which will procure power through renewable energy purchase agreements and will also bear the cost of connecting to the transmission grid, so existing customers will not face any cost burden. The agreement is conditional on approval from the Foreign Investment Review Board.

On September 15, CoinShares published its second-quarter 2026 Bitcoin mining report, expressing the view that even if the Bitcoin price recovers, the shift of listed miners toward AI infrastructure will not reverse. According to the report, in the second quarter the listed mining sector as a whole fell below its cash-based break-even point, with the average cash production cost per BTC at about 75,500 dollars, while BTC had fallen to 58,400 dollars by the end of the quarter. By the firm's estimates, AI brings these companies about 1.5 million dollars in annual profit per megawatt, while mining yields only about 500,000 dollars. Author Luke Nolan cited examples including Core Scientific paying 41.9 million dollars to cancel contracts for next-generation mining rigs. New data center construction itself has also become more difficult, with at least 225 construction halts or regulatory interventions seen across 30 U.S. states. Although BTC has recovered to around 77,000 dollars and many miners are once again above break-even, the firm believes it is unlikely that miners who have committed power and infrastructure to AI through long-term leases and the like will return to mining.

Bernstein named CoreWeave as the single stock most exposed to a potential AI slowdown, sending its shares down 6.75% to close at $82.98 on Sept. 14. The warning followed an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," in which he argued AI companies need to slow how they improve model capabilities, a call backed within hours by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Bernstein analyst Madison Rezaei said about 25% of CoreWeave's active U.S. power sits in Tier 3 and Tier 4 rural markets built for training, with another 74% of its contracted but not yet active power in those same markets, leaving it vulnerable if training demand slows. Bernstein rates CoreWeave Underperform with a $74 price target, while the stock's average Wall Street price target sits near $139. By contrast, Bernstein rates Equinix, Digital Realty and Csquare Outperform, with price targets of $1,270, $226 and $27 respectively, noting each keeps more than 90% of its U.S. capacity in metro markets. The sell-off spread across AI infrastructure, with Nebius down 8%, Applied Digital down 6%, DigitalOcean down 5%, IREN down 4%, Lumentum down 8%, Ciena and Coherent each down 7%, Arista Networks down 5%, Marvell and Arm each down 8%, AMD and Intel down 6%, and Broadcom down 4%.

Anthropic signed a six-year, $13.7B compute agreement with Trump-linked RUM Group, the company best known for its Rumble video-sharing platform. Under the deal, Anthropic will lease AI compute capacity from RUM's Maysville, Georgia data center, which is under construction with 120 MW of secured grid power and potential expansion to 180 MW, and Anthropic gains warrants to buy roughly 51 million shares of RUM. The contract value is more than 300 times RUM's latest quarterly revenue of $40.4M. RUM shares soared more than 15% on Monday, and the session was set to be RUM's highest volume day in history. The agreement followed a viral social media post by former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warning about AI safety, which drew 170 million impressions in five days and helped lift cybersecurity stocks including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Okta and CrowdStrike.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde warned in Vienna on Monday that Europe cannot rely solely on imported artificial intelligence from the United States and must develop its own capacity or risk giving foreign technology suppliers leverage over every corner of its economy. Lagarde said Europe's first priority must be expanding its own computing infrastructure, noting the continent already lacks sufficient data center capacity to meet existing demand and that on current trends the gap is projected to grow more than sixfold within a decade, with closing it potentially costing as much as €600 billion over ten years, chips included. She said the E.U.'s new gigafactories are a start but fill only a fraction of the shortfall, and that Europe must also develop AI models competent enough for the majority of use cases and hosted on European systems, pointing to French firm Mistral and a company in San Sebastián that adapted a Chinese open model to top independent benchmarks among European models. Lagarde said euro area households hold roughly €440 billion in U.S. technology firms while U.S. hyperscalers issued more than $100 billion in bonds last year, and cited ECB estimates that rapid AI adoption could raise productivity by as much as 4% over a decade. She argued the buildout requires patient equity rather than debt alone, noting European households save roughly €1.4 trillion a year but that markets to channel that capital into homegrown technology do not yet exist at the necessary scale. The remarks came alongside prior Brussels steps, including European Commission legislation to restrict sensitive government cloud contracts to providers meeting European sovereignty standards through the Cloud and AI Development Act, and a roughly €30 billion E.U. tender for up to seven AI gigafactories pairing up to €10 billion in public funding with at least €20 billion in expected private investment, with construction targeted to begin in 2027.

