center

France has been determined to rob Spain of its position as a data center power in Europe

by

The French country has hit the table in its ambition to become a technological benchmark in Europe. He agreement reached between Emmanuel Macron and Masayoshi Son (CEO of SoftBank) aims to deploy up to 5 GW of computing capacity for AI data centers in northern France. This movement competes with all the projects that are underway in Spain, one of the countries that until now had attracted the greatest interest from hyperscalers. The problem is that neither France nor Spain will gain much from these initiatives. Nuclear counterattack. France has taken advantage your energy network —with a clear prominence of its nuclear power plants— to attract AI supercomputing projects. The SoftBank project will start in the Hauts-de-France region with an initial phase of 45 billion euros to build data centers in regions such as Dunkirk. In this first phase we want to achieve that the total capacity rise to 3.1 GW in 2031followed by a second phase that could reach 5 GW. Spain, data center paradise. Faced with this French movement, Spain has been closing agreements in that same area for months. It totals more than 22,000 million euros in recently announced projects. Giants like AWS (15.7 billion in Aragon), Microsoft (more than 7,000 million) and Blackstone have chosen our country to create these data centers. The Spanish advantage is its renewable energy productionwhich has attracted that type of investment. The harsh reality: Europe (probably) loses. Although both this announcement and those made in Spain are very striking, the reality for the Old Continent is quite stark. The data centers in Spain are not Spanish, and those in France are not French either. Europe is becoming the powerhouse for foreign multinationals that invest here because it suits them strategically. Energy resources are great for Microsoft, Amazon, Meta or Softbank, but the real benefit of this computing does not remain in Europe. The accounts. There is a clear difference between the strategies of Spain and France. Spanish soil is filled with hyperscalers like AWS or Microsoft that build, operate their own clouds and then control the flow completely. In the case of France, the initiative depends on a Japanese conglomerate allied with sovereign funds from the Middle East. SoftBank operates here more like a real estate developer– Create the data center and then rent it to third parties. Source: FT. Sovereignty, little. Emmanuel Macron and Pedro Sánchez can sell the message that these projects promote this ambition to have sovereign AI. The problem is that these data centers are simply delegations of big technology companies taking advantage of the advantages offered by their European partners. There may be options in the French project for the country to boost its AI companies —Mistral is the clear example—, but the truth is that these movements do little to help this objective of avoiding the independence of foreign technology companies. Rather they make the situation worse. The other European rivals. Europe’s traditional technology markets, grouped under the acronym FLAP-D (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin) are giving way to projects in other countries like France or Spain. There are also other protagonists in this new map of decentralized infrastructures: the Nordic countries are also interesting for their cold climates, ideal for helping to cool these centers. The real bottleneck. Beyond the billions of euros that are on the table, the big battle in the coming years will be access to hardware components, especially now that the memory crisis has made everything significantly more expensive. Demand far exceeds supply and it does not seem that this imbalance will be resolved soon, so all of these initiatives could suffer delays and changes in their final costs. In Xataka | Mistral does not generate hype, it is a discreet AI, it does not boost the shares of any company, but it already makes more money than Grok

Airbus had a single center in the world to convert commercial aircraft into military tankers. Now another one will open in Seville

