AI infrastructure
Google's Wyoming fuel cells run on a metal the world makes 80 tons of a year
AEP will spend about US$4 billion on 702 MW of Bloom fuel cells to power a Google campus near Cheyenne. Bloom's cells use a scandium-doped electrolyte, drawn from a byproduct market the USGS sizes at about 80 tons of oxide a year, led by China. Bloom says supply is secure. Its own annual report does not name the metal.
The picture problem: multimodal AI is where the memory wall gets worse, and who is tearing it down
Text got leaner all year. Video and images did not. A tour of the labs in China, Korea, the United States and Brazil working on memory that remembers at more than one scale.
Diamond buys compute without a substation. Two Chinese suspensions expire 17 days apart.
Akash says diamond-cooled servers add up to 22 percent FLOPs per watt to hardware that already exists. Synthetic diamond and the CVD reactors that grow it sit under MOFCOM Announcement 55, paused to November 10. Gallium sits under Announcement 46, paused to November 27.
Oregon Stopped Selling Land to Data Centers. It Also Admitted It Cannot Stop Much Else.
Governor Kotek froze every unapproved easement, lease and transfer of state-owned property for data center projects through July 1, 2027, and gave agencies until September 14 to report their exposure. The same release concedes the state has no authority to go further. Brazil spent the same fortnight writing a water-efficiency number into the data center bill it just sent for signature.
Brazil Rewrote Its Export Law So That Compute Counts as a Shipment
A Medida Provisória at the end of 2025 let a data center qualify for export processing zone benefits. The first tenant at Pecém is Chinese, draws 300 MW, and is legally forbidden from serving Brazilian users.
Brazil broke ground on a gigawatt-class AI campus this week. Its transformers were ordered in March.
Terranova started construction on Campus Campinas with a 300 MW substation and headroom to 1 GW. The Siemens Energy contract behind it was signed on 15 March, and the hardware is being built in Jundiaí and in China.
Kimi K3 triggered a chip selloff. The physical stack underneath did not reset.
Moonshot's 2.8 trillion parameter open weight release hit TSMC and Nvidia on Friday. TSMC's own Q2 print, filed the day before, said the opposite. And if China's compute footprint routes through Chinese silicon, the materials bill routes with it.
TSMC lifts 2026 capex to $60 to $64 billion. Arizona commitment hits $265 billion.
Thursday's Q2 print answered Monday's preview with upside on every number the desk flagged. Revenue guidance to more than 40 percent, capex up 14 percent, another $100 billion booked for Arizona. The AI materials runway just got extended in a single call.
TSMC's record June, and the packaging line the AI cycle runs through
TSMC posted NT$442.68 billion in June, its highest month ever, up 67.9 percent year on year. The Q2 print beats guidance and lands three days before Thursday's earnings call. CoWoS capacity is the binding number to watch.
Meta doubles Hyperion to 5 GW. The turbine backlog is the ceiling now.
Richland Parish jumps from 2 GW/$27B to 5 GW/$50B+ under a Meta-Entergy deal that funds seven new gas plants, three grid-scale batteries, and 240 miles of 500-kV line. The gating input is no longer land or capital. It is GE Vernova's slot book.
Token costs fell 75 percent. Zhipu took the open weight lead. The data center math survives.
Per million token costs fell from roughly $10 to roughly $2.50 in a year per Ramp. Zhipu's GLM 5.2 dropped MIT licensed on June 13, sitting a point off Anthropic Opus 4.8 on FrontierSWE at a fifth of the cost.
Qualcomm books Meta and Microsoft. The agentic CPU bet doubles down on copper.
Investor Day unveiled the Dragonfly C1000, a $3.92B Modular buy, and anchor hyperscaler customers. The materials read is 160 kW racks, more copper per watt, and a longer queue at the substation.
SpaceX becomes the fifth hyperscaler. Reflection signs $6.3B. The compute landlord economy is here.
Reflection AI agreed Monday to pay SpaceX $150 million a month for GB300 access at Colossus. With Anthropic at $1.25B per month and Google at $920M, the SpaceX compute backlog clears $80 billion. The materials and power math sits underneath.
OpenAI's $500B Ohio lease lands on the uranium enrichment site. Piketon's two-tenant problem.
The reported 10 GW campus puts 9.2 GW of new gas on the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion site DOE just funded for centrifuge restart. Nvidia guarantees the lease. Brazil's R$15 billion Sovereign Plan was built for moments like this and did not bid.
Texas prices the AI grid. The map of hyperscaler capex starts to shift south.
ERCOT's Batch Zero rules, approved June 1, demand upfront deposits and site control from the first 100 GW tranche of a Texas queue that has now swelled to roughly 450 GW. The filter accelerates a competitive bid from Brazil and China for the spillover.
The watt gap. Hyperscalers raised 2026 commitments to $710 billion and broke ground on a third of it.
Sightline Climate tracks roughly 5 GW under active construction against the 16 GW US operators planned for this year. China will energize 8 GW in 2026. Brazil quietly put its first phase live in May.
The first honest benchmark for AI agents just landed. China is ten points behind, not ten years.
UniPat's SaaS-Bench tested 14 frontier models on real professional work across 23 production SaaS systems. Claude Opus 4.7 led with 43.9 percent. Kimi K2.6 finished fifth at 34.1 percent. The compute story underneath that gap is the one Brazil should be reading.