Digital Infrastructure Monthly Insights

Zayo is scaling its digital infrastructure strategy to support growing AI and data center demand. With plans for more than 8,000 miles of fiber backed by its Nvidia partnership, a long-term supply agreement with Corning, and new agentic AI network monitoring tools, Zayo is positioning itself for the next wave of AI-driven connectivity growth.

Cisco is expanding its AI networking portfolio with new silicon, SONiC-based networking capabilities and cross-site deployment solutions designed for large-scale AI infrastructure. As AI clusters grow, the company is addressing rising demands for network bandwidth, power efficiency, cooling and operational coordination across distributed data centers. These innovations aim to simplify AI network management, improve infrastructure scalability and support high-performance AI training and inference workloads, strengthening Cisco's role in next-generation AI data center networking.

GlobalFoundries and TSMC have signed a five-year, $2 billion agreement to manufacture silicon interposers at GlobalFoundries' Malta, New York facility. These critical components enable high-speed communication between AI processors and memory chips. With volume production expected to ramp up in the first half of 2028, the partnership aims to strengthen US semiconductor manufacturing and expand advanced packaging capacity to meet growing AI infrastructure demand.

HPE will provide AMD Helios AI racks with AI processors, along with HPE networking switches and software, to expand Vultr’s United States data center infrastructure under a $1.2 billion agreement.

At OCP Global Summit, NVIDIA contributed Vera Rubin rack and compute tray designs via its open MGX architecture (v1.2) supporting up to 250 kW racks with liquid cooling and standardized interfaces, and introduced a Vera CPU rack for AI agent workloads. NVIDIA joined AMD, Google, and Meta to publish Open Data Center Specification v0.7 and, with Google, Meta, and Microsoft, released the OCP Grid Resilience Specification targeting sub-2s recovery from grid events. Meta is adopting NVIDIA Spectrum-6 (102.4 Tbps) Ethernet switches and advancing Spectrum-X Multiplane (up to 8 planes) to scale beyond 100,000 GPUs. NVIDIA and Cisco unveiled the USFP optical standard targeting 400 Gbps per lane.

The company states its software platform connects silicon design with advanced packaging to streamline development of multi-die systems, supporting chiplets, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and high-performance computing (HPC) devices targeted at data centers and AI factories.

Lumen is integrating Eminence Grey’s sovereign AI platform with its physical infrastructure and programmable network to provide secure connectivity and orchestration for AI workloads spanning edge and cloud.

Cisco is expanding its Secure AI Factory with Nvidia through a strategic collaboration with Supermicro, introducing rack-scale AI infrastructure designed for enterprises, neocloud providers, and sovereign cloud environments. The architecture integrates Nvidia NVL72 systems, HGX and MGX GPU servers, Cisco high-performance networking, distributed security, and Splunk observability. Supporting both liquid- and air-cooled configurations, the solution enables organizations to scale AI training, inference, and agentic AI workloads with greater efficiency, security, and operational control. The expanded portfolio strengthens Cisco's position in full-stack AI infrastructure and accelerates deployment of next-generation AI data centers.

Huawei and Alibaba are advancing China's AI infrastructure capabilities through innovations in processors, computing clusters, networking, and foundation models. Huawei introduced its Peerium Computing Architecture, UnifiedBus interconnect, and new AI SuperClusters designed to support trillion-parameter models. Meanwhile, Alibaba unveiled its Zhenwu V900 AI processor, upgraded supernode servers, and next-generation Qwen AI model roadmap. Together, these developments highlight growing momentum in China's domestic AI semiconductor ecosystem and large-scale computing infrastructure.

Japan will fund $20B for two new semiconductor fabs at GlobalFoundries’ Malta, New York campus. GlobalFoundries is selected to build and operate the sites, as part of a broader agreement in which Japan plans $550B of investment tied to reduced US tariffs. The initiative targets expanded, trusted semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the United States.

MRO-TEK Networks is expanding its focus on India's growing data center market with plans to develop indigenous network operating system capabilities and integrated security platforms. Building on its Made-in-India switching portfolio spanning 1G to 100G, the company aims to strengthen domestic networking innovation and support rising demand for AI-ready data center infrastructure.

Asia-Pacific's rapidly expanding data center market is navigating new financial, regulatory, and energy challenges. Australia's Firmus withdrew its planned $5 billion IPO, while Philippine telecom operator PLDT postponed its Vitro data center REIT listing until 2027. Meanwhile, Indonesia and Thailand have paused major data center developments amid regulatory reviews, and Malaysia is addressing rising electricity demand. Despite these challenges, the region remains a major growth market for AI and digital infrastructure investment.

Financial Times reports SpaceX seeks approximately $40B in funding, with Apollo Global Management leading, to purchase Nvidia AI chips for expanding internal AI compute capacity.

Filed a US prospectus for a Nasdaq IPO to raise up to US$5B at ~US$20B valuation. Proceeds to fund new data center development/construction, working capital, and general corporate purposes. H1 revenue was US$512M with a net loss of US$81.9M; total bookings ~2.3 GW (1.4 GW in Johor, Malaysia). Largest customer contributed 69.2% of H1 revenue; 87% of H1 revenue from Malaysia.

AWS will invest more than $1 billion over five years to fund programs for communities hosting its US data centres, aiming to mitigate opposition and enable continued AI-focused capacity expansion. The move was outlined by AWS CEO Matt Garman, who argued data centre buildout is critical for US competitiveness in AI.

Bell Canada and the Saskatchewan government emphasized the rapid commissioning of an AI data centre outside Regina, adding regional AI compute capacity and localized processing in Canada.

Globe Telecom plans to invest a minimum of $1 billion to expand data center capacity in the Philippines to attract AI workloads and hyperscaler tenants as the country targets a regional AI hub position.

TSMC is evaluating a new multibillion-dollar manufacturing campus in Texas as part of its multi-year US expansion to boost output of AI-focused semiconductors, reflecting sustained demand from customers such as Nvidia and Apple.

Blackstone President Jonathan Gray outlined a plan to expand the firm’s India portfolio from about $50B to $100B over five years, prioritizing data centers and energy along with healthcare, housing, and financial services. He addressed AI infrastructure demand and said Indian IT services could benefit from AI, while commenting on private credit risks.

Editorial analysis arguing that AI deployments are moving from centralized training to distributed inference and agentic AI, requiring open standards, interoperable software, and heterogeneous compute across edge, cloud, and sovereign/on-prem environments.