by

Airbus has chosen Seville to install its second global conversion center for the A330 MRTT, the best-selling tanker and military transport aircraft on the market outside the United States. The San Pablo plant will thus become the twin of the Getafe plant, until now the only one in the world capable of transforming A330 commercial aircraft into its multirole military version. We made the announcement during the opening of the ADM Sevilla 2026 fair and the facilities are expected to be operational at the end of 2027. Why it matters. The A330 MRTT is experiencing a sweet moment, as it accumulates some 91 orders from 19 countries and controls 90% of the world market share, excluding the United States. The war in ukrainethe escalation of military spending in Europe and the growing need for tanker aircraft to extend the air forces’ operating margin have triggered demand for a model that until now was assembled at a rate limited by its single-plant capacity. Add Seville will allow you to go from five to seven annual conversions and thus take some work off the Getafe plant. In detail. The conversion process is usually a rather complex task for European aerospace engineering. Civilian A330s leave the Toulouse chain and they are transferred to the conversion center, where for about nine months military systems, in-flight refueling equipment, specific avionics, communications and interior configurations adapted to each client are integrated, until they are ready for aerial refueling missions, troop transport, strategic cargo or medical evacuations. The plant in Seville will also assume maintenance, repair and modernization (MRO) tasks for aircraft already in service. Airbus will take advantage of the current hangars in San Pablo and optimize them to work with two aircraft at a time, imitating Getafe’s way of workingwhere usually one is converted while the other receives maintenance tasks. Figures. The new line will generate around 200 direct jobswhich will be added to the 2,000 professionals already working in São Paulo, and about 600 additional positions in the auxiliary industry. In Andalusia, Airbus is responsible for around 3,500 people between the San Pablo, Tablada (Seville) and Cádiz plants, and more than 14,000 throughout Spain. Why Seville. The president of Airbus in Spain, Francisco Javier Sánchez Segura, pointed ABC that the reasons were based above all on the technical knowledge accumulated in the A400M and C295 programs, the existing infrastructure (San Pablo is the only Airbus factory with two final assembly lines) and the operational proximity with Getafe, which will act as strategic coordinator of the entire program. A technological leap. Until now, Airbus Defense and Space’s activity in Seville revolved around the assembly and maintenance of the A400M and the C295, both military transport aircraft. Sanchez Segura underlined The Seville center will replicate the cutting-edge technologies developed in Getafe, including the intensive use of augmented reality applied to the assembly and inspection of systems. Andalusia, in the focus of aviation. For the Junta de Andalucía, the announcement fits into its strategy to place the community in one of the three most important European points, along with Toulouse and Hamburg. The acting Minister of Industry, Jorge Paradela, recalled that the region already has several important investments, such as the arrival of the Swiss company Pilatus to manufacture private and military training aircraft, and the Ryanair projectvalued at 500 million euros, to internalize the repair of aeronautical engines in Andalusia, with 600 direct jobs planned. The acting Minister of Economy, Carolina España, rated the Airbus announcement is “magnificent news”, also highlighting that exports from the Andalusian aerospace sector have grown by 86% so far in 2026. The other side. The ADM Seville fair, where the advertisement was presented, also attracted protests. The STOP Arms Fair Platform, which brings together social groups, unions, environmentalists and pacifists, gathered at the gates of FIBES to denounce “the institutional support” for the defense industry and the presence of companies that, according to these organizations, have links to human rights violations in armed conflicts such as the one in Gaza. What’s coming now. Airbus has about two years of works, personnel training and technological adaptation ahead before San Pablo delivers its first converted aircraft. If the planned pace is met, Seville and Getafe will end up operating in a coordinated manner to satisfy a larger customer base in a context that does not seem to be going to let up. According to Sánchez SeguraAerópolis depends on around 70% of Airbus’ workload, and this for the Seville plant means consolidating in a field that until now was foreign to it. Cover image | Air and Space Army In Xataka | The war in Iran is doing something that not even Ryanair imagined: making 20 euro flights a relic of the past

Microsoft wanted to create a mega data center in Kenya. To function, half the country had to live without electricity

