Data Center Investment News — 25/09/2026
September 25, 2026
Written by Angela Cáceres, Siddhi Pandit, Ensar Aljimi
Egypt’s Intro Group to Invest US$270 Million in 80 MW Kemet Data Center
Egyptian conglomerate Intro Group has committed US$270 million to the first phase of its Kemet Data Center, an 80 MW facility planned for the Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZONE). Positioned as the first Tier III site in the zone, Kemet is designed to deliver cloud, IoT and advanced computing infrastructure to enterprise customers. Engineering designs are complete and contracts with equipment suppliers have been signed, moving the project from planning into execution.
The announcement was made alongside Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Raafat Hindy, who underlined the government’s intent to create an investment-friendly environment for data center development and urged the private sector to capitalise on Egypt’s locational advantages. The timing reflects a market in rapid expansion: Egypt’s data center sector was valued at US$305 million in 2025 and is forecast to reach US$865 million by 2031, driven by AI, machine learning and IoT demand.
Microsoft to Invest $10bn Into Gulf States by 2030
Microsoft will invest more than $10 billion across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait by 2030, targeting cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. A further $400 million is earmarked for undersea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East. The programme builds on partnerships with G42 in Abu Dhabi — where Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in 2024 — as well as Humain in Saudi Arabia and Qai in Qatar, though the company confirmed it will not take equity stakes in the latter two.
The commitment extends Microsoft’s regional cloud footprint, which already includes a UAE region launched in 2019, regions in Qatar and Israel, a Saudi Arabian region completed in December 2024, and a planned Kuwait region. Microsoft has pledged to prioritise zero-water cooling technologies where feasible and to advance water reuse and replenishment. It also plans to broaden data-sovereignty commitments and cybersecurity support, acknowledging the operational impact of regional conflict on data center resilience.
Digital Realty Hires New Global Head of Energy
Digital Realty has appointed Jim Collins as Senior Vice President, Global Head of Energy. Collins joins from Microsoft, where he spent 13 years and most recently served as General Manager of Global Energy Markets. Before that he spent a decade as an energy consultant at Brubaker & Associates in North Carolina, giving him a background that spans both hyperscale procurement and utility-side advisory work.
The hire lands at a moment when power strategy has become the defining constraint on data center growth. Collins will own Digital Realty’s global energy strategy across a portfolio that already includes rooftop solar in Switzerland, 24/7 renewable energy matching in Sweden and France, and a 500GWh hydropower agreement supplying its Virginia footprint from Ohio River projects. Commenting on the appointment, Collins described the opportunity to advance the company’s energy strategy amid extraordinary growth in data centers, cloud and AI infrastructure as “both exciting and humbling.”
OpenAI and Anthropic Seek 20-30MW Data Center Deployments
OpenAI and Anthropic are both in discussions for smaller data center deployments in the 20-30MW range, intended primarily for inference workloads rather than training. OpenAI has approached partners in the United States and the Nordics, while Anthropic has held parallel conversations in the UK and Nordic markets. OpenAI noted that different workloads require different infrastructure, and that it assesses opportunities against specific requirements across a range of partners.
The move signals a maturing procurement pattern among frontier AI labs: very large training clusters concentrated in a handful of sites, complemented by a geographically distributed layer of mid-sized capacity placed closer to end users. The scale of underlying commitment remains substantial — Anthropic has signed more than $517 billion in compute capacity leases over the past eleven months to support training and deployment of its Claude models. For operators, the shift opens demand at a capacity band many regional developers can realistically serve.
Meta Signs 144MW Solar PPA With Apex in Texas
Meta has signed a 144MW solar power purchase agreement with Apex Clean Energy tied to the Starling Solar project in Gonzales County, Texas. Construction is already underway, with commercial operations expected in 2027. The plant will feed into the ERCOT grid rather than serving a Meta facility directly, with Meta taking exclusive rights to all environmental attributes and renewable energy credits generated.
This is the seventh agreement between the two companies, bringing their combined contracted capacity to 1.2GW across projects in Virginia, Texas, Illinois, Kansas and Iowa. The deal supports Meta’s growing Texas presence, where it operates campuses in Fort Worth and Temple and is developing a third site in El Paso due online in 2028. Apex, headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia, has commercialised over 12GW of clean generation since 2009 and holds a development pipeline exceeding 25GW.
Meta Plans Petal, the First Transoceanic Subsea Cable at Petabit Capacity
Meta has unveiled Petal, a 7,000 km (4,350 mile) subsea cable linking the United States and France that will be the first transoceanic system to achieve petabit-per-second capacity. The cable uses two-core fibre in a 24-fibre-pair configuration — functionally equivalent to 48 fibre pairs — combined with single-core fibre amplification and Fan-In/Fan-Out interface technology. Service entry is expected in 2029.
The system is being built with NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries, with Orange managing the French landing. Eduardo Mateo, Chief Strategy Officer of NEC’s Submarine Network Division, described the project as a major technological milestone in the history of global telecommunications. Petal adds to a portfolio of more than 20 subsea cable investments by Meta, including Project Waterworth, currently described as the world’s longest subsea cable.
