Global Data Center RoundUp – November 2025: The New Compute Reality

From interconnection backlogs to billion-dollar land races, this month traced how power, capital, and policy are reshaping where and how global AI infrastructure gets built.

Welcome to Global Data Center Hub. Join investors, operators, and innovators reading to stay ahead of the latest trends in the data center sector in developed and emerging markets globally.

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Dear Friends,

Beneath the noise of AI breakthroughs, a deeper transformation is unfolding the shift from a software-driven race to a battle over the physical and financial foundations of compute.

Across this month’s analysis, one pattern became unmistakable. The AI economy is no longer defined by who can train the most advanced model, but by who controls the scarce infrastructure that determines whether those models can run at all. Power, land, interconnection, and permitting not algorithms are now the real choke points.

From interconnection queues that dictate where AI clusters can exist, to billion-dollar land strategies, to the unexpected rise of emerging markets able to deliver power faster than mature hubs, the landscape is being redrawn.

The near-blackout in Virginia revealed how brittle the old map has become. Meanwhile, a quiet $350B global buildout, the rise of modular systems, and a new era of sovereign compute strategies show how energy markets, policy, and capital cycles are converging to shape the next decade.

This month’s stories examine these shifts from every angle and how they are rewriting the rules of global compute.

In case you missed any of the insights, here is the full roundup of what we published this month.

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Substack

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Deep Dives

Detailed breakdowns on risks, strategic models, and long-term shifts.

• Site Selection: How Billion-Dollar Data Centers Pick Their Land – [Read here]

• The Rise of Emerging Markets in the Data Center Race – [Read here]

• The Future Is Modular: How Data Centers Are Being Reinvented – [Read here]

• From Permit to Power-On: How Data Centers Actually Get Built – [Read here]

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Big Market Shifts

Major strategic moves by hyperscalers and what they signal.

• The $350B AI Buildout No One’s Talking About – [Read here]

• AI’s Next Phase Is Being Built, Not Coded – [Read here]

• When 1.5 Gigawatts Vanished: What the Virginia Near-Blackout Revealed About the Future of AI Infrastructure – [Read here]

• 10 Reports Defining Global Data Center Strategy — Q3 2025 Briefing – [Read here]

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Infrastructure Fundamentals

Core constraints and capabilities shaping AI-ready compute.

• The Interconnection Bottleneck: How Renewable Delays Are Rewriting the AI Power Map – [Read here]

• The Hunt for Compute: Why Watts and Wires Now Decide the Future of AI – [Read here]

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LinkedIn

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• The $1.99B Q3 That Redefined Who Owns the AI Economy - [Read here]

• The Future Is Modular: How Data Centers Are Being Reinvented - [Read here]

• Is Meta’s $600B U.S. Data Center Bet the New Benchmark for AI Infrastructure Scale? - [Read here]

• Will Microsoft and NVIDIA’s $15B Anthropic Deal Redraw the US AI Data Center Map? - [Read here]

• The Hidden Risk Inside the Hyperscale Boom - [Read here]

• Is Brookfield’s $100B AI Bet the Beginning of a New Sovereign Compute Race in Europe? - [Read here]

• The Hidden Cost Inside Every Fiber Project - [Read here]

• The Rise of Compute REITs: Why Power, Not Property, Now Defines the Digital Estate - [Read here]

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Twitter/X

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• Orbital compute isn’t a moonshot it’s an energy arbitrage model.

Structured around Crusoe’s flare-to-renewables evolution, Starcloud’s dawn-dusk Sun-Synchronous Orbit, and Starship’s <$200/kg economics, this thread explores how surplus energy, launch costs, and compute demand are merging into a new market where uninterrupted orbital solar not terrestrial megawatts sets the price of frontier AI training. [Read here]

• Microsoft’s AI moat isn’t the model it’s the scaffolding.

Built on GitHub’s distribution, Azure’s layered model strategy, and the economics of leveraging third-party GPU capacity while keeping platform control, this thread examines how optionality, workload diversification, and service-layer lock-in not model superiority shape long-term AI advantage. [Read here]

• The power bottleneck isn’t generation it’s interconnection speed.

Driven by overloaded queues, transmission underinvestment, and AI-driven load growth, this thread analyzes how delay risk, abandoned megawatts, and regulatory lag are reshaping energy economics where behind-the-meter generation, direct-wired renewables, and multi-asset PPAs become the investor edge in a market where reaching electrons first, not paying less for them, defines the winners of the next decade. [Read here]

• The next data center supercycle isn’t in mature metros it’s in emerging markets.

Propelled by explosive user growth, tightening data-sovereignty laws, and a wave of new subsea connectivity, this thread examines how Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia are becoming the next great compute geographies where first-mover land control, sovereign-aligned infrastructure, and AI-optimized green builds offer the most asymmetric growth in global digital infrastructure this decade. [Read here]

• AI infrastructure strength isn’t measured by CapEx it’s measured by time-to-energize.

Defined by Equinix’s compounding interconnection moat, Digital Realty’s scarcity-priced renewals, and the shift toward power-secured land and high-density ecosystems, this thread examines how energized megawatts, switching-cost networks, and accelerated delivery—not budget size are becoming the real drivers of value in the next decade of AI infrastructure. [Read here]

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Thanks for catching up with this month’s roundup.