#data-centers

#data-centers

With the first full trading week of 2026 now in the books, investors might be wondering if the strong early start in the S&P will precede even more strength. Undoubtedly, a lack of a Santa Claus rally has seemingly paved the way for a rather hot start to 2026, with some memory chip stocks really picking up momentum while certain semiconductor equipment makers made up for lost time.

Anthropic appears to be preparing for one of the largest financing rounds ever in the AI sector. The developer of the Claude chatbot is in talks with investors about a capital injection of approximately $10 billion, which would value the company at around $350 billion. This would mean another sharp rise in valuation in a short period of time. According to reports in The Wall Street Journal, investor Coatue Management and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC are leading this round.

Virtus Data Centres has announced the appointment of industry veteran Adam Eaton as its new chief executive officer, effective immediately. The move paves the way for the pure play data center owner-operator - part of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) - to continue expanding its portfolio of data centers across the UK and Europe. A seasoned industry leader, Eaton brings a combination of commercial and operational expertise

The new European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) requires large companies to report their energy and water consumption annually from 2024 onwards. Data centers with at least 500 kW of installed IT capacity must report to national authorities such as the RVO by May 15 at the latest. However, compliance appears to be problematic: of the 160 Dutch data centers, 104 submitted something, but 27 left crucial fields blank. All but three of these were American-owned.

While investors chased artificial intelligence stocks and cryptocurrency throughout 2025, a commodity fund quietly delivered returns that rivaled the market's biggest winners. The United States Commodity Index Funds Trust ( NYSE:CPER) surged 39% last year, matching NVDA's performance and more than doubling the S&P 500's 16% gain. CPER tracks copper futures contracts, providing exposure to the industrial metal without mining company operational risks.

They are creating their own financial ecosystem, and there is enough actual momentum in current AI efforts that I don't see the hyperscalers pulling back in 2026, Tom Chi, founding partner at At One Ventures, told TechCrunch.

The 'build it and they will come' strategy is a trap. If you are a hyperscaler, you will own your own data centers. We foresee a significant financing crisis in 2027-2028 for speculative landlords.

SoftBank said it will acquire digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge for about $4 billion. The Japanese conglomerate said it is doubling down on building the data centers, connectivity, and power needed to support AI at a global scale. "As AI transforms industries worldwide, we need more compute, connectivity, power, and scalable infrastructure," said Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group. The deal underscores SoftBank's push to control more of the physical infrastructure behind AI as competition for computing resources intensifies.

MayimFlow, the Built World stage winner at this year's TechCrunch Disrupt, is a good example. The startup is focused on essentially one task: preventing damaging water leaks. Data centers use a lot of water, and that water can present a big risk, even if a leak is small. Founder John Khazraee told TechCrunch that many data centers only have reactive solutions for water leaks. That can saddle companies with downtime and set them back millions of dollars if one occurs.

The complaint Dominion filed Tuesday alleges that a stop work order that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) issued Monday is unlawful, "arbitrary and capricious," and "infringes upon constitutional principles that limit actions by the Executive Branch." Dominion wants a federal court to prevent BOEM from enforcing the stop work order. "Virginia needs every electron we can get as our demand for electricity doubles."

Undoubtedly, there's still a lot of nerves out there over the latest wave of volatility, which may very well be the start of a painful, drawn-out move lower. As to whether we're in an AI bubble, though, remains a mystery. It'll probably be the big question going into the new year. With a recent wave of relief powering hard-hit AI stocks higher in the last few sessions, it seems like AI fears might be in an even bigger bubble than the AI stocks themselves.

On the outskirts of Dallas/Fort Worth, where pastureland once stretched uninterrupted to the horizon, thousands of new structures are rising. Windowless. Warehouse-sized. Fenced in and humming with electricity. These are not fulfillment centers or factories. They are data centers, the physical backbone of artificial intelligence. Texas, long known for oil rigs and subdivisions, is now ground zero for the AI economy.

