Articles &amp; Insights

The New Land Rush: Why Amazon Is Betting $10 Billion West of St. Louis

Amazon's roughly $10 billion data center campus west of St. Louis is not an anomaly. It is the clearest signal yet that hyperscale capital is executing a deliberate retreat from Northern Virginia and a calculated bet on the American interior.

DC Atlas18 min read

Half-Built America: The Gap Between Announced Gigawatts and Poured Concrete

Developers have announced enough US data center capacity to power a small country. About half of it is actually under construction. Here is what is stalling the rest, and what that gap means for every tenant and investor betting on 2026 availability.

Breaking Nvidia's Grip: The Custom Silicon Revolution Reshaping AI Infrastructure

From Google's TPUs to Qualcomm's pursuit of Tenstorrent and the RISC-V bet, a more contested AI accelerator market is here. What it actually means for data center design, power, and cost.

Analysis

The Capex Reckoning: Why Wall Street Is Right to Push Back on AI Infrastructure Spend

A trillion dollars in projected data center capex. A Microsoft shareholder lawsuit. And a growing gap between AI revenue and AI infrastructure outlay. We think the bulls have this backwards.

DC Atlas14 min read

Who Pays for the AI Boom: The Data Center Rate Fight That's Coming for Every Operator

Utilities and regulators are starting to ask a simple question: why should a residential customer in Texas or Virginia subsidize the transmission upgrades that a hyperscaler needs? The answer is reshaping power pricing for every data center operator in America.

DC Atlas17 min read

The Trillion-Dollar Texas Frontier: Inside America's Hottest Data Center Market

Everyone knows Texas is booming. What they don't know is why the boom might break the grid that made it possible, and what that means for every operator betting big on the Lone Star State.

DC Atlas19 min read

Underwater and Off-Grid: China's Bet on Subsea Data Centers

Submerged, seawater-cooled data centers sound like science fiction. China is building them at scale. Here's what's real, what's not, and whether the ocean is actually a viable answer to AI's cooling crisis.

Behind the Meter: How Battery Storage Became Core Data Center Infrastructure

AI's spiky power draw broke the old assumptions about UPS systems and grid reliability. Here's how battery storage went from backup plan to primary strategy, and who's actually building it.

DC Atlas19 min read

The Unseen Cost: Water, Power, and the Real Environmental Footprint of the 2026 AI Boom

Everyone has a net zero pledge. Far fewer have the water permits, grid agreements, and capital budgets to back them up. Here's what the AI boom's environmental footprint actually looks like when you get past the press releases.

DC Atlas19 min read

Case Studies

From Wood Pulp to Cloud: The Data Center Cooled by the Baltic Sea

How Google turned a bankrupt Finnish paper mill into the world's most innovative data center, using granite tunnels and Baltic seawater to eliminate chillers entirely.

DC Atlas12 min read

Ashburn Didn't Plan to Become the Center of the Internet. Now It Can't Stop.

A zoning decision meant for office parks accidentally created the world's most concentrated data center market. Now Northern Virginia handles a quarter of North America's capacity and the locals want it to stop.

DC Atlas10 min read

Why Your Data Center Has Been 6 Months Away for 3 Years

Grid interconnection now takes 5+ years. Transformers stretch to 60 months. Labor shortages are forcing contractors to walk away from projects. Here's what the lead time data actually reveals.

DC Atlas20 min read

The 100kW Rack Era: How AI Is Rewriting Data Center Power and Cooling From the Ground Up

Air cooling hits a wall at 30kW. AI workloads demand 100kW+ racks. Here's how the entire data center stack is changing to keep up.

DC Atlas23 min read

Breaking Down PUE: The Number That Tells You How Much Power Your Data Center Wastes

PUE is the most important efficiency metric in data centers, but most operators don't understand what drives it. We break down where your power actually goes and why cooling is eating your budget.

Singapore vs. Johor Bahru: Southeast Asia's Data Center Rivalry

Singapore's moratorium is forcing a complete rethink of Southeast Asian data center strategy, with Johor Bahru emerging as the unlikely winner that's rewriting the rules of proximity and efficiency.

25 GW by 2030: Inside APAC's Infrastructure Bet of the Decade

APAC is doubling its data center capacity in just five years, but the real story isn't the growth, it's the massive supply shortage that's already locked in.

DC Atlas15 min read

When the Grid Breaks: How Power Constraints Are Reshaping Data Center Strategy

The math is brutal: AI workloads consume 1,000 times more power than web searches, but the grid wasn't built for this. We're tracking how operators are scrambling to adapt.

DC Atlas10 min read

Not In My Backyard: The Global Backlash Against Data Center Development

Community opposition killed $18 billion worth of data center projects in two years. As AI drives demand to 82.3 GW, the fights are getting nastier.

DC Atlas11 min read

From One Cloud to Three: How Sovereignty Laws Are Fragmenting Data Center Architecture

New regulations are forcing operators to build locally, fragmenting the borderless cloud era and tripling enterprise costs across sovereign zones.

DC Atlas18 min read

The Rise of Liquid Cooling: How AI Is Rewriting Data Center Design

AI chips hitting 2,700W per unit have broken air cooling for good. We're tracking the infrastructure shift that's forcing every data center operator to rethink their cooling strategy.

DC Atlas12 min read