Gulf Development Public Company Limited, or GULF, has announced a major investment plan over the next five years worth as much as 140 billion baht to expand its data centre and digital infrastructure businesses and capture the growth of AI technology. The company aims to raise its data centre capacity to as much as 2,000 megawatts, up from roughly 200 megawatts at present. Chief Executive Officer Sarath Ratanavadi said the private sector is ready to take part in developing power projects of all types under the new Power Development Plan, or PDP, including solar, wind, battery energy storage and natural gas-fired power plants, as well as studying small modular reactor technology. The PDP targets power generation capacity of 50,000 megawatts, and the company sees opportunities in the free electricity business, such as selling green power to large electricity users. On the data centre side, GULF agrees with the government's move to set clear definitions and regulations, noting that demand in Thailand is very high from users of various social media platforms. The company has also joined hands with Singtel Group to take part in developing the Vietnam-Thailand-Singapore Cable System, a submarine cable network linking Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore on an open access basis, with a project value in the tens of billions of baht and service scheduled to begin in 2030.

Buildots announced a $130 million funding round led by O.G. Venture Partners, bringing its total capital raised to $297 million. The round included participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Mohari Ventures, Human Capital, Qumra Capital, Avigdor Willenz, Viola Growth and Poalim Equity. The Tel Aviv-based company said the funding extends a multi-year streak of 3x annual revenue growth and will scale deployments of its AI construction platform across the global data center buildout. Buildots is currently deployed by more than 100 large-scale firms, including owners Digital Realty and Intel, hyperscalers, and contractors STO Building Group, JE Dunn, Mortenson, Bouygues and HOCHTIEF. The company said seven-figure, portfolio-wide, multi-year agreements are now the norm rather than the exception, and the round adds two new investors to its cap table: Human Capital and Mohari Ventures.

Supapong Iamkong-aek, an analyst at Kiatnakin Phatra Securities, or KKPS, said investment in artificial intelligence is entering a new cycle, with the focus shifting from developing the technology to investing in the infrastructure needed to support AI's expansion, including data centers, power systems, electronic components and connectivity. This is an opportunity for Thailand to attract a new wave of foreign direct investment. Although only a limited number of technology and electronics companies are listed on the Thai stock exchange, off-market businesses tied to the downstream side of AI, such as Analog Devices and Seagate, have production bases in Thailand and have seen a significant rise in investment promotion applications to the Board of Investment, or BOI. On data center investment in Thailand, the value of BOI promotion applications in the first quarter exceeded 700 billion baht, but slowed markedly in the second quarter as some foreign investors waited for clarity on data center regulations in Thailand. Thailand currently has fewer than 1 GW of data centers actually in operation, while Malaysia has about 7 GW. Given the steady flow of BOI applications, Thailand's data center capacity could rise to 3 to 5 GW within the next three to five years, and combined with the new Power Development Plan, Thailand is preparing as much as about 9 GW of power capacity to support data centers. On electronics stocks, the analyst said Delta Electronics (Thailand), or DELTA, remains the standout, given its large market capitalization and its direct link to the AI theme, with a price-to-earnings ratio as high as about 100 times, compared with around 20 to 30 times for Nvidia. Among power plant operators, Gulf Development, or GULF, is the top pick, while in the industrial estate group, WHA Corporation, or WHA, is the top pick because it has a larger share of revenue and land area tied to data centers than AMATA.

Nearly a dozen data center companies have gone public, filed for an IPO or been reported to be exploring one over the past year, with the pace accelerating over the past three months. Recent listings include Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust, Brookfield-backed colocation provider Csquare and Texas startup Fermi, while Switch and Singapore-based DayOne have confidentially filed, SoftBank-backed SB Energy has publicly filed and AI data center specialist Nscale is reportedly preparing a listing. Major digital infrastructure players Vantage Data Centers, CyrusOne, Blue Owl, DataBank and EdgeCore are all reportedly at least exploring IPOs, a reversal from 2021 and 2022 when take-private deals including Blackstone's $10B acquisition of QTS left just two listed data center firms. Industry leaders say no single force is driving the shift, attributing it instead to the trillions of dollars required for AI infrastructure and a growing diversity of public equity strategies. Blue Owl is reportedly planning a REIT seeded with around $6.5B of its own stabilized data center assets, while SB Energy is reportedly seeking a valuation of more than $50B despite still developing its first campus.

