GoKawiil
Tech News
AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a Yahoo Finance interview that AMD now identifies primarily as a data center company, with that segment making up about 63% of its record $13.4 billion Q3 2026 revenue, up 97% year-over-year. Meanwhile, AMD's gaming revenue dropped 40% from a year earlier to $773 million, which Su attributed largely to AI data centers consuming memory and components and driving up GPU prices.
About 100 protesters, organized by the Geef Tegengas group, broke into the construction site of a planned Microsoft data center in Amsterdam, with some climbing a crane to hang a banner reading 'fuck AI' and another declaring 'Microsoft powers genocide.' Protesters chanted slogans against Microsoft and in support of Palestine at the site, which is being built by Pure Data Centres under a project approved before Amsterdam's 2030 ban on new data centers.
Several US states have seen candidates win elections on promises to impose moratoriums on new data center construction, prompting AI and cloud companies to reconsider their build-out plans. Developers are reportedly exploring alternatives including overseas sites and remote desert locations to avoid local resistance.
Jim Cramer said on CNBC's Mad Money that a two-day sell-off in AI-related stocks stems from investors' inability to value companies tied to data center growth. The decline hit chipmakers and infrastructure suppliers broadly, with the iShares Semiconductor ETF falling 10% Thursday after a 3% drop Wednesday, and GE Vernova and Sandisk sliding 7% and 22% respectively.
OpenAI has published a National Community Compact and Compute Campus Policy Blueprint outlining commitments for every future compute campus it builds. The company pledges to pay full energy and infrastructure costs, provide financial assurances to other utility customers, publish water and noise impact data, avoid NDAs with public officials, and report annually on local hiring and investment.
AMD posted third-quarter adjusted earnings of $2.09 per share on revenue of $13.38 billion, both ahead of analyst expectations, with revenue up 45% from $9.25 billion a year earlier. Data center sales nearly doubled and now make up 64% of total revenue, up from 47% a year ago. Shares rose about 8% in after-hours trading following the report.
OpenAI announced a Grid Protectors Program designed to cut electricity use at its data centers when local grids are under heavy demand, rather than waiting for new power supply to come online. The company says it has already signed a 3.2-gigawatt agreement with Georgia Power for its planned Effingham County campus, including 1,000 megawatts set aside for flexible demand response.
According to a Financial Times report, Nvidia has told data center operators worldwide that Chinese clients must not exceed 49% of their total business, with the remaining 51% required to come from non-Chinese customers. The policy reportedly applies only to new and future contracts, not existing hardware leasing deals, and was communicated informally through Nvidia's sales and regional teams rather than official documentation. Nvidia said in a statement that U.S. policy encourages cloud providers to build on American infrastructure while serving customers globally.
Envision Energy says it has deployed what it calls the first commercial 800-volt DC power system at its Galaxy AI data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, running since August under the Dubhe Controller and Dubhe Energy Foundation Model. The system converts electricity directly from 10kV medium-voltage AC to an 800V DC bus, cutting out conventional conversion stages, and pairs solid-state transformers with battery storage for millisecond-level load balancing. The Galaxy campus is planned to scale to 3GW and eventually support up to one million AI accelerators.
Drax Group has signed an agreement with Brookfield and its neocloud platform Radiant to develop an AI data center on Drax's North Yorkshire power station site. The project aims to deliver up to 100 megawatts by early 2028, scaling to 600 MW by 2031 and eventually surpassing 1 gigawatt, with Brookfield projecting total investment including chips could exceed £20 billion ($26.8 billion), starting with a £2.5 billion first phase.
Physicist Robert Davies, in an analysis for the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, estimates that the $70 billion Wonder Valley data center project in Alberta would produce a daily thermal load of 16-18 gigawatts — comparable to roughly 23 Hiroshima-sized bombs. The facility, backed by investor Kevin O'Leary, would run on nine gigawatts of on-site natural gas power rather than grid electricity, and sits near land considered traditional territory of the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. Alberta's government has exempted the project from a full provincial environmental impact assessment.
Omen AI, which makes real-time sensors to monitor data-center cooling fluids, has acquired competitor Aquatic Labs in a $16 million cash-and-stock deal. The merger follows Omen's $31 million Series A raised in June, and brings together Omen's elemental water sensors with Aquatic Labs' alkalinity-testing technology. Aquatic Labs CEO Allan Adams will become Omen's chief science officer as the teams work to integrate both sensing approaches into a single device.