by

In May 2024 Microsoft announced what seemed like a historic agreement for Kenya’s technological development. The goal: create a gigantic data center that would be powered by geothermal energy. This center was going to be created in the Olkaria region, but the Kenyan president, William Ruto, has been blunt with Microsoft’s energy claims: to power the total requested 1 GW capacity, the country “would have to shut down half the nation.” too fair. Kenya has an electrical capacity installed capacity of between 3 and 3.2 GW, with peak demand that already reaches 2.44 GW. Microsoft’s project would consume approximately a third of the country’s total capacity. Even the first phase, which requires a capacity of 100 MW, would take a huge bite out of the production of the Olkaria geothermal complex, which generates about 950 GW in total. Kenya seems to be clear that sacrificing domestic consumption was not worth it when most of the project’s profitability will end up in the hands of a large foreign technology company. Financial disagreement. In addition to the energy problems, the negotiations have ended up getting stuck in the economic field. According to sources close to the process cited in BloombergMicrosoft and the investment firm G42 have reportedly asked the Kenyan government for a financial commitment. Specifically, payment for a certain amount of capacity each year, something with which the Kenyan leaders did not fully agree. The project has not been canceled. John Tanui, head of Kenya’s Ministry of Information, explained that his country is still in negotiations with Microsoft and G42, and that the agreement “has not failed or been abandoned. The scale of the data center they needed requires some structuring,” and that includes solving both the energy and economic problems. A project with a lot of geopolitics behind it. This project was not only a technological milestone for Microsoft and Africa, but also a diplomatic one. It is part of a $1.5 billion deal between Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based G42, which was designed to counter potential deals on this continent with China. In fact, as a condition for the G42 agreement had to divest its Chinese assets and remove Huawei equipment from their systems. While the project is on hold, however, the Chinese company continues to expand in this region and has recently launched new broadband services over fiber with the largest Kenyan operator, Safaricom. Bottlenecks everywhere. The case of Kenya is not the only one that is stopping Microsoft’s plans. The company has announced a capex of 190 billion dollars by 2026 that will be invested in data centers, and the company is adding approximately 1 GW of computing capacity each quarter globally. However, about half of the data centers planned in the US this year have been canceled or delayed due to the shortage of electrical infrastructure. Image | Microsoft In Xataka | In 2024, Big Tech spent absurd amounts of money on AI. In 2025, they managed to spend 77% more

Neighbors in Chile tried to stop an Amazon data center. Justice has left a clear message with its decision

by

Artificial intelligence has been part of our lives for a long time, often almost without us stopping to think about what is behind it. We use it as if everything were happening in an invisible layer: models, algorithms and, perhaps, servers in some remote location. But we can also look at it from another perspective. The infrastructure that supports that world is very real: it has a location, consumes resources, requires permits, involves enormous investments, and can also alter the environment of those who live nearby. That is one of the great debates that is beginning to accompany the rise of AI: the cloud also has neighbors. They lost the case. A specific case leads us to Huechurabanorth of Santiago de Chile, where Amazon plans to build a data center. The initiative had received a favorable Environmental Qualification Resolution in July 2024, but not everyone was convinced that the project had been evaluated accordingly. That concern reached the judicial route through a claim presented by Patricio Hernández Valenzuelaa resident of the area, and the Second Environmental Court resolved on April 9, 2026 to reject ita decision that leaves the data center in a position to move forward. A very specific concern. Hernández questioned whether the environmental evaluation of the project had not adequately taken into account a possible high voltage line that, according to his approach, would be necessary to power the data center. The criticism was not minor: if both infrastructures were linked, they had to be analyzed together. For residents, not doing so meant leaving relevant impacts on the environment out of the analysis. The key to the failure. The court’s reasoning involves clearly separating both pieces. The ruling concludes that the data center and the eventual high-voltage line cannot be considered to form a single initiative, among other things because the Amazon project does not include that infrastructure as part of its design. Furthermore, the planned electricity supply does not depend on its own installation, but on the network managed by third parties, which reinforces the idea that these are different projects. Without joint evaluation. Once the existence of a project unit has been ruled out, the court concludes that an integrated environmental assessment is not appropriate. The sentence explicitly states it: “it has been proven that between both initiatives there is no relationship of functional interdependence that conditions their execution.” This nuance is key, because it implies that the data center can operate using the available electrical infrastructure, without the need to subject its viability to a future high voltage line which, in any case, would have to be evaluated separately if it were to be considered. Beyond the legal debate. The Amazon project has very specific dimensions on paper. The data storage center in Huechuraba is designed to operate for 30 years, with an estimated investment of 205 million dollars. It would be built on an area of ​​10.9 hectares, with a construction of 21,350.07 square meters, in the street of Américo Vespucio 1055. From the company, collects Reutershave pointed out that the design of the infrastructure focuses on minimizing energy and water consumption, and maintains that the plan met environmental requirements. Chile as a hub. The Huechuraba project is not an isolated initiative within Amazon’s strategy. Amazon Web Services has proposed an investment of more than 4,000 million dollars in Chile over 15 years to build, operate and maintain its infrastructure in the country. The idea is to turn Santiago into its third major center in Latin America, after São Paulo and the central region of Mexico. Factors such as connectivity through fiber optic cables are added to this context. The concern of those who live nearby. Beyond the investment and digital infrastructure they promise, data centers are often accompanied by very specific concerns: high electricity consumption, use of water for cooling, heat or noise generation, and their fit into environments that, in many cases, have environmental or community value. Google did not have the same path. The case of Amazon is not the only one that has gone through this type of debate in Chile. Google had obtained initial approval in 2020 to build a $200 million data center in Cerrillos, southwest of Santiago. However, the project’s journey was different. In February 2024, the Second Environmental Court decided to partially reverse that permissionand months later the company announced that it would not continue with the initiative as it had originally been proposed, opting to start a new process from scratch for a project in the same location, but with a redesign based on air cooling. Electricity enters the scene. If we broaden the focus, the debate is not limited to a specific project, but to the system’s capacity to absorb this type of infrastructure. A Systep reportpublished on September 23, 2025 with data from the National Electrical Coordinator, indicated that, taking 2025 as a starting point, the electrical demand of data centers in Chile could increase by 270% in five years. The same projection places this consumption at around 1,207 MW in 2030. These figures help to understand why the energy issue has become one of the central axes when talking about the expansion of the cloud and AI. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | In 2024, Big Tech spent absurd amounts of money on AI. In 2025, they managed to spend 77% more