Anthropic has lined up a $517 billion compute commitment ahead of its confidential IPO, according to a September 6, 2026 report from The Information, up from the roughly $180 billion in server-leasing spend the company previously told investors it expected through 2029. The figure aggregates contracted and reported deals stretching mostly across the next decade rather than a single contract, and actual outlays will hinge on how much capacity is delivered and utilized. Amazon and Alphabet together account for roughly 11 GW and more than $300 billion over about 10 years, Microsoft committed at least $30 billion for roughly 1 GW of Azure capacity, and the SpaceX/Colossus deal runs up to about $45 billion, with neoclouds including CoreWeave, Lambda, Nscale, and Fluidstack also inside the total. AMD captured a 2-gigawatt MI450 Series deal in Helios racks, complementing rather than replacing Anthropic's NVIDIA footprint. NVIDIA reported Q2 FY2027 revenue of $96.22 billion, up 105.85% year over year, with Data Center at $89.02 billion, up 117%, and guided Q3 to $108.0 billion plus or minus 2%, while CFO Colette Kress said the company expects revenue growth of approximately 70% in fiscal 2028.

Nvidia announced on September 9 strategic partnerships with Australian Nvidia Cloud Partners and AI infrastructure providers, working toward an AI infrastructure buildout of up to 2 gigawatts by 2027. The initiative will expand land, power, and data center shell capacity designed to host multiple generations of Nvidia's DSX AI factory infrastructure, with Nvidia supplying its DSX platform, accelerated computing, networking, software, and ecosystem support. The Australian buildout is one part of Nvidia's broader global AI factory expansion, which also includes a 140-megawatts AI factory in Japan expected to use Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, plus new AI supercomputers across multiple European countries. Power constraints remain the key risk, as a 2 GW buildout requires enormous reliable electricity and could face delays in grid connections, transmission, land development, construction, or regulatory approvals, alongside utilization risk if Australian demand for AI compute grows slower than expected. According to Insider Monkey data, 285 hedge funds held Nvidia shares at the end of the second quarter versus 275 in the previous quarter, with Fisher Asset Management raising its position by 3% to approximately $18.19 billion and AQR Capital Management increasing its stake by 18% to approximately $7.48 billion, while short interest stood at roughly 1.23% of shares as of August 14.

Major real estate companies, including comprehensive developers, are stepping up data center development. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the domestic related market is expected to exceed 5 trillion yen in 2028, and further growth is anticipated on the back of the artificial intelligence boom. Daiwa House Industry plans to build a total of 14 data centers in Inzai City, Chiba Prefecture, breaking ground on the fifth in late September. It has also developed a modular small-scale data center in which some components are manufactured at a factory and assembled on site, and the first such unit was completed in April in Okuma Town, Fukushima Prefecture. Mitsui Fudosan plans cumulative investment of more than 600 billion yen in data center-related projects by fiscal 2035, with development underway in four areas: Sagamihara City, Hino City in Tokyo, the Hokusetsu region of Osaka Prefecture, and the Tama region of Tokyo. In the Hino City project, the building's height was gradually lowered from an initial 80 meters to 63.5 meters in consideration of sunlight. New entrants are also appearing one after another. Mitsubishi Estate set up a data center business office in April and has already invested in multiple projects, and a data center in Ishikari City, Hokkaido, in which Tokyu Land Corporation participated in development for the first time, began operating in August using 100 percent renewable energy.

Dell Technologies CFO David Kennedy told investors at Citi's TMT conference that the company booked $6.1 billion of AI server GPU orders in its fiscal second quarter, matching the amount booked across the prior three quarters, and $13.2 billion over the last 12 months. Kennedy said pipeline activity is multiples of backlog, spanning neocloud providers, sovereign customers and enterprises, with enterprise demand growing fastest by rate. Growth is broadening beyond AI GPUs: traditional server revenue rose 122% in the second quarter, with every geography, customer segment and vertical growing at triple-digit rates, while storage grew 26% and Dell guided for double-digit storage growth for the full year, expecting to add $2.5 billion in storage revenue and calling the coming quarter potentially a record for Dell storage. Kennedy said Dell expects the supply-demand imbalance to worsen next year, with DRAM and NAND the largest constrained components, prompting customers to discuss infrastructure requirements two, three and four years ahead and to seek multiyear supply-access commitments, though guaranteed supply does not mean guaranteed pricing. Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group posted a 15% margin rate despite growth in lower-margin AI servers, and the company has guided to operating expenses equal to 8% of revenue, which Kennedy called its most efficient level in Dell's 42-year history, versus 20% six years ago. Dell has more than 6,500 enterprise AI customers, up more than 60% over the past six months, and its share repurchase authorization increased from $1.6 billion to $3.9 billion over 90 days.