The S&P 500 utilities sector had gained well over 15% in 2025, before rolling over in mid-October. After hitting a high of 471, the sector has traded back to the 434 level, offering investors a new chance to own the top stocks in the industry. It is important to remember that as the S&P 500 approaches its third consecutive year of double-digit gains, a correction could be on the way in 2026.

"The lead negotiator for Amazon called me on Thursday," Neugebauer said.

The amount of electricity data centers use in the U.S. in the coming years is expected to be significant. But regular reports of proposals for new ones and cancellations of planned ones mean that it's difficult to know exactly how many data centers will actually be built and how much electricity might be required to run them. As a researcher of energy policy who has studied the cost challenges associated with new utility infrastructure, I know that uncertainty comes with a cost.

"For the first half a decade that I was telling people I was doing nuclear, I had to convince them, 'Hey, here's why nuclear is important,'" Bret Kugelmass, founder and CEO of Last Energy, told TechCrunch. "Now everyone just comes to us saying, 'Oh yeah, of course nuclear is a key part of the solution.' I'm like, okay, great, I'm glad everyone's caught up now."

The bank's analysts are forecasting that AI's share of the overall data center market will double to 30% over the next two years, eating into the share from conventional cloud workloads. By 2030, the firm said in a new , overall power consumption from data centers looks set to jump 175% from 2023 levels - more than the 165% that the firm previously forecast.

In 2025, state and local governments reportedly sold a record amount of debt for the second year in a row, with strategists predicting another $600 billion in sales next year. Most of that money is expected to fund infrastructure projects. Meanwhile, Census Bureau data reportedly shows that private spending on data center construction was running at annualized run rate of more than $41 billion - roughly the same as state and local government spending on transportation construction.

"If you subscribe to our worldview that bringing superintelligence at scale at very low cost is going to be transformative, you try to figure out - how can I invest in that and take the least amount of risk?"

Antin is a European infrastructure investor with offices in Paris, London, and New York. The company focuses on investments in sectors such as digital infrastructure, energy, transportation, and social services. In the digital domain, Antin has previously invested in data center and connectivity companies in various European countries, including a regional data center platform in the United Kingdom. This has given the company experience in scaling up colocation and network services within regulated and competitive markets.

As data center power density and uptime expectations rise, it's predicted that we'll see a rapid growth in the use of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in the next three to five years. While there are utilities working on flexible load tariffs for which data center operators could use storage when called upon instead of curtailing, many are turning to off-grid solutions because interconnection for new loads is taking too long, says Allison Weis, Global Head of Energy Storage, Power, and Renewables at Wood Mackenzie.

Enhanced geothermal startup Fervo Energy has raised $462 million to complete its first large-scale power plant and begin development on several others as it races to provide electricity to a power-hungry grid. The new funds will help the company continue work on its 500-megawatt Cape Station power plant in Utah while starting development on several others, Sara Jewett, senior vice president of strategy at Fervo, told TechCrunch.

San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, is now ground zero in California's battle over how to govern the rise of data centers used to power artificial intelligence. The county seat of Santa Clara is touting its partnership with Pacific Gas & Electric, claiming the city is "the West Coast's premier destination for data center development." The investor-owned utility now estimates it has enough capacity in its planning pipeline to push the city's electricity use to almost three times its current peak.

More than 230 groups including Food & Water Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Greenpeace are demanding a pause on the construction of any new data centers in the US until stronger regulations are in place to prevent soaring electricity rates, water use, and pollution.

AI preemption would not apply to local infrastructure. That's a separate issue," Sacks wrote. "In short, preemption would not force communities to host data centers they don't want.

Civil rights groups say these impacts resemble earlier patterns seen with highways, refineries and manufacturing: pollution concentrated where political resistance is weakest and property values are lowest. Data centers can also consume millions of gallons of water per day and use as much electricity as a small city, driving up energy and water use costs for poor residents. Zoom in: A supercomputer data center built by Elon Musk's xAI in Southwest Memphis, a historically Black neighborhood, faces a legal challenge from the NAACP.