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.
Every month, I track the top data center and AI infrastructure transactions globally. In August 2026, I tracked 125 deals.
Ten things stood out to me about this month’s top transactions:
1. AI labs became the anchor tenants.
Anthropic stands behind four of August’s transactions, OpenAI behind three. The marginal buyer of capacity isn’t a hyperscale cloud provider anymore. The labs are signing for it themselves.
2. NVIDIA appeared in seven transactions in five different roles.
Guarantor of a $105 billion exposure cap. Reported acquirer of a stake in a power developer. Strategic investor in two more. Participant in a $2 billion equity round. Architect of a blueprint to mobilize $500 billion of third-party capital. And GPU counterparty in a two-million-chip agreement. I cannot recall one company taking up this much of the sector’s structure in a single month.
3. Capacity is being sold like infrastructure concessions.
Five deals carried tenors of 15 to 20 years. That’s build-to-suit territory, not colocation.
4. Power now picks the site.
A Department of Energy brownfield, a crypto mine’s interconnection, Marcellus gas rights, Nordic hydro, a Texas wind farm. Nothing in the top tier was sited for connectivity.
5. Behind-the-meter gas is America’s speed play.
At least six U.S. deals paired data centers with dedicated on-site generation rather than waiting in a grid queue.
6. Utility regulators became dealmakers in the US.
Two state public service commission approvals and a federal energy authorization were among the month’s most consequential events. Power contracts are the new permits.
7. Sovereigns showed up as principals, not regulators.
Two Saudi builds, Armenia’s government-funded AI factory, Mongolia’s 863MW MoU program, Germany’s sovereign-cloud campus, Singapore’s capacity tender, and a UK state guarantee sitting under private debt.
8. The financing toolkit stretched to fit the asset class.
August produced a residual-value guarantee capped at $105 billion, $5.75 billion of convertible notes, an Islamic Murabaha facility from a Qatari bank, a debut Australian dollar bond from a hyperscaler, a private equity continuation vehicle, and a telecom carve-out selling minority stakes to global funds. No single instrument fits AI infrastructure yet, so the market is reaching for all of them.
9. Capital moved upstream into the companies that build the buildout.
Partners Group took majority control of AVK, the on-site power and energy-as-a-service platform, with an initial investment above $1 billion. H&MV Engineering recapitalized at a €1.4 billion headline valuation. Kingspan paid a firm €850 million for BMC Manufacturing, and H.I.G. Capital acquired Phoenix ME. Four transactions in one month bought the supply chain rather than the data centers themselves.
10. Crypto infrastructure found its second life.
Conversions and grid-position acquisitions turned mining assets into AI capacity in three states, because an approved interconnection is worth more than the business running on it.
Top 10 Global Data Center Deals
The ten highest-ranked transactions of the month span all five regions: four in North America, three in Europe, one in Asia-Pacific, one in the Middle East, and one in South America.
1. OpenAI–SB Energy: 8GW in Ohio for Twenty Years (North America)
OpenAI, the AI lab behind ChatGPT, agreed to secure about 8GW of IT capacity at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike campus, a developer of power and AI data-center infrastructure, on the former Department of Energy site in Pike County, Ohio, under a twenty-year lease. SB Energy builds, owns, and operates; delivery runs in phases from 2028, with the first roughly 800MW riding on existing AEP infrastructure and the remainder requiring new generation and transmission.
Development still depends on permits, environmental reviews, and financing, so treat the 8GW as a plan, not a certainty. What nobody can walk back is who signed: a model developer, not a cloud provider, took the industry’s largest tenancy, on a site chosen for its power.
2. NVIDIA’s $105 Billion PORTS-Pike Guarantee (North America)
This is the deal that makes the first one financeable. NVIDIA, the chipmaker whose processors power the AI buildout, entered definitive residual-value guarantee arrangements covering the initial 4.25GW of the same Ohio campus, with a disclosed aggregate maximum payment obligation of $105 billion. No cash moves at signing; the figure is a ceiling on exposure, not spending.
Each guarantee phases in as the corresponding lease commences. An option to support roughly another 3.75GW is excluded. Why does a guarantee like this exist at all? Because no lender syndicate will underwrite a single campus at this scale on a young tenant’s covenant. So the chip supplier stepped into the credit stack behind its own demand chain.
3. Volta and an Unnamed AI Lab: $10 Billion at Tydal (Europe)
Europe’s largest deal is a $10 billion strategic partnership between Volta, an AI-factory developer, and an unnamed leading AI lab, anchoring the 121MW Tydal AI factory in Norway that Volta is developing alongside Bitdeer. The same campus carries a fully disclosed sixteen-year, $4.7 billion lease between Bitdeer and Volta Tydal.