President Trump called AI data centers "the oil of the next 50 years" during an appearance on Laura Ingraham's The Ingraham Angle, arguing the buildout is delivering wealth and investment to American communities, while singling out Google for building a data center in Finland and saying he "wasn't happy about that." The remarks land as Google CEO Sundar Pichai describes a company building the physical layer of that new economy at unprecedented scale, telling analysts on the July 22, 2026 call that Google is "supply constrained" and that "the demand still outpaces that investment." Google's Q2 revenue reached $119.80 billion, up 24.2% year over year, with Google Cloud accelerating to $24.77 billion, up 82%, a Cloud backlog of $514 billion, and EPS of $9.11 against a $3.0427 estimate. Q2 capital expenditures hit $44.92 billion, up 100.14% year over year, driving free cash flow to negative $5.855 billion, while long-term debt jumped from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion and full-year 2026 capex is guided to $175 billion to $185 billion. The Finland project Trump referenced is Google's single largest AI investment in Europe, a €13 billion ($15.1 billion) commitment across 2027 and 2028 that includes a 22-year nuclear power deal covering up to 50% of Fortum's Loviisa plant output through 2050, projected to add roughly €3.6 billion to Finnish GDP during construction and support 7,000 jobs annually once operational. Trump's claim that community backlash against data centers is a Chinese PR campaign glosses over hard numbers: U.S. electricity prices rose 6.1% year over year, roughly 61% faster than CPI's 3.8%, and AI data-center draw is projected to rise 14-fold by 2028 to 12% of U.S. electricity consumption.

Apple took the wraps off its new iPhone lineup, including the foldable iPhone Duo starting at $1,999 for the 256 GB option and running up to 2 TB, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,199 and iPhone 18 Pro Max at $1,299. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reiterated he is confident in growing revenue 70% next year, noting the upcoming Vera Rubin system is priced at roughly $40,000 versus roughly $25,000 for Blackwell and $18,000 for Hopper, while the Justice Department is investigating whether Nvidia structured its $20B licensing deal with AI chip startup Groq to avoid antitrust scrutiny. Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter results and guidance that topped Wall Street estimates by a significant margin, with cloud revenue at $11.6B, up 62% year-over-year, infrastructure revenue soaring 121% to $7.4B, and application revenue rising 10% to $4.2B. Adobe also reported second-quarter results and guidance above estimates, though analysts noted a slowdown in annual recurring revenue growth amid its freemium AI strategy. In other news, Qualcomm and Amazon announced a partnership to build next-generation AI data center infrastructure, and Microsoft plans to more than triple its global data center capacity to more than 38 gigawatts by 2032, up from about 12 gigawatts currently.

Emerald AI has raised $150 million in financing to support commercial expansion of flexible AI infrastructure developed with NVIDIA and Digital Realty, with NVIDIA named among the investors in the August 25 announcement. The capital backs a nearly 100-megawatt research factory in Manassas, Virginia, that the companies now expect online later this year, a later schedule than the first half of 2026 targeted in an October 2025 announcement. The approach coordinates computing workloads with onsite energy resources so a facility can adjust its electricity draw when the grid is under strain, using NVIDIA's software and infrastructure controls alongside Emerald's orchestration technology. Emerald already reports commercial deployment at an entire California data center, though the announcement provides no quantified earnings contribution for Digital Realty and no new order value for NVIDIA. August 14 short interest stood at 1.23% of NVIDIA's float and 2.07% of Digital Realty's.

Equinix has expanded its partnership with Nvidia and launched the Equinix Inference Exchange, giving enterprise customers a flexible way to run AI models using Nvidia's Enterprise Reference Architectures and Together AI's open-source inference platform through Equinix's global data centers and connectivity. The colocation data center company, which dates back to the 1998 dot-com era, operates more than 280 data centers across 77 metros with over 10,500 interconnected customers, and its facilities are optimized for Nvidia's B300 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, with some liquid-cooled sites supporting newer Vera Rubin chips. Equinix shares are up over 33% this year, lifting its market capitalization to $100 billion as the most valuable data center REIT, ahead of Digital Realty's $68 billion. In the second quarter, revenue grew 16% to $2.625 billion, AFFO per share rose 19% to $11.78, adjusted EBITDA margin reached a record 53%, and management delivered its largest guidance increase in company history. The company nearly doubled its capital expenditure guidance to $5 billion to $7 billion annually from $3 billion to $4 billion, and it expects the new Nvidia and Together AI offering to launch commercially in the first quarter of 2027.