Week in Review, 5 January 2026

SoftBank to Acquire DigitalBridge for $4B to Secure AI Infrastructure Assets

This move signals a major shift where tech conglomerates are moving to directly own the underlying physical layer—including fiber and data centers—to ensure control over AI scaling.

Data Center Frontier → Bisnow → Data Center Frontier →

AI Infrastructure Scales to Gigawatt Levels with Musk’s Colossus and GridFree’s 5GW Plan

The industry is moving past the megawatt era; the emergence of multi-gigawatt sites in Texas and Tennessee is redefining site selection and regional power grid impacts.

TechRepublic → Data Center Knowledge →

Broadcom’s Aggressive VMware Tactics Trigger Forced Infrastructure Migrations

The transition from perpetual licenses to high-cost subscriptions is no longer just a financial concern; reports of 'outage threats' are forcing operators to plan emergency migrations.

r/sysadmin → r/sysadmin →

Copper Hits Decade Highs as Tariffs and Demand Strain Data Center Construction

Skyrocketing material costs for electrical infrastructure are becoming a critical bottleneck, threatening to balloon construction budgets and delay project timelines.

Bisnow →

Geothermal Energy Transitions from Concept to Practical AI Power Strategy

As hyperscalers exhaust traditional solar and wind capacity, geothermal is emerging as the primary 'firm' renewable energy source to support 24/7 AI data center workloads.

Data Center Frontier →

Starcloud Successfully Tests Space-Based AI Data Center with NVIDIA H100 GPUs

While still experimental, successful orbital GPU deployment offers a radical alternative to terrestrial power and cooling constraints for niche, high-value workloads.

Data Center Frontier →

Nvidia Reportedly Invests $20B to License Groq Technology and Secure Talent

If confirmed, this massive deal indicates Nvidia is aggressively moving to co-opt emerging inference-optimized architectures that threaten its training dominance.

The Register →