CyrusOne Hones AI-Era Data Center Strategy for Power, Pace, and Reliability

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CyrusOne Hones AI-Era Data Center Strategy for Power, Pace, and Reliability

The incident forced the company into an unusually open conversation about redundancy, cooling systems, and operational discipline: systems that are meant to disappear in normal operation, and dominate the story when they malfunction.

From Projects to a Playbook

Which projects, missteps, and strategic moves from 2025 are now shaping how CyrusOne enters 2026?

Nowhere is that view clearer than in Texas. There, CyrusOne has been leaning hard into a “power + land + interconnect” model: treating deliverable power and grid position as part of the product, not just a prerequisite.

If you map the company’s announcements since late July, Texas reveals the playbook. Secure power, secure substations and grid position, then build multi-phase campuses designed to scale quickly as demand materializes.

The Calpine “Powered Land” Deal: From 190 MW to 400 MW in Three Months

On July 30, 2025, CyrusOne and Calpine announced a 190-MW agreement tied to a hyperscale campus (DFW10) adjacent to Calpine’s Thad Hill Energy Center in Bosque County, Texas.

The structure bundled power, grid connection, and land into a single development package, with CyrusOne saying the site was already under construction and targeting operation by Q4 2026.

Just three months later, on November 3–4, the partners announced a second phase, adding 210 MW and taking the campus to 400 MW. The update emphasized coordination to support grid reliability during scarcity; such curtailment and operational-coordination concepts are becoming table stakes for ERCOT-scale megaprojects.

Together, the two announcements show CyrusOne placing a large bet on an emerging model: power-ready campuses, or “powered land,” that compress development timelines by turning the hardest part of modern data center development, aka grid position, delivery path, and land entitlement into an integrated product.

The language also signals an expectation that hyperscale and AI customers will increasingly buy capacity certainty, not just square footage.

The Eolian Partnership: Turning a BESS Site into a Fast-Start 200-MW Campus

On January 13, 2026, CyrusOne and energy developer Eolian announced a partnership built around speed: a 200-MW data center campus in Fort Worth, enabled by existing high-voltage transmission infrastructure at the Chisholm Grid, a site originally developed as a 100-MW battery energy storage system (BESS) facility.

The campus, known as DFW7, is already under construction. By co-locating large-scale data center capacity next to an operating grid-scale battery site, CyrusOne is effectively skipping what has become the longest pole in the tent for new development: waiting in line for interconnection. The companies say the structure will allow CyrusOne to begin delivering capacity to customers in 2026.

The origin of the deal goes back to 2023, when Eolian, after developing and operating BESS projects across the U.S., identified the Chisholm Grid substation as a rare asset: a highly networked node in a fast-growing market with available capacity that would be difficult to replicate from scratch.

The companies collaborated on a structure that allowed CyrusOne to break ground in April 2025, compressing the typical data center timeline by reusing existing transmission and substation infrastructure rather than waiting years for new grid upgrades.

“Our customers’ continued growth drives demand for new capacity. Leveraging the existing infrastructure at the Fort Worth campus enables CyrusOne to deliver large-scale capacity to customers beginning in 2026,” said CyrusOne CEO Eric Schwartz. “CyrusOne is accelerating time-to-market for our customers by working creatively with Eolian as an established energy project developer and operator with existing sites in locations that would be difficult to replicate.”

As part of the transaction, Eolian will modernize and upgrade one of Texas’ earliest utility-scale BESS systems, while the existing infrastructure supplies power to the initial phases of the data center campus. For Eolian, the project represents a broader thesis about how the grid and large loads should evolve.

“This project is about problem-solving: using existing infrastructure intelligently to deliver speed to power and speed to datacenter growth,” said Eolian CEO Aaron Zubaty.

He added, “By developing flexible capacity resources at highly networked grid locations, we can enable hyperscale growth without duplicating facilities, expanding transmission, or utilizing additional industrial real estate. This is exactly how the grid should evolve. Efficiently, quickly, and in direct response to real load growth.”

For CyrusOne, the Fort Worth deal seems to confirm a strategic shift: existing grid infrastructure such as substations, brownfield power sites, and BESS nodes are now being treated as strategic real estate. Energy developers and data center operators are converging around the same scarce bottleneck: deliverable power.

DFW7 also previews a model that is likely to repeat across the industry. As interconnection queues stretch into years, the fastest path to new capacity may not be building more grid from scratch, but learning how to build next to what already exists, and make better use of it.

The Quieter Texas Story: Permits, Pipelines, and the “Run” Side of the Business

Outside the headline megawatt announcements, trade reporting and regulatory filings show CyrusOne continuing to build quietly across Texas. In December 2025, filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation pointed to an expansion of a campus near Waco/Whitney, with staged fit-outs and capital spending stretching into 2026 and 2027. Local and regional coverage also referenced a planned Whitney facility with a similar multi-year timeline.

