This Week's Top Five Stories in the Data Centre Industry

Legrand Selected to Cool 1.2GW AI Campus in Portugal

Legrand has been selected by Start Campus to deliver high-efficiency cooling systems for a hyperscale data centre campus in Sines, Portugal, designed to support artificial intelligence and cloud workloads at scale.

The project centres on a 1.2GW facility, one of Europe’s largest digital infrastructure developments, built to handle high-performance computing demand. Start Campus is developing the site as a fully renewable-powered campus, with efficiency targets that include a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.1 and a Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) of 0.

These metrics reflect how efficiently a data centre uses energy and water – with lower figures indicating better performance. Achieving these levels requires advanced cooling and infrastructure design, particularly as AI workloads increase heat density within server environments.

Digital Realty's Swiss Data Centre Raises Sustainability Bar

Digital Realty’s Zurich data centre has become the first facility to receive the Swiss Datacenter Efficiency Association’s new PLATINUM Plus certification, marking a milestone for operational sustainability standards in the Swiss data centre market.

The company’s ZUR2 site achieved the highest distinction available under the SDEA’s independently verified framework, which measures live operational performance.

The certification evaluates facilities against metrics including power usage effectiveness (PUE), carbon usage effectiveness (CUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE).

Digital Realty said the facility recorded a PUE of 1.10, CUE of 0.02 and WUE of 0.00, positioning the site among the most operationally efficient data centres in Switzerland.

Empyrion Digital Breaks Ground on First Thailand Data Centre

Empyrion Digital has started construction of its first Thailand data centre, in the face of increased AI and digital infrastructure demand in Southeast Asia.

The Singapore-headquartered developer and operator is building the 20MW Bangkok Data Centre, known as TH1, in Bang Na, an area emerging as a major connectivity hub in the Thai capital.

The site spans more than 17,000 square metres and is scheduled to go live in the third quarter of 2027.

Empyrion's project marks the company's entry into the Thailand market and places it among a growing number of operators targeting Bangkok as demand rises for regional cloud infrastructure.

Mark Fong, CEO of Empyrion Digital, said: “The groundbreaking of TH1 represents an important milestone in Empyrion Digital's continued expansion across Asia.

Hut 8 Commercialises US$9.8bn Texas AI Data Centre Lease

Hut 8 has commercialised the first phase of its Beacon Point AI data centre campus in Nueces County, Texas through a 15-year lease valued at US$9.8bn.

The agreement covers 352MW of IT capacity and supports the deployment of hyperscale AI training and inference infrastructure for a confidential high-investment-grade tenant.

Structured as a triple-net lease, the deal forms part of Hut 8’s wider strategy of combining power infrastructure, digital infrastructure and large-scale compute environments.

Behind the Floating Future of AI Data Centres

For years, the data centre industry has searched for spare land, bigger substations and faster routes to grid power.

Panthalassa’s answer is considerably more dramatic: head several hundred miles out to sea.

As AI infrastructure demand keeps surging, the sector’s hunt for energy is starting to resemble a global engineering competition.

Nuclear is back on the agenda, hyperscalers are investing in fusion start-ups and renewable developers are racing to secure generation capacity before the next wave of AI deployments arrives.

Now one company is arguing that the answer has been rolling across the ocean the whole time.