Massachusetts Data Center Intel

Recent Massachusetts data center news

• Jul 3, 2026

  Heat Adds to Strains on Areas With Data Centers, Raising the Temperature on AI Debates

  AP reports on community concerns in Lowell, Massachusetts, about a nearby data center’s impact during extreme heat. - Eileen Castle, 82, said she will not fill her swimming pool because of concerns about air quality and water effects from the data center behind her house.

  • The article says hot weather increases electricity demand for data centers, adding strain to power grids and worsening air quality in surrounding neighborhoods like Sacred Heart in Lowell.
  • This is a news report and commentary on the effects of existing data-center operations; it does not describe a new announcement or deal.
• Jul 1, 2026

  The Internet Dispersed Power. The Supreme Court is Concentrating It

  Broadband Breakfast hosted a BroadbandLive webinar in which Reed Hundt, Vint Cerf, Lawrence Lessig, and Shane Greenstein responded to the Supreme Court’s Slaughter v. Trump decision.

  • Main announcement/action: Reed Hundt sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s Slaughter v. Trump ruling, saying the Court has effectively decided that “the president can kick any commissioner out of a multi-member agency,” a change that discourages bipartisan decision-making and undermines the multimember-commission model used at agencies like the FCC and FTC. The panel discussed that the ruling permits summary firing of minority commissioners and that a commission that “serves at the president’s pleasure cannot play that role.”
  • Background and other details: The remarks were given during the third of three BroadbandLive events tied to America250 / Telecom150 (in-person event scheduled October 1, 2026 at the National Press Club). Panelists including Vint Cerf and Lawrence Lessig praised the Internet’s evolvable architecture, cited the 1997 WTO Agreement on Basic Telecommunications (negotiated with U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and 69 countries), and noted fragmented AI oversight—more than 50 federal agencies and more than a dozen congressional committees have roles; Hundt also offered a plan for regulatory predictability for construction of data centers (see BroadbandBreakfast link).
• Jul 1, 2026

  Against the Wind: Inside the Completion of America’s Largest Offshore Wind Plant

  Dominion Energy has announced that the 2.6-GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project delivered first power to the Virginia grid in March 2026.

  • Project milestone and status: CVOW achieved a first power milestone in March 2026 while turbine installation and commissioning continue across the 176-turbine commercial array (Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD). The project is a 2.6 GW regulated, utility-owned asset with an updated budget of about $11.4 billion and an expected service (COD) mid-2027 per NextEra; Dominion previously sold a 50% noncontrolling stake to Stonepeak in 2024 (transaction closed Oct 2024, generating about $2.6 billion for Dominion).
  • Permitting, risks, and permits: CVOW cleared the federal permitting stack (BOEM final EIS Sept 2023; ROD Oct 2023; Construction and Operations Plan and Army Corps permit Jan 2024; EPA OCS air preconstruction permit Apr 2024) and completed FAST-41 coordination, survived a 90-day DOI stop-work order (Dec 22, 2025) and obtained a preliminary injunction (Jan 16, 2026) to resume work. Dominion also holds a separate CVOW-South BOEM lease won Aug 14, 2024 for $17.7 million (approx. 176,505 acres) that could support ~800 MW in the 2030s.
• Jun 30, 2026

  MIT student teams win top honors in NASA competition

  MIT teams have been awarded five prizes at NASA’s 2026 RASC-AL Forum for integrated moon-base infrastructure designs.

  • Main announcement: MIT student teams ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER won a total of five awards at NASA’s 2026 RASC-AL competition — including first and second overall — for designs of a lunar power grid, communications/positioning constellation, and regolith-to-resource processing pipeline. ECLIPSE delivered a reference grid sized for an initial 120 kilowatts, featuring buried 20 kW CARROT microreactors and a target availability of >99.995% (fewer than 27 minutes downtime per year); MELIORA scales from 3 to 23 satellites, returns >100 megabits per second via free-space optical links and provides ~10 m positioning; CHEESEBURGER proposes five robotic payloads (SWISS, BRIOCHES, BACON, GRILLED MEAT, AVOCADO) to produce oxygen, metals, and bricks from regolith.
  • Context and details: The projects were developed by ~35 students across eight MIT departments and Wellesley College since fall 2025, advised by faculty including Olivier de Weck, Kerri Cahoy, and Jeffrey Hoffman, supported in part by NASA, Massachusetts Space Grant, MIT AeroAstro, and the MIT Space Resources Workshop, and framed to validate designs on the Moon before extension to Mars; NASA plans to begin landing first base elements in 2027 and expects months-long lunar surface stays by the early 2030s.
• Jun 30, 2026

  MIT researchers advance toward greater bandwidth, more energy-efficient communications

  MIT-led FUTUR-IC announced progress developing electronic-photonic integrated microsystems, reporting three new optical “couplers” (evanescent, GRIN, and a 2023 DOE-supported coupler) and claiming the approach can enable data transmission from hundreds of terabits per second to greater than 1 petabit per second.