Woodway to Build 22-Mile Gas Pipeline for Behind-the-Meter Data Center Project
Woodway Energy Infrastructure has signed definitive agreements to develop a 22-mile, 30-inch natural gas pipeline supplying a hyperscale data center’s behind-the-meter power generation facility. The line is expected to enter commercial service in the first half of 2028, subject to regulatory approval, and will be owned and operated by Woodway. Neither the customer nor the precise location has been disclosed, though Woodway’s existing asset base in Texas points to that market.
The company’s CEO framed the project as evidence of Woodway’s ability to deliver large-scale, purpose-built gas infrastructure for customers with demanding safety, reliability and capacity requirements. The commercial logic is increasingly familiar: behind-the-meter generation sidesteps interconnection queues that have become the primary schedule risk for hyperscale projects. ERCOT is currently tracking 438 GW of large load requests, with close to 89 percent originating from data centers seeking grid connection.
BDx Breaks Ground on AI Campus 2 in Jatiluhur, Indonesia
BDx Data Centers has broken ground on AI Campus 2 (CGK4), a 640MW development in Jatiluhur, West Java, roughly five kilometres from the Jatiluhur Dam. The first 120MW building is scheduled to come online in early 2027, with six buildings delivered sequentially over three years. The site is backed by 845MVA of grid capacity and is certified under Nvidia’s DGX-Ready Colocation Data Center programme.
The campus is engineered for high-density AI workloads, using direct-to-chip liquid cooling capable of supporting up to 500kW per rack. BDx operates in Indonesia as a joint venture with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and Lintasarta, and has previously secured 1.2GW of power from state utility PT PLN — described as the single largest power commitment secured by any data center operator in the country. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Singapore, BDx is targeting 1GW of portfolio capacity across APAC.
Plans Progress for 200MW Data Center in Schladen-Werla, Germany
Green Datacenter Development (GDD) has advanced plans for a 200MW data center in Schladen-Werla, Lower Saxony, on a site of more than 14 hectares (34 acres) outside the town. The local grid operator has approved the connection request and the scheme was included in the municipal development plan in April 2026. First proposed in 2025, the facility could open as early as 2030.
The project is designed around locally generated solar and wind power, with a planned waste heat distribution network serving homes and businesses across the municipality, and is expected to support both AI and cloud workloads. GDD, headquartered in Cremlingen and employing around 300 staff developing and operating wind and solar parks, is entering the data center sector for the first time. Remaining steps centre on securing tenants and refining construction plans, as Lower Saxony emerges as a focus for German development activity.
Polcom to Build 40MW Data Center in Skawina, Poland
Polcom will develop a 40MW data center in Skawina, southern Poland, investing up to PLN 150 million (approximately $39.4 million). The facility is scheduled to open in 2030 and will house six server rooms using a combination of water, air and mixed cooling. It will support conventional business applications alongside Polcom’s sovereign cloud platform for AI services.
Founded in 1991, Polcom is among Poland’s leading cloud service providers; the new build will be its second facility in Skawina, following a 15MW site developed there in 2010. CEO Marcin Gwóźdź observed that AI is moving from experimentation into real-world business use, and argued that infrastructure competitiveness now rests on efficiency and data location rather than megawatts alone. The announcement follows comparable moves in southern Poland from LVL Energy and the municipality of Gliwice.
CleanSpark Prices $2.3 Billion Senior Notes to Fund Meta Data Centre Build
CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) has priced a $2.276 billion offering of senior secured notes carrying a fixed 7.875 percent coupon and maturing in 2031, with closing expected on 25 September 2026. Proceeds are earmarked for the construction of data centre capacity serving Meta.
The financing marks a further step in CleanSpark’s repositioning from bitcoin mining operator to data centre developer, a transition several mining companies have pursued as AI demand reprices their power-rich sites. It also illustrates the scale of capital being mobilised across the sector, as hyperscalers and their development partners raise debt at pace to fund AI infrastructure build-out.
OData to Deploy Aligned’s DeltaFlow Liquid Cooling System at Brazil and Mexico Data Centers
OData is deploying Aligned Data Centers’ proprietary DeltaFlow liquid cooling system at two Latin American facilities — SP04 in Brazil and QR03 in Mexico — in a project valued at $630 million across both sites. Phase one installation and testing is already underway. DeltaFlow, developed jointly by Aligned and cooling vendor Munters, enables hybrid air and liquid cooling designed for high-density AI racks, and follows earlier deployments of Aligned’s Delta Cubed air cooling system at the same sites.
The system is manufactured at Munters’ facility in Araucária, Paraná state, giving the programme a regional supply chain. OData CEO Ricardo Alário said the goal is to establish DeltaFlow as the market benchmark for liquid cooling. Founded in 2015 by Brazilian private equity firm Patria Investments and acquired by Aligned Data Centers in May 2023, OData operates across Chile, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico.