These kinds of filings rarely make press releases, but they matter. The permitting and construction pipeline is where a developer’s real intent shows up. Even when the headlines slow, the paperwork reveals whether a company is still planning for growth. In Texas, CyrusOne appears to be doing exactly that.

At the same time, the company is clearly reinforcing the “run” side of the business to match the pace of the “build” side. On January 14, 2026, CyrusOne announced that Robert Johnson had joined as Chief Business Officer, with responsibility for performance and operations across the company’s U.S. data centers as new facilities come online.

Johnson will oversee U.S. operations, security, service delivery, account management, and asset management, with accountability for operational excellence, customer outcomes, revenue management, and asset utilization. He comes from Ericsson, where he led the Americas Networks business, and brings more than two decades of experience in large-scale, mission-critical environments, including senior roles at Siemens IT Solutions & Services, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services, and CSC.

“Rob is an experienced operator and people-first leader with a strong track record of building high-performing teams and translating complexity into execution,” said CyrusOne CEO Eric Schwartz. “His background in large-scale, mission-critical environments and his commitment to customer outcomes and operational rigor make him a strong addition to our leadership team.”

Johnson framed the move as an extension of a culture already focused on reliability. “There is a real sense of pride in how this organization serves its customers and upholds its standards every day,” he said. “CyrusOne has built an impressive global platform grounded in trust, reliability, and technical excellence.”

Taken together, the quiet Texas filings and the operations-focused leadership hire point in the same direction. CyrusOne is adding big-time megawatts while also trying to make sure the operational machine can absorb them without slipping.

Community Pushback: Big-Campus Ambition Meets the Permitting Reality

Amid the same trend in similar localities, Illinois last year became a clear example of the modern data center development cycle: a large power request, followed by local hearings, then a mix of noise, water, transparency, and land-use politics playing out through the county board process.

For CyrusOne, that cycle came into focus around a proposed project in Sangamon County, near Waverly in Talkington Township. The development has generated sustained local coverage and formal county documentation, including a public hearing on December 3, 2025, and a growing packet of filings, comments, and responses posted on the county’s website. Local reporting has framed the proposal as roughly a $500 million investment, while also highlighting debates over tax base benefits versus perceived impacts related to noise, water use, transparency, and land use.

More than just another site fight, the Illinois debate reflects a broader shift in how data centers get built. As AI-driven load balloons, the local process is becoming a gating factor nearly as important as capital or construction expertise. Developers now need political and community strategies alongside engineering ones.

That matters especially in Illinois, where CyrusOne has previously been reported to be exploring a campus as large as 600 MW across six buildings. Moves at that scale are just as much political and grid-planning statements as they are real estate decisions. At 600 MW, a data center campus is no longer a single project; it is an industrial megaproject, effectively telling utilities and counties: this will reshape how your grid, land, and tax base evolve.

The CME Outage: When Reliability Became the Story

The defining reputational event for CyrusOne in 2025 was the trading disruption at CME on November 28, tied to a cooling failure at a CyrusOne facility. The outage interrupted trading across major instruments and pushed a normally invisible part of data center operations, i.e. cooling systems, into the global financial news cycle.

The initial headlines focused on impact: markets down for hours, trading halted, and a reminder of how tightly financial infrastructure is coupled to physical data center systems.

Follow-on reporting added sharper detail. Reuters reported that CyrusOne moved quickly to bolster cooling capacity and add redundancy after the incident. Bloomberg later reported that the outage was attributed to human error, and that some markets were disrupted for more than 10 hours.

CyrusOne’s public response emphasized corrective action. The company said it added additional redundancy to cooling systems and addressed the root cause of the failure. But the larger lesson went beyond any single fix. In a sector where customers expect “five nines” to be routine, one high-profile failure can outweigh years of quiet success.

For CyrusOne, the CME incident created a new tension just as the company was accelerating its growth strategy. The company is trying to scale faster than ever — more campuses, more megawatts, more concurrent builds — while serving some of the most demanding customers in the world. Financial markets, hyperscalers, and AI operators do not just buy space and power; they buy trust.

The outage made that tension visible. It also helps explain why CyrusOne’s recent messaging leans heavily on operational discipline, redundancy, and leadership focus on the “run” side of the business. In the AI era, growth may be driven by speed and power, but reputation is still built, or broken, by reliability.

What CyrusOne Is Building Toward in 2026

As CyrusOne moves into 2026, its strategy is defined by a balancing act. The company is trying to do two hard things at once: scale faster than ever (more campuses, more megawatts, more projects running in parallel) while convincing the most demanding customers in the world that reliability will not slip as complexity rises.

The CME outage made that tension unavoidable. It also helps explain why CyrusOne’s recent communications and leadership moves emphasize operational discipline, redundancy, and accountability on the “run” side of the business. In a period of rapid expansion, reliability is no longer just a technical metric. It is a brand attribute.