The two are legs of one transaction story covering the same 121MW of critical IT load, running entirely on renewable power. The values must not be stacked and the megawatts count once. It reads like Ohio at European scale: a long tenor, lab demand, and a site picked for cheap, clean electricity.
4. HUMAIN–MIS: Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Buildout Quadruples (Middle East)
HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s state-backed AI company, expanded its data center construction award with Al Moammar Information Systems, the Saudi-listed IT company, by 200MW, taking the contracted program from 50MW to 250MW. The amended contract value exceeds $2.3 billion, according to a Saudi Exchange disclosure that the post-expansion contract exceeds 689 percent of MIS’s 2025 revenue.
What strikes me is the speed. A sovereign AI program quadrupled its physical footprint through a mid-contract scope change, at a pace you would normally associate with hyperscale procurement.
5. Riot–Anthropic: 191MW and a Second Life for Crypto Infrastructure (North America)
Riot Platforms, the U.S. Bitcoin mining company, signed an executed twenty-year lease with Anthropic, the frontier AI lab, covering 191MW of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus, with roughly $9.1 billion in contracted revenue over the initial term.
That figure is lease revenue over two decades, not construction cost; optional extensions could take it toward $16.1 billion. The money is striking, but the conversion matters more: a Bitcoin mining site became long-duration AI capacity because it already held an approved grid interconnection. In Texas, the queue is the moat.
6. Nscale–Anthropic: $45 Billion in West Virginia (North America)
The month’s largest contract by value: a six-year agreement under which Nscale, a provider of dedicated AI compute, gives Anthropic 460MW at its Monarch campus in West Virginia, valued at $45 billion. The figure is compute-rental revenue rather than project cost.
Note where the electricity comes from: on-site natural gas generation, because six-year AI demand can’t wait in a grid queue. Labs are paying for speed, and speed currently burns gas.
7. CoreWeave Enters Asia with 360MW in Indonesia (Asia-Pacific)
CoreWeave, the AI cloud provider, announced its first Asia-Pacific expansion: three Indonesian facilities totaling exactly 360MW of contracted IT power, expected online in 2028, all owned and operated by CoreWeave.
An AI cloud, not an enterprise cloud, is what finally pulled major western compute investment into Indonesia. New markets are now opened by training and inference demand rather than corporate IT.
8. TERRANOVA Breaks Ground on Latin America’s Largest AI Campus (South America)
TERRANOVA, an Actis-backed developer of purpose-built AI campuses in Brazil, began construction in Campinas on a campus with 216MW of initial verified IT load, expandable to 386MW, served by dedicated substation and transmission infrastructure and targeting global hyperscale and AI customers.
Initial-phase investment is stated only as exceeding $500 million. It is the region’s lone entry on this list, and the pairing matters: purpose-built AI capacity at three-digit megawatt scale is under construction in South America in the same month the continent recorded zero closed financings.
9. Firebird Lights Up Armenia (Europe)
Firebird, an AI infrastructure developer, brought its Hrazdan AI factory in Armenia operational in August. The NVIDIA DSX facility, described as the largest AI factory in the CIS region, is funded by a disclosed $500 million investment from the Armenian government.
A country of three million people bought itself frontier-grade compute as a matter of national capability. Small states have concluded that AI infrastructure is closer to an airport than an office park: something a nation builds because sovereignty requires it.
10. Schwarz Group’s €5.6 Billion Answer to Digital Sovereignty (Europe)
Schwarz Group, the German retail group that owns Lidl, disclosed plans for a data center campus at Dummerstorf in northern Germany, with an estimated investment of approximately €5.6 billion (about $6.5 billion), running exclusively on renewable power during regular operations.
The capacity serves the group’s own ecosystem and its STACKIT sovereign-cloud platform, and the project remains proposed, subject to approvals. Europe’s sovereignty debate has mostly produced policy papers; here it produced a retailer committing billions to build the alternative itself.
Step back from the top 10 global data center transactions and the list reads as two markets running on different fuel.
In developed markets, the story is financial engineering: a $105 billion guarantee standing behind an Ohio campus, six of the world’s largest financiers designing platforms to mobilize $500 billion, twenty-year leases priced like infrastructure concessions.
In emerging markets, the story is the state: Armenia’s government wrote the $500 million check for its own AI factory, Saudi Arabia quadrupled one sovereign build mid-contract and committed $5 billion to another at NEOM, and Mongolia signed 863MW of memoranda.
And in Brazil, the builders simply went first: TERRANOVA broke ground on a 216MW campus with more than $500 million committed to its first phase, ahead of a continental financing market that is still to open.
Developed markets are inventing new instruments to fund the machine. Emerging markets are reaching for the oldest one: the sovereign balance sheet. Both are building. The question August left open is which system gets to price the next gigawatt.