Illinois Data Center Intel

Recent Illinois data center news

• Dec 12, 2025

  Speaker shares details on Washington talks: They were very good

  The US Government has announced funding for the construction of the Strășeni–Gutinaș 400 kV power line connecting Moldova to Romania and the European power grid, while Moldovan Speaker Igor Grosu reported positive talks in Washington on energy, security, and humanitarian cooperation.

  • Energy project & funding: The US Government will fund the Strășeni–Gutinaș 400 kV power line with 130 million USD, to be completed by 2028, including modernization of the Strășeni 330 kV station with a 400 kV section and a route crossing 25 localities in Strășeni, Călărași, Nisporeni, and Hîncești districts, to directly connect Moldova, Romania, and the European power grid and reduce dependence on the East.
  • Washington visit & cooperation: During a December 2–10 working visit to the United States, Speaker Igor Grosu held meetings at the US Senate, Congress, and State Department on energy cooperation, state border management, cybersecurity, humanitarian projects, defense capacity, and combating misinformation, received congratulations on Moldova’s September parliamentary elections, and engaged with the Moldovan diaspora in Washington, Chicago, and North Carolina.
• Dec 10, 2025

  Environmental group sues to get energy use at Beaver Dam data center

  Midwest Environmental Advocates has filed a lawsuit to compel the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin to release the projected electrical load/energy demand for Meta’s Beaver Dam data center (records request denied by the PSC citing trade secrets).

  • Lawsuit and records request: Filed Dec. 9 in Dane County Circuit Court by Midwest Environmental Advocates seeking electrical load projections for two hyperscale sites: Meta’s Beaver Dam (served by Alliant Energy) and Vantage’s Port Washington (served by We Energies); the PSC provided Port Washington data showing We Energies requested interconnection for a 1,300-megawatt facility but withheld Beaver Dam projections as trade secrets.
  • Project and background details:Meta is slated to spend more than $1 billion on the Beaver Dam campus (over 700,000 sq ft; operational buildings targeting LEED Gold), will underwrite nearly $200 million in energy infrastructure (network upgrades and transmission lines), expects ~100 permanent jobs and ~1,000 construction trade jobs, and the site is expected to go online in 2027; the story notes prior related legal actions (Sept. suit over Microsoft Mount Pleasant water use) and analyses (Clean Wisconsin) showing the two Wisconsin data centers could require more energy than all Wisconsin households combined.
• Dec 10, 2025

  Toshiba, Quantum Corridor Hit Quantum-Secure Network Milestone

  Quantum Corridor and Toshiba completed a live demonstration of quantum-secured communication using QKD over a 21.8-kilometer commercial fiber link between Illinois and Indiana.

  • Main announcement: The collaboration used Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) over Quantum Corridor’s 21.8-kilometer optical network between Illinois and Indiana, achieving average secure key rates of 1,500 kbps, integrating quantum keys into Ciena Waveserver5 800G, and obtaining a fresh set of QKD keys every 90 seconds while maintaining 100% line-rate throughput and zero packet loss over 48 hours of continuous encrypted traffic.
  • Background and details: The experiment demonstrated interoperability and scalability of quantum-secured transport in a commercial setting, involved integration with Ciena coherent encryption models, and included statements from Quantum Corridor (Ryan Lafler), Toshiba (Terry Cronin) and Purdue University (Michael Manfra); Toshiba and Quantum Corridor said they will explore additional network corridors for deployment.
• Dec 10, 2025

  Top Environmental Victories of 2025

  The Sierra Club announces a roundup of its top environmental victories in 2025.

  • Major announced actions: The article catalogs specific legal, legislative, and advocacy wins including: stopping a proposed public-lands sell-off after Congressional withdrawal; passage of the Climate Change Superfund Act in New York (following Vermont in 2024) and introduced bills in California, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Maine; legal victories blocking Commonwealth LNG (coastal use permit terminated) and two lawsuits creating guardrails on data centers in Kansas and Michigan; NEVI program restart unlocking $2.7 billion for EV charging; and a $744 million jury verdict against Chevron for coastal damages in Louisiana.
  • Background and additional details: The piece lists species and land protections (Northern Rockies wolves, Colorado bison, Rice’s whales), closure of Merrimack Station (final New England coal plant) and repeal of an Ohio coal-bailout that would have cost nearly half a billion dollars, passage of Utah’s balcony solar law allowing small plug-in systems without utility approval, a coalition delivering ~500,000 public comments to defend the Roadless Rule (including 40,000 from Sierra Club advocates), and a world-record origami action sending more than 86,000 paper fish to oppose Enbridge’s Line 5.
• Dec 9, 2025

  Squeezy: Rapid VM Memory Reclamation for Serverless Functions

  The authors of the paper “Squeezy: Rapid VM Memory Reclamation for Serverless Functions” propose a new OS-level mechanism to accelerate memory hot(un)plug for VM-sandboxed FaaS workloads.

