Cloud Cover: February

Welcome to the February edition of Cloud Cover, brought to you from a gradually warmer London, at least compared to last month.

This edition, like the last, will look at the ever-growing stream of investments, including the mammoth Stargate project.

We’re also live from Newcastle where we visited Stellium Data Centres to look at their new immersion cooling POC.

There are also interviews with AWS’s sustainability director, Mark Acton from Data Centre Alliance, and Data4 Group’s François Sterin.

Plus, find out our Data Centre of the Month, take a look at Europe’s largest data centre, and witness a bizarre new wireless mouse.

We’re just a few weeks away now from Datacloud Energy & ESG — there’s still time to join us and digital infra leaders from across the industry for two days in Brussels.

Enough cash to fund a real-life Stargate (almost)

To some, Stargate is a middling 90s Sci-Fi movie starring Kurt Russell (at least it was better than Star Trek Generations that year – Ed.)

To the world today, Stargate is a gargantuan investment project spearheaded by OpenAI and SoftBank, with Oracle and MGX also on board.

Coming at the beginning of Trump’s second term, it very much aligns with his signature bombastic style, with $500 billion set to be spent not so much scaling out by ramping up to extreme levels, AI infrastructure in the US.

Putting that $500 billion into perspective, that’s more than the estimated wealth of Elon Musk or almost half of the UK's annual NHS budget. You could buy ~20 million Nvidia H100 GPUs with that, more than the entire AI industry currently has access to.

If Stargate were a country, its AI infrastructure budget would be larger than the GDP of nations like Portugal ($300bn) or New Zealand ($250bn).

Heck, with that cash, you could build a working Stargate like in the 1994 movie. Well, maybe not, but you'd get ridiculously close to testing the core physics.

While a somewhat smaller amount, France is looking to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the US with €109 billion set to be spent on AI infrastructure projects.

We said at the turn of the year that 2025 was going to be a continuation of 2024 spending levels. Looks like we were wrong, and two months in, we’ve seen ludicrous numbers being talked about, meaning we’re looking at a bumper year for the industry.

Live from Stellium: Immersion in action

Howay man, poor Ben Wodecki 's been grafted up the Toon... If like us you have no idea what that means, you’re not Geordie.

Anyway, to translate, we sent Capacity’s resident data centre nerd up to Newcastle to take a gander at Stellium Data Centres - The Data Meridian and their OCP immersion cooling proof of concept.

It’s the first ORv3 immersion cooling deployment in Europe and sees Mitac International Corp. ’s Capri 2 servers with AMD CPUs dunked into special fluid developed by ExxonMobil , housed in a Submer pod.

The POC is a thing of beauty. While we couldn't get any photos, during our trip to Stellium's impressive Newcastle facility, this mockup shows how it looks.

Huge thanks to Stellium, the Open Compute Project Foundation , with special kudos going out to Edward Bissell !

You can read more about the project below:

An inside look at AWS’s sustainability efforts

For their recent Middle East issue, the team over at Capacity spoke with Chris Walker, AWS’s director of sustainability.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Walker talks about AWS’s nuclear efforts, its new data centre designs that reshape entire facilities, and how it’s recovering materials from decommissioned racks and servers.

It’s mindboggling to imagine just how big an undertaking it must be for a brand the size of AWS to achieve net-zero carbon by 2040 and be water-positive by 2030, but Walker and co are trying to achieve just that.

Navigating the Power 'Quad-Lemma'

In a conversation with Datacloud’s Managing Director Annabel Helm, Francois Sterin , COO of Data4 and member of the Datacloud Energy & ESG Advisory Board, discussed the growing challenges data centre operators face in balancing affordability, availability, sustainability, and power quality—what he calls the "quad-lemma".

With the rise of AI, securing a reliable and sustainable energy supply has become more complex. François highlighted Data4's efforts in forging power purchase agreements (PPAs) in countries like France, Italy, and Spain to secure renewable, low-carbon energy for their data centres.

He shared insights into the company's innovative approaches, such as retrofitting older data centres to improve energy efficiency and collaborating in the Net Zero Innovation Hub to solve energy supply issues. François also stressed the importance of community engagement in sustainability efforts, acknowledging the challenges of getting planning approval for data centres while also pushing for greater environmental credentials.

Addressing the talent shortage & nuclear ambitions

Ahead of our Datacloud ESG event in Brussels, the team caught up with Mark Acton from the The DCA - Data Centre Alliance to learn about his career and how he thinks we can create a sustainable digital economy.