  • Core technical announcement: FUTUR-IC has developed three optical couplers intended as the first optical equivalents of “solder bumps” to integrate photonics and electronics: the evanescent coupler (featured on the cover of Advanced Engineering Materials, “last year”), the graded index (GRIN) coupler (reported in the March 2026 issue of Journal of Physics: Photonics), and a third coupler reported in 2023 in Laser & Photonics Reviews (work supported by the DOE). FUTUR-IC was established in 2022 and is funded by the NSF Convergence Accelerator; progress was summarized in an April webinar titled “Shaping the Future of Semiconductors: Power, Performance, and Possibility,” sponsored by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Startup Exchange.
  • Value-chain and workforce actions: Under Value Chain Innovation, FUTUR-IC highlights the Earthster visual modeling tool to identify product-level energy and material hot spots; under Workforce, FUTUR-IC is launching an online course on semiconductor resource efficiency, gamified digital learning, problem-based learning, a summer academy, a hands-on bootcamp, and K-12 TED-Ed videos. The program notes the supply-chain immaturity for co-packaged optics and positions its work as relevant to packaging vendors, materials vendors, and data-center supply chains.
• Jun 25, 2026

  Improving the speed and energy-efficiency of AI agents

  Researchers from MIT and Microsoft have developed Murakkab, an intelligent system that automates the design and runtime optimization of agentic AI workflows to reduce computation, energy, and cost.

  • Main announcement: Murakkab automatically maps developer intent to workflow components, selects existing models and tools, determines parallelism vs. sequential execution, and dynamically configures hardware and resource allocation at deployment to meet user constraints (e.g., prioritize accuracy or latency). The paper describing Murakkab will be presented at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation and the research was supported in part by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
  • Key results and details: In tests on video Q&A and code-generation workflows, Murakkab used about 35% of the computation compared with other methods, consumed about 27% of the energy, and ran for less than 25% of the cost; in one case it reduced energy consumption by more than an order of magnitude with only ~2% drop in accuracy. The system also provides cloud providers visibility across workloads so they can share computational resources more efficiently.
• Jun 24, 2026

  Construction employment rises in 30 states over past year, AGC reports

  The Associated General Contractors of America reported that construction employment increased in 30 states and the District of Columbia between May 2025 and May 2026.

  • Main announcement: AGC reported state construction employment increased in 30 states and D.C. between May 2025 and May 2026; Texas added 18,700 jobs (2.1%), North Carolina added 13,600, Wisconsin added 9,000, and Wisconsin posted the largest percentage increase (6.2%); California recorded the largest annual decline at 13,100 jobs (−1.5%).
  • Monthly detail and risks: From April to May, construction employment increased in 23 states and D.C., declined in 22 states, and was unchanged in 5 states; monthly leaders included Texas (+3,600) and Wisconsin (+2,900). AGC officials Ken Simonson and Jeffrey D. Shoaf cautioned that opposition to data center projects and uncertainty over federal transportation funding pose threats to future construction job growth.
• Jun 23, 2026

  Massachusetts’ Kopin Corp. To Open New Optics and Photonics Design Center in Dallas

  Kopin Corp. has announced plans to open a new Optics and Photonics Design Center in Dallas, slated to open by the end of 2026.

  • Main announcement: Kopin will open a dedicated Optics and Photonics Design Center in Dallas by the end of 2026 that will include optics and photonics lab space, a design and engineering center, advanced R&D capabilities focused on Neural I/o, and manufacturing capacity for Neural I/o and ASOS systems. The company presented this as an expansion of its U.S.-based engineering footprint to accelerate next-generation Neural I/o development for the AI infrastructure market.
  • Background and related details: Kopin has a strategic joint development agreement with NYC-based Fabric.AI to build MicroLED-based optical interconnect technology for high-performance AI data centers; the article also notes an initial microdisplay production order received in February from a Tier-1 European defense contractor for a rotary-wing helmet-mounted display integration.
• Jun 22, 2026

  NAIRR Science Program Reshapes Scientific Research, Powered by NVIDIA AI Infrastructure

  NVIDIA announced its contribution to the NAIRR pilot, providing dedicated NVIDIA DGX access and technical support to researchers.

  • Main announcement: NVIDIA provided researchers in the NAIRR pilot with a cloud-based resource guaranteeing a minimum of four NVIDIA DGX nodes for at least a month plus technical onboarding and support; the NAIRR pilot has supported over 700 projects across the past two years. The University of Michigan team used a 40-GPU NVIDIA DGX cluster (from a NAIRR allocation) and an additional 200,000 NVIDIA GPU hours on ALCF’s Polaris for MIST model development.
  • Background and project details: NAIRR-enabled projects highlighted include Polymathic AI’s Walrus foundation model (dataset, code and pretrained weights made public) for fluidlike simulations, University of Michigan’s MIST molecular models for energy storage fused with LLMs, and Boston University’s BEACON LLM pipeline for infectious disease detection (processing HealthMap, news, social media and other signals). The announcement summarizes implementation over the past two years and documents concrete compute allocations and public releases.
• Jun 22, 2026

  In Interview with AP, Nvidia's Jensen Huang Urges Americans to Use AI More

  Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized broad AI adoption and warned the U.S. faces an energy shortfall that could limit AI/data center growth, in an Associated Press interview.

  • Main announcement: Jensen Huang urged that society should “use AI” and adopt new social norms around the technology, called for government regulation and clear safety/export guidance, and warned the United States is “woefully behind in energy production”; he made these remarks in a June 21, 2026 AP interview while speaking in Sherman, Texas at the Coherent factory expansion.
  • Background/details: Huang noted Nvidia’s market capitalization ~ $5 trillion, referenced AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic as potentially reaching $1 trillion if publicly traded, criticized proposals for government ownership of AI shares, and highlighted a Coherent laser project at the Sherman expansion that could cut AI power use by up to 50%; the piece is a news interview by the Associated Press (Josh Boak).