In 2004 Madrid decided to build its own Guggenheim. Now it has a monster that not even Richard Gere wants as a Buddhist center

by

Many cities have pursued the idea that a single building could change everything, attract tourism and redefine their identity almost overnight. The obsession has a very specific origin: the impact it had the Guggenheim Museum in the economy and image of Bilbao, converted into a global case study. In 1997, its inauguration marked a before and after and fueled an urban fever that led to replicate that model in places where the context did not always accompany. A Guggenheim in the suburbs. At the beginning of the 2000s, in the midst of a real estate boom and with the Bilbao effect still resonating, Alcorcón decided to aspire to his own cultural icona complex that was to place the city on the international art map. The idea was ambitious to the point of excess: a macrocenter cwith nine interconnected buildings which included an auditorium, conservatory, conference center and even a permanent circus, all conceived as a kind of Madrid Guggenheim. The problem here was not a lack of imagination, of course, but the scale of a project designed for an economic reality that was about to disappear. A half giant. The works They started in 2007 with budgets that were already high, but soon they began to chain modifications, cost overruns and difficult decisions to justify, such as the demolition of a practically new library or the incorporation of such peculiar facilities as, attention, stables for animals. When the 2008 crisis hit squarely, the project was stopped with around 70% executed and more than 100 million of euros invested, leaving behind a huge structure, partially completed and without a clear function. What should have been a cultural emblem became an empty mass, one too big to abandon completely and too expensive to finish. The hidden cost of an impossible project. Beyond the initial investment, CREAA had profound economic consequences for the municipality. The reason? It had been financed through a public company that ended up accumulating a gigantic debt. The estimates spoke of tens of millions additional costs to complete it and several million annually just to keep it running, which turned it into a structural problem rather than an opportunity. In fact, even its design played against: a complex so integrated that turning on a single zone meant activating practically the entire system, skyrocketing costs and making any reasonable partial use unfeasible. Nobody wants the “Guggenheim” of Alcorcón. Over the years, the building became a kind of failed promise that was passed from hand to hand without finding real lace. Projects of all types and colors were considered, from an NBA campus to a sports university, passing through a large Buddhist center promoted by Richard Gerebut none came to fruition and most of those interested declined the opportunity. Even more recent initiatives, such as the creation of a great audiovisual hubhave ended up running aground when faced with the real costs of adapting facilities designed for a completely different context. The idea that that complex could become an international benchmark has been diluted with each failed attempt. From cultural icon to symbol of excess. Over time, CREAA has gone from being an emblematic project to becoming another example of that appellant excessive planning in Spain, a construction that aspired to change the identity of a city, but ended up conditioning its public narrative. The image of that large iron and concrete structure, partially finished and unused for years, has weighed more than any original intention, fueling the debate about the limits of public spending on large-scale cultural projects. A partial ending to an unfinished story. However, in recent years, some spaces have begun to find usefulnesssuch as the installation of a state victim care center or the partial reopening of certain areas, but the whole is still far from fulfilling the vision with which it was conceived. More than a decade later, the complex begins to reactivate in a fragmented way, adapting to much more pragmatic needs than those from which it was born. The result, as in other phantom “moles” of the Peninsula, is a persistent reminder of a time when it was thought that it was enough to build big to transform a city, without foreseeing that the real challenge would really come later. Image | Juan Lupión, Zarateman In Xataka | The biggest disaster in sports history dates back to the Roman Empire: the tragedy of the Fidenae “VIP boxes” In Xataka | In 1995, South Korea suffered one of the great architectural disasters of the century. The culprit: the air conditioning

