Latest updates · 21 October 2026
In the full issue →The AI data-centre race keeps scaling: Anthropic is reported to be in talks with Nscale for a second 460 MW West Virginia data centre worth about $45 billion, and Nebius has signed a letter of intent for a 600 MW campus near Rotterdam.
Research, industry & policy
- Anthropic in talks for second $45 billion Nscale data centre deal, CNBC · 20 Oct 2026: According to a person familiar with the matter, the agreement would cover a second 460-megawatt data centre at the same West Virginia site as the first deal.
- Nebius signs LOI with Volt for 600 MW Maasvlakte campus, Tech Times · 20 Oct 2026: The Dutch prime minister has endorsed the Rotterdam AI gigafactory plan, but a Dutch policy of not putting in public capital complicates the EU gigafactory bid.
Journals & preprints
- SARP: An On-SSD Index for KVCache with Fast Prefix Matching and Recovery, arXiv 2610.26849 · 19 Oct 2026: Distributed LLM serving relies on a global index to locate reusable key-value cache (KVCache) blocks through prefix matching.
- Data Center Oscillation Isolation and Grid Support: Fundamental Limits and Source-Selective Control, arXiv 2610.26812 · 19 Oct 2026: The grid integration of large data centers poses a growing power-system stability challenge.
Why it matters
Compute deals are now measured in hundreds of megawatts, making power, land and public policy as important as chips.