Europe as a Test of “License to Build”

That same logic shows up in how CyrusOne is approaching community relations, especially in Europe. On December 17, 2025, the company highlighted community engagement in Frankfurt by allowing a special police unit to use an unused building at the former Europark site for training ahead of demolition and development of its FRA6 campus.

In markets like Frankfurt, permitting and public-sector coordination are often as decisive as capital or engineering. By making itself visible as a cooperative local partner, CyrusOne is signaling that “license to build” is something that must be earned, not assumed.

Frankfurt is not an outlier in that regard. As CyrusOne continues to operate across Europe and Japan, it is increasingly working in environments where development is shaped as much by public process as by private capital. In these markets, grid access, zoning, environmental review, and community acceptance often move on political timetables rather than construction schedules.

CyrusOne’s recent emphasis on visibility, partnership, and public-sector coordination suggests it is adapting to that reality by treating community engagement and regulatory fluency as core competencies of international expansion, as opposed to secondary considerations.

The 2025 Lessons That Shape 2026

Taken together, CyrusOne’s moves in 2025 suggest the company is now optimizing around four hard constraints:

1) Interconnection and deliverable power
The Calpine “powered land” deal and the Eolian BESS-site reuse are both about securing power access and schedule certainty, not just acquiring land.

2) Speed-to-market through standardization
Leadership changes and organizational design point toward a more standardized delivery system integrating procurement and construction, because bespoke builds do not scale cleanly under AI-driven demand.

3) Reliability as brand protection
The CME disruption put a bright spotlight on cooling systems and operational controls, areas where customers expect boring perfection and remember failure.

4) Community and process risk
The Illinois experience shows how quickly a project can become a civic issue, especially at campus scale. Political and community strategy is now part of core development strategy.

Going into 2026, CyrusOne is not just pursuing more megawatts. It is working to align rapid growth with the operational discipline, community standing, and reliability its customers require.

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In the second half of 2025, CyrusOne was racing to secure buildable power and faster time-to-market capacity for AI-era customers. At the same time, its reputation for mission-critical reliability took a very public hit when a disruption at a CyrusOne facility helped knock CME trading offline. The incident forced the company into an unusually open conversation about redundancy, cooling systems, and operational discipline: systems that are meant to disappear in normal operation, and dominate the story when they malfunction. From Projects to a Playbook Which projects, missteps, and strategic moves from 2025 are now shaping how CyrusOne enters 2026? Nowhere is that view clearer than in Texas. There, CyrusOne has been leaning hard into a “power + land + interconnect” model: treating deliverable power and grid position as part of the product, not just a prerequisite. If you map the company’s announcements since late July, Texas reveals the playbook. Secure power, secure substations and grid position, then build multi-phase campuses designed to scale quickly as demand materializes. The Calpine “Powered Land” Deal: From 190 MW to 400 MW in Three Months On July 30, 2025, CyrusOne and Calpine announced a 190-MW agreement tied to a hyperscale campus (DFW10) adjacent to Calpine’s Thad Hill Energy Center in Bosque County, Texas. The structure bundled power, grid connection, and land into a single development package, with CyrusOne saying the site was already under construction and targeting operation by Q4 2026. Just three months later, on November 3–4, the partners announced a second phase, adding 210 MW and taking the campus to 400 MW. The update emphasized coordination to support grid reliability during scarcity; such curtailment and operational-coordination concepts are becoming table stakes for ERCOT-scale megaprojects. Together, the two announcements show CyrusOne placing a large bet on an emerging model: power-ready campuses, or “powered

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What CleanArc’s Project Really Signals About Scaling in Virginia The more important story is what the project signals about how developers believe they can still scale in Virginia at hyperscale magnitude. To wit: 1) The campus is sized like a grid project, not a real estate project At 900 MW, CleanArc is not simply building a few facilities. It is effectively planning a utility-interface program that will require staged substation, transmission, and interconnection work over many years. The company describes the campus as a “flagship” designed for scalable demand and sustainability-focused procurement. Power delivery is planned in three 300 MW phases: the first targeted for 2027, the second for 2030, and the final block sometime between 2033 and 2035. That scale changes what “site selection” really means. For projects of this magnitude, the differentiator is no longer “Can we entitle buildings?” but “Can we secure a credible path for large power blocks, with predictable commercial terms, while regulators are rewriting the rules?” 2) It’s being marketed as sustainability-forward in a market that increasingly requires it CleanArc frames the campus as aligned with sustainability-focused infrastructure: a posture that is no longer optional for hyperscale procurement teams. That does not mean the grid power itself is automatically carbon-free. It means the campus is being positioned to support the modern contracting stack, involving renewables, clean-energy attributes, and related structures, while still delivering what hyperscalers buy first: capacity, reliability, and delivery certainty. 3) The timing is