China has just launched its first undersea data center with total energy autonomy. The idea makes more sense than it seems

by

In the AI ​​race, having a robust data center infrastructure to power it is essential, but first you need energy to power it all. The United States may lead the chip industry (at least, the strategic ones), but China follows closely at an unstoppable pace and furthermore, has the energy. And he is already beginning to connect the dots, showing off his technical power and ingenuity: already It has the largest data center in the worldis also a pioneer to submerge them under the sea. Now it has taken a twist with the first underwater data center that ‘drinks’ directly from the wind that just opened. This project represents the perfect union of two of China’s strategic priorities: digital sovereignty and carbon neutrality. By placing computing infrastructure on the seabed and powering it directly with clean energy on siteChina is solving one of the great current technological problems: the insatiable energy consumption of AI and Big Data. The project. About 10 kilometers off the coast of Shanghai, at the bottom of the East China Sea, a steel cylinder receives electricity directly from wind turbines and is cooled with sea water. It is the Lingang Subsea Data Centeran ambitious project promoted by Shanghai Hailan Cloud Technology (HiCloud) and built by CCCC Third Harbor Engineering. It consists of a series of data storage and processing modules encapsulated in watertight and submerged containers, which are connected via two 35 kV submarine cables to offshore wind turbines operating off the coast of Shanghai. With a planned capacity of 24 MW in two phases, the first is already operational: it has a capacity of 2.3 megawatts and includes a ground control center, a vertical data module installed under the sea and two main 35 kilovolt submarine cables. Why it is important. In addition to the fact that it does not occupy land, in cities as crowded as Shanghai it represents a valuable saving in land and that it can be installed close to where it is needed (if there is a coast, obviously), because it solves at the same time three structural problems of the sector: Refrigeration. Seawater acts as a constant and free heat sink, eliminating the need for industrial air conditioning systems that consume 40 to 50% of electricity. The metric that measures the energy efficiency of a data center by comparing the total energy consumed versus that used purely by the servers is the PUE, which for a standard data center on land is an average slightly higher than 1.5. The project promises to lower it to a figure not greater than 1.15. Without consumption of fresh water. Traditional data centers evaporate millions of liters of water to cool their servers, but this uses thermal exchange with the ocean, so it does not consume water resources. Take advantage of the surplus from wind power. One of the handicaps of wind energy is that generation depends on the wind and not on demand, so if you do not have a battery, the energy that is not consumed is wasted. Thanks to this direct connection, the data center absorbs wind production in real time, functioning as a constant consumer that reduces the waste of renewable energy due to lack of destination, In figures. The magnitude of the project, with some official numbers: The budget is 1.6 billion yuan, about 200 million euros. Total planned operational capacity of 24 MW (2.3 MW in the first phase). The design PUE is less than 1.15. More than 95 percent of electricity comes from renewable sources. Context. The name of HiCloud is not new because in fact it is an old acquaintance: it is the person behind the underwater prototype in front of Hainan which began to install in 2021. However, the international reference is the Natick project from Microsoft (2013–2024), which demonstrated the potential of underwater centers: only 8 of the 864 servers failed, a much lower mortality rate than that of any conventional data center in the same period and also got a very low PUE of only 1.07. Despite this, Microsoft shelved the matter: viability in terms of costs and maintenance is another story. However, the Lingang project has top-level institutional support: is present on the List of Green and Low Carbon Technology Demonstration Projects of the NDRC, China’s top economic planning body. How they have done it. Servers are placed in pressurized steel cabins filled with inert gases to prevent corrosion and fire with a design that maximizes interior space and minimizes the impact of waves. Heat is dissipated by pumping seawater through radiators located behind the racks. The most complicated operation was raising the cabin in the open sea: the separation between the legs of the support structure and the steel piles on the seabed was only 0.18 meters and the maximum allowable deviation was 10 centimeters, so GPS and the Sanhang Fengfan crane vessel were helped. Roadmap. The project follows a staggered progression that leaves certain unknowns. First was the prototype in Hainan (2021-2024). In 2025 the project began in Shanghai, whose phase 1 concluded in October of that year and it has just been launched a few weeks ago. The key phase that will take capacity up to 24 MW has no official public date. Of course, the consortium of companies made up of HiCloud, Shenergy Group, China Telecom Shanghai, INESA and CCCC Third Harbor Engineering signed a cooperation agreement in October 2025 to scale to 500 MW linked to offshore wind, although where and when is unknown. Yes, but. That 2.3 MW of phase 1 is practically a demonstration, not commercial infrastructure as a large conventional data center operates between 50 and 500 MW. And in addition, it has to resolve the issues that Microsoft’s Project Natick left unresolved, such as underwater maintenance: HiCloud has not published protocols or long-term repair costs. And scalability to 500 MW is at the moment more of an intention than a project In Xataka | Where you see a mountain, China sees a … Read more