He believes power and AI will dominate the conversation at the event:

“Once you start talking about power and AI, inevitably you’re drawn into the sustainability discussion, because one is a consequence of the other. AI has become a buzzword, and it’s slightly irritating that lots of people are talking about it without really understanding it.

“There is no question that it’s going to increasingly feature in our lives and that it will increasingly consume more power – but I don’t think anybody’s really got any idea quite how much and where it will go.”

Hear from Mark and leaders from the likes of Schneider Electric , JLL , CyrusOne , and Microsoft and more at Datacloud Energy & ESG.

Data Centre of the Month: Lefdal Mine Datacenter

From Stargate to something like out of a James Bond film, our Data Centre of the Month is the Lefdal Mine Data Centers in Norway.

Lefdal Mine was previously used as a source of olivine, the green mineral used in everything from metalworking to precious stones to jewellery in its more precious form, peridot.

This former olivine mine now plays home to vast data halls housing servers and HPC clusters for the likes of Mercedes Benz, Tiaga Cloud and Sigma2.

Spanning four (soon to be five) levels, the Lefdal Mine facility is visually striking as it is a feat of engineering marvel, with its “underground cities of data centres” encased some 700 metres inside a mountain.

Learn from Mats Andersson , Lefdal Mine's chief commercial officer about its innovative cooling and the fishy thing they’re doing with waste heat as they attempt to create the greenest facility on the planet.

Europe’s largest data centre gets the green light

In what could be the largest data centre in Europe (at least for now anyway) got the greenlight here in the UK.

DC01UK, set to be located on green belt land across from South Mimms service station in Hertfordshire, would span up to two million square feet of space – that’s half the size of Vatican City, or 3.5 times the size of the floor space at the Pentagon.

Judging by our calculations, so take this with a fair pinch of salt, it would take (checks notes) someone with walking at an average pace around 15 to 20 minutes to walk across, assuming it has no walls, which it will so the comparison is fun but frankly redundant.

It’s important to stress that see 54% of DC01UK’s 85 acres will however be retained as green, open space.

Nvidia’s bold move in China

We recently got our first look at Nvidia’s RTX 5090D series, the China-focused version of its new flagship line of graphics cards, and well, there’s a bit of a problem.

The D series is designed to be significantly slower than the standard versions of the 5090 to prevent Chinese firms using them to power their AI workloads.

And while the 5090D does lock itself after 3 seconds to prevent it from being used for that purpose, the issue, potentially, is the limiter.

Previously Nvidia reduced cores on graphics cards it sends to slow down units it sends to China to comply with export restrictions.

However, this time, Nvidia isn’t cutting anything, instead introducing a limiter in the hardware’s BIOS preventing it from running as fast as its Western counterparts.

The problem? Computer nerds have been circumventing hardware BIOS for years, overclocking graphics cards to get then to run well beyond what the manufacturer intended.

All it would take is a savvy engineering team in China to work out how and bam, they’ve got powerful hardware to run their AI models. While no way near what an H100 or god forbid a Blackwell could run, it would certainly give them a leg up.

Bits and pieces

• DeepSeek has, understandably, dominated conversations the past few weeks. The Capacity team have been hard at work putting together some solid long-reads on this, including one that examines the realities of its development costs.
• So Elon Musk has bid $94 billion to buy OpenAI, and while it was understandably rejected, his consortium is preparing another bid. Jeez.
• We enjoyed this post from BBC tech editor Zoe Kleinman about how she sees the evolution of Trump's relationship with Big Tech.
• The folks over at the National Data Centre Academy are working to develop a nationally recognised qualification to address the talent shortage. They’re hosting an event in March aiming to bring together stakeholders from across the industry to create an apprenticeship project, potentially even a degree. There’s a lot of effort going on behind the scenes here, we’ll keep you posted on this one!
• This month’s bizarre hardware spot goes to Lofree with its Touch tri-mode wireless mouse. $69.99 gets you a mouse that looks straight out of, well 1994, but with giant buttons straight out of Windows 95. It even has a mini built-in screen that displays the DPI setting you’re using.

What's coming up?

In just a couple of weeks, we’ll be heading out to sunny Fort Lauderdale for Metro Connect, the ultimate networking event for the digital infrastructure industry.

One week after, we'll be in Brussels hosting Datacloud Energy & ESG. There's still time to join!