  • Squeezy is implemented as an extension to the Linux v6.6 memory manager, segregating hotplugged memory regions from regular VM memory to bound allocation lifetimes and enable sub-second reclamation of multiple GiBs of memory under realistic FaaS load, with order-of-magnitude faster performance and bounded tail latency compared to state-of-the-art.
  • The work targets VM-sandboxed serverless functions in FaaS environments, addressing the long reclamation latencies and CPU overheads of existing memory hot(un)plug mechanisms by making the OS memory manager aware of hotplugged memory, and is published on arXiv with DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2411.12893 by researchers from National Technical University Of Athens and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
• Dec 9, 2025

  Aurora: Architecting Argonne's First Exascale Supercomputer for Accelerated Scientific Discovery

  Argonne National Laboratory and collaborators describe the architecture and software ecosystem of Aurora, the lab’s first exascale supercomputer, in a 40-page paper submitted to J. Supercomputing.

  • The paper details Aurora’s node architecture, including Intel Xeon Data Center GPU Max Series (Sapphire Rapids) with HBM, Intel Data Center GPU Max Series (Ponte Vecchio) on each compute node, HPE Slingshot interconnect, and integration of Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) and Intel oneAPI.
  • It reports on standard benchmark performance and application readiness via Aurora’s Early Science Program and the Exascale Computing Project, with the article hosted on arXiv (arXiv:2509.08207, DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2509.08207) and revised to version v2 on 8 Dec 2025.
• Dec 5, 2025

  Scaling MPI Applications on Aurora

  Huda Ibeid and co-authors present a technical and performance study of the Aurora exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory.

  • Main announcement/action: The paper provides system design details and validated performance results for Aurora, deployed in 2024 at Argonne National Laboratory, describing a system of over ten thousand nodes with six Intel Data Center Max Series GPUs and two Intel Xeon Max Series CPUs per node, connected via HPE Slingshot fabric with nearly 85,000 Cassini NICs and 5,600 Rosetta switches in a dragonfly topology, and demonstrates MPI benchmarks and application scaling on a large fraction of the machine.
  • Background and details: The manuscript (submitted 3 Dec 2025 to arXiv) focuses on network fabric validation and presents results for performance benchmarks HPL, HPL-MxP, Graph500, HPCG and applications HACC, AMR-Wind, LAMMPS, FMM, reporting throughput, latency, and bandwidth measurements across large node counts; PDF, HTML, and TeX source links are provided.
• Dec 3, 2025

  SWEP Introduces New Products for Future Demands of Data Center Cooling and Heat Reuse

  SWEP, part of Dover, announced the launch of two new brazed plate heat exchanger models, SWEP B327 and SWEP B224, for liquid cooling in data centers and district energy applications (press release dated Dec. 3, 2025).

  • Main announcement: SWEP launched SWEP B327 and SWEP B224, designed for single-phase data center cooling and district heating with shared features including large ports for high flow rates, low pressure drop, and high thermal efficiency; SWEP B327 can capture excess heat for thermal storage, heating substations and tap water stations up to 1000kW.
  • Background & details: The release is a corporate product announcement (Dec 3, 2025); SWEP is described as a global brazed plate heat exchanger supplier with ~1,100 employees, five production sites, and a presence in 50 countries; SWEP is part of Dover Corporation (Dover: annual revenue noted as over $7 billion, ~24,000 employees). Contact details for media and investor relations were provided (Malin Bengtsson, Adrian Sakowicz, Jack Dickens).
• Dec 3, 2025

  Roundup: Rolling back efficiencies / ICE in NOLA / Big tech debt

  The Trump administration plans to roll back fuel economy standards for gasoline-powered cars and trucks covering through the 2031 model year, and Morgan Stanley is exploring a significant risk transfer tied to Meta’s Hyperion data-center financing.

  • Main announcement: The Trump administration intends to weaken mileage rules for gasoline-powered cars and trucks through the 2031 model year, according to people familiar with the plan (reported by Associated Press). The rollback would ease regulatory pressure on automakers to reduce emissions.
  • Additional details:Operation Catahoula Crunch: DHS agents deployed to New Orleans targeting unauthorized immigrants with criminal histories, similar to prior sweeps in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Charlotte (reported by The Wall Street Journal). Morgan Stanley arranged over $27 billion of debt and about $2.5 billion of equity in October for an SPV tied to Meta Platforms Inc.’s Hyperion data-center in Richland Parish, and is now considering an offload via a significant risk transfer (reported by Bloomberg).
• Dec 2, 2025

  Data Center Jobs: Engineering, Construction, Commissioning, Sales, Field Service and Facility Tech Jobs Available in Major Data Center Hotspots

  Data Center Frontier, in partnership with Pkaza, posted a monthly roundup of active data center job openings on the Pkaza jobs board.

  • Main announcement: Data Center Frontier and Pkaza published a list of open roles (examples: Data Center Facility Technician, Electrical Commissioning Engineer, Construction Project Manager, Electrical Engineer, Critical Power Sales Associate, Sr Mechanical Engineer, Site Selection Manager/Director/VP, Electrical Project Manager, MEP Superintendent, Mechanical Commissioning Engineer, Engineering Design Director, Navy Nuke Facility Technician) posted on Pkaza’s jobs board; positions are available across many US cities including Ashburn, VA; Atlanta, GA; Dallas, TX; Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Montvale, NJ; Austin, TX; Charlotte, NC; New Albany, OH; Phoenix, AZ.
  • Background and details: Roles are for mission-critical data center employers (developers, colo providers, contractors, commissioning firms) and frequently emphasize reliability, energy efficiency, sustainable design / LEED expertise and commissioning; some listings explicitly accept Navy Nuke / military veterans and many positions list multiple alternative locations or hybrid/remote options. Author: Kathy Hitchens (Data Center Frontier).