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February 25, 2026

AMD Instinct MI450 deal powers 6GW Meta AI buildout Google Pine Island adds 1,400MW wind, 300MW Form Energy batteries Virginia 765kV Joshua Falls-Yeat line targets Northern Virginia data centers Orange Town Council shifts hyperscale data centers to special permits

Meta just handed AMD a headline-sized wedge into the AI data center stack: a multiyear agreement for up to 6GW of AI capacity built around custom Instinct MI450 GPUs. If you’ve been wondering what “AI demand” looks like in purchase-order form, this is it — and the performance-based warrant structure is a tell that hyperscalers want suppliers to share execution risk, not just cash the cheque.

The Big Stories

AMD to supply 6 GW AI capacity to Meta is the clearest signal yet that “alternative GPU ecosystems” are moving from slideware to deployment plans. The deal is for up to 6GW of AI capacity using custom Instinct MI450 GPUs in Helios servers paired with EPYC CPUs, with deployments starting later this year. AMD also issued Meta performance-based warrants for up to 160 million shares tied to milestones up to 6GW and share-price thresholds up to $600 — a structure that echoes AMD’s earlier arrangement with OpenAI. The competitive implication is blunt: hyperscalers are pressuring vendors to commit to outcomes (capacity delivered) rather than just components shipped.

Google had a two-front infrastructure day — one in the Midwest and one in Texas — and both were packaged with new grid capacity rather than vague offsets. In Minnesota, Google to build new data center in Pine Island includes a Clean Energy Accelerator Charge (CEAC) with Xcel Energy and brings 1,400MW wind, 200MW solar, and 300MW iron-air battery storage (Form Energy) onto Xcel’s grid, plus a $50m contribution to Xcel’s CapacityConnect Program. In Texas, Google to build Wilbarger County data center with clean energy is co-located with clean power developed by AES and uses advanced air-cooling to minimise water use; Google also says it has contracted to add *more than 7,800MW of net-new energy capacity to the Texas grid. The common thread: the hyperscalers are increasingly showing up with a grid story attached — because communities and regulators now demand one.

The U.S. power bottleneck is hardening into a political problem, not just an engineering one. A new Virginia proposal, Proposal for 115-mile, 765 kV Joshua Falls-Yeat Transmission Line, would move large-scale power toward Northern Virginia data centers; Valley Link Transmission plans to file for SCC approval in summer 2026 and energize by end-2029, against a backdrop where PJM’s 2025 RTEP recommended almost $12bn in regional transmission projects and Dominion reported requests to serve over 70GW of demand. Zoom out and the stress looks systemic: Data center expansion strains grids, raises costs and emissions cites at least 700GW of interconnection requests in 2025, utilities seeking roughly $29bn in rate increases, and average electricity prices around ~19 cents/kWh by end-2025, alongside delayed coal retirements and new gas build. For investors, the message is that transmission timelines and rate cases are now core diligence items — not footnotes.

Local permitting is also tightening in ways that can quietly reset land values and development velocity. In Virginia, Orange enacts zoning changes to restrict hyperscale data centers moves data centers from by-right uses to a Special Use Permit process and prohibits them in Traditional Town Center and residential districts. The Piedmont Environmental Council is pushing for an explicit ban on data centers larger than 40,000 square feet and tighter standards around definitions, visuals, and noise — a reminder that “data center friendly” jurisdictions can flip when the politics turns.

Crypto-era infrastructure players keep trying to rebrand into AI capacity providers — but the capital structure matters as much as the press release. Cipher Digital announces 2025 update, pivots to HPC data centers (formerly Cipher Mining) rebranded around HPC development, sold a 49% stake in three 40MW JV sites to Canaan for about $40m, and completed three high-yield note offerings raising aggregate proceeds of $3.73bn to finance Barber Lake and Black Pearl. Cipher says it has 600MW of contracted HPC capacity, via two 300MW leases with AWS and Fluidstack/Google. The watch item: whether contracted megawatts translate into financeable, on-time delivery — especially in markets where grid access and equipment lead times are the real gating factors.

In Brief

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