China says it has built its largest data center. And confirms that your problem is precisely in the chips

by

China has just turned on its new technological pride in Shenzhen: an AI cluster with 14,000 petaflops built entirely with Huawei Ascend 910C chips. the city has presented it as the first scale computing center with 10,000 cards with completely national technology. It is an undeniable milestone, but if we give it context, an alarm signal and a dose of reality. Why is it important. The Shenzhen cluster, with all its rhetoric of technological sovereignty, represents about 1% of the capacity of the largest US data center in operation today. In other words: China has built, with great institutional effort, what OpenAI already had available to train GPT-4 in 2022. The gap is not a question of ambition (China has it) or capital (it also has it) or energy (of course, he also has it). It’s a chip issue. What are they capable of manufacturing and in what volume today. Between the lines. The Shenzhen government statement highlights energy efficiency metrics and occupancy rates of 92%. It’s really good data. But the selection of indicators (the cherry picking) says a lot so it is omitted: there are no direct comparisons with the clusters of NVIDIA H100 that colonize the data centers of Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Posting only what you have is also a way of not publishing what you lack. The context. At this point no one doubts that China does not lack electricity, not even engineersnor money to build large-scale AI infrastructure. What is still missing, despite the advances, are the chips. Export restrictions imposed by Trump They have cut off access to advanced semiconductors from NVIDIA and TSMCand that has forced China to accelerate its own ecosystem. Huawei has responded with the Ascend 910Ca capable chip but that still has performance limitations and, above all, volume production. If wafers were not in short supply, this data center would be a hundred times larger. Yes, but. Can China close that four-year gap before it gets even bigger? The answer depends almost entirely on how much its domestic semiconductor industry manages to scale, and whether or not Western sanctions manage to stifle that process. At the moment, in Shenzhen they are celebrating an achievement as undeniable as it turns out that in the eyes of Silicon Valley they are still in 2022. Featured image | Huawei In Xataka | Memory prices have started to fall in some markets. There is still a long way to go to close the AI ​​crisis

Imagine you are offered $26 million to convert your farm into a data center. And then imagine that you reject them

by

The market price of agricultural land in Mason County, Kentucky, USA, is around $6,000 per acre. Last year, an unnamed company — the suspect is one of the AI ​​majors — offered Ida Huddleston and her family about 10 times that amount for half of their 1,200 acres. They tempted her with 26 million dollars to build a data center there but Huddleston, 82, rejected the offer without thinking. Farmers of yesteryear. Delsia Bare, daughter of the owner, counted on a local television station as for them “26 million means nothing. Although the phrase is blunt, it is likely that more than indifference to money it reflects a different scale of values. The land matters. Bare explained how his family has farmed that land for generations, paid taxes on it, and kept it productive even during the Great Depression. “We even grew wheat during the Depression and kept bread production lines running in the US when people didn’t have access to other foods.” For the family, the sale would be a break with those values. Obsession with data centers. The Huddlestons’ story is not an isolated case, and Bare herself claimed to be one of dozens of homeowners in the area who had received similar offers from the same anonymous buyer. We all know that large AI companies have been seeking for months to expand the presence of data centers throughout the US, and several of them have announced astronomical investments to achieve that future computing capacity. cheap land. Rural areas are perfect because they are far from urban centers but still have access to resources such as water for their cooling systems and electrical networks with sufficient capacity. In Kentucky the price of agricultural land is relatively low compared to other areas, and that availability of water and energy is a very attractive combination for companies that want to create new data centers. From stupid farmers, nothing. Huddleston, 82, explained that turning down the offer is surprising: “They call us stupid farmers, but we’re not. We know when our food is disappearing, when our land is disappearing.” The owner is clear that the conversion of agricultural land into the basis for digital infrastructure will have consequences on water, food production and the economy of rural communities itself that for decades have been very outside of these technological cycles. Lies. Those who wanted to buy his land claimed that the project would bring jobs and economic growth to the area, but Huddleston has a very different opinion. “I say they are liars, and the truth is not in them. That’s what I say. It’s a scam.” Gone with the wind. His daughter compared this symbiosis with his land to that reflected in the mythical film ‘Gone with the wind‘ and what her protagonist in the film, Scarlett O’Hara, experienced: “She was very attached to that land. Her spirit would never die. The same thing happens to me. As long as I am on this land, as long as it feeds me, as long as it takes care of me, there is nothing that can destroy me if I have this land.” But. Despite the Huddlestons’ refusal, the project has moved forward. Other neighbors in the area have agreed to sell, and the AI ​​company has adapted its plans to use those plots. It is therefore likely that the Huddleston family farm will end up being very close to that future data center if it is finally built, but one thing is certain: for now they are holding out. Image | Xataka with Freepik In Xataka | OpenAI has signed countless billion-dollar agreements with other companies. We are discovering that they are made of paper

Spain is preparing a data center specifically designed to have AI for war. The surprise: it is in Soria

by

More than two thousand years ago, on the hill of Numanciaits inhabitants preferred to resist to the end rather than surrender to the siege of the legions of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. That story of defiance against a superior enemy has remained engraved in Soria’s memory as a symbol of resistance. Now, a few kilometers from that place, in the Valcorba industrial estate, the Ministry of Defense wants to build another kind of fortress: a data center named Numant-IA, where defense will no longer be measured in walls or swords, but in servers, algorithms and artificial intelligence. A unique project. While we live a technological-military schism in the USSpain accelerates in a project that precisely combines both sections. The Government has launched Numant-IA, a data center with a notable investment and totally dedicated to offering computing for AI. Here there are, yes, two notes that stand out. The full name of the project will be the Center for Advanced Defense Technological Capabilities, and its investment is part of the Annual Contracting Plan of the Ministry of Defense (Pacdef) from 2026. It includes 7,868 proposals and 156 framework agreements with a combined value of 10,102 million euros. Soria, new technological capital. The data center announced by the Government last September and that already it was outlined months before, it will have its headquarters in Soria. The project will take advantage of a space provided by the Soria City Council and that covers an area of ​​almost four hectares in the Valcorba industrial estate. Lieutenant General José María Millán, director of CESTIC, already warned then that said center will carry out the “incorporation of artificial intelligence systems for the benefit of the Armed Forces.” Military applications. The initial investment, which was 70 million euros, has been increased to almost 130 million euros according to El Heraldo de Soriaand will be assumed by the Ministry of Defense. Its resources will be used for applications that will process classified data in the area of ​​operations and logistics, and military applications will be an integral part of its mission. This project confirms other movements of the Armed Forces such as the development of Gonzalo, that “ChatGPT” for the army which is precisely designed to support this type of tasks safely. Employment and template. About 20 people will be a permanent part of the staff of this center that will operate 24/7 once it is operational. The construction of the data center, the Department of Defense states, will generate “a significant economic and employment impact on the city.” We know when, but we don’t know what. The Ministry of Defense has indicated that the project has a construction period of 24 months, and therefore they hope that it will theoretically be ready by early 2028. What we do not know is what type of infrastructure it will house or what the real capacity of the data center will be. 67.88 million euros will be dedicated to information systems and servers – unspecified, perhaps because they are not yet defined – while construction will be allocated 58.68 million euros and a third item of 1.65 million euros has no specified purpose. Sovereignty and decentralization. Choosing Soria as the location for this data center responds to the decentralization strategy of the Armed Forces. The defense budgets demonstrate this with a distribution of these funds throughout Spain in different projects that try to avoid the danger of excessive centralization of critical centers. The movement also answers to others that we have been seeing for months and that make it clear that in Spain and Europe they are trying to find solutions that allow us to have the highest possible degree of digital sovereignty. Image | Ministry of Defense In Xataka | Spain’s main problem is not weapons, fighters or drones: it is the number of hands it lacks to use them

Google is going to build a mega data center in a state where the drought is atrocious. Your cooling plan: use air

by

The American state of Texas has been dealing with heat wavesdroughts and a increasing pressure on its aquiferswhich makes it on paper one of the worst places to set up a data center. Well, Wilbarger County in Texas is just the place chosen by Google to set up your next data center. But big tech hides an ace up its sleeve: it is not going to use water for cooling, but air. Context. Briefly, a data center is an industrial facility full of servers where information transmitted over the internet, such as AI responses or your Google photos, is stored and processed. And if your personal computer requires cooling when it has been working with a certain intensity for some time to dissipate heat, more of the same with servers, which operate 24/7. The usual thing in these plants is to use thermal dissipation systems with water, either with chillers, evaporation or direct cooling with immersion, thermally efficient solutions, but problematic if water is scarce. The problem? That Texas is an oven that is not for buns: its drought is pressing. But Texas is not a foreign place for Google: it has been in that state for more than 15 years, where it has operational centers in Midlothian and Red Oak and already plans to build two more campuses in Armstrong and Haskell Counties. It’s very serious. The project. The Wilbarger County data center will reduce water use so much that it will restrict its application to basic campus uses such as kitchens and services. As? Google has not provided details of the technology, only that it will be advanced air cooling. Cooling with air in such a hot scenario implies greater energy consumption, so the problem now becomes electricity. What Google proposes is a “Power first” model. In short: the data center goes hand in hand with its own renewable electricity generation plant. Google’s energy partner for this project is AESone of the largest producers of renewables in the US, with whom it has a 20-year energy purchase agreement at an agreed price. This is how both win: AES has stability to build the plants and Google has the guaranteed supply and price. Furthermore, according to Google, they already have the land and the interconnection signed, which saves bureaucracy and launches the project into the construction phase. Why is it important. Because according to EESI estimatesa medium-sized data center can consume 416 million liters per year for thermal dissipation alone, the equivalent of a thousand homes. And if there is a shortage of water, allocating it to meet the needs of a data center is hardly justifiable. Wilbarger’s project solves this with air cooling, removing the precious commodity of water from the equation, but also from the electrical grid itself: Google cooks it and Google eats it (with the help of AES). Given that the demand for computing continues to grow, a model that does not consume water or overload the network emerges as a solution to a resource management problem. In figures. For Google, Wilbarger County is not a pilot plant and its size demonstrates this: 0 liters of water for cooling. The project will provide 7,800 MW of power to the Texas grid. The agreement between the technology and energy companies is for 20 years. Google advertisement an investment item of 40 billion dollars for Texas in November 2025 and has provided a $30 million fund to boost energy initiatives in Texas from 2026 to 2028. It won’t be easy. Although Google has been cryptic when it comes to reporting what the technology, its capacity and needs will be, the reality is that when cooling with air in a hot climate, the pressure is transferred to the electrical grid. On the other hand, and although this specific project points the direction of a possible solution to this problem, we will have to see if and how it can be scaled, because there are more and more data centers and the climate is increasingly more extreme. In Xataka | Google doesn’t have rockets, but it is going to install data centers in space. SpaceX and Blue Origin rub their hands In Xataka | Data centers in space are the finger, Google’s purchase of an electrical company is the Moon Cover | Google Data Centers and Ganapathy Kumar

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.