ThisWay Global, an Austin-based sovereign AI and HPC provider, plans a 73MW data center in Bryan, Texas, dubbed the Research and AI Compute Center, on the Texas A&M-Rellis campus. The phased project would use closed-loop direct-to-chip liquid cooling and offer governed AI compute to researchers, the public sector, and industry under the company’s Sovereign Blueprint framework. Founder Angela Hood said the development would advance “in collaboration with A&M-Rellis leadership, local stakeholders and qualified partners.”
Digital Realty has begun construction on KIX15, a 24MW data center at its Osaka campus in Ibaraki City, Japan, developed through its 50/50 MC Digital Realty joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation. The fifth building on the campus is expected to begin operations in Q4 2028, taking the venture’s total Japanese capacity to 220MW of IT capacity. The facility will be designed for hybrid air- and liquid-cooling.
Google’s vice president of global infrastructure and capacity, Bikash Koley, has left after more than 16 years at the company to become chief technology and product officer at Crux AI, the Google-Blackstone TPU neocloud run by former Google engineering VP Benjamin Treynor Sloss. Crux, which rents Google TPUs outside of Google Cloud, plans 500MW of capacity online in 2027 and a scale-up to 2GW. Koley previously served as CTO of Juniper Networks.
Bitdeer expanded its Bitcoin mining deployment at Soluna’s Project Kati 1 in Willacy County, Texas, from 28MW to 35MW, adding roughly 2.42 exahashes per second of hash rate under a co-mining structure with completion expected in November 2026. Kati 1 is an 83MW wind-powered data center now fully subscribed in its K1BC phase. The expansion comes as Bitdeer also agreed to a 10-year lease on a 67MW AI data center in Malaysia.
Cipher Digital extended its Barber Lake data center commitments in Colorado City, Texas, to 20 years: Fluidstack’s lease was amended and an unnamed AI lab signed a binding commitment to enter a separate 10-year lease once Fluidstack’s term ends. Cipher expects the additional commitment to generate about $5.2 billion, lifting total contracted revenue at Barber Lake from $3.8 billion to more than $9 billion across the campus’s full 300MW. Data halls are expected between Q4 2026 and Q1 2027, with Cipher absorbing the first $359.3 million of costs above budget.
Petra Power, a 15-person startup selling solid oxide fuel cells for data centers and defense vehicles, is targeting first deployments with neocloud customers in 2028 and full-scale production in 2029. Founder Aaron Goodman told TechCrunch the fuel cells convert fuel to electricity without combustion and that the company has received nearly $9 million in Defense Department contracts. Petra was selected for this year’s TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200.
HPE’s networking chief Rami Rahim told The Register that AI will handle all network trouble tickets without humans within two to three years, saying “we’re now at probably around 70 to 80 percent of all tickets don’t require human intervention.” Rahim, the former Juniper CEO, said only hardware swaps would remain, and even those could be handled by an intern while the system orders parts and configures them itself. The comments come as HPE extends its self-driving network automation across its hybrid cloud portfolio.
Researchers at KAIST and South Korean startup TDS Innovation demonstrated a method to control where 2D semiconductor crystals start growing, a Nature study published October 7 reports. The etching-flux process suppressed nucleation everywhere except each patterned region’s center, achieving 99.3 percent single-crystal yield across 400 sites in tests. The company says it aims for commercial use of 2D semiconductors around 2030, with AI demand a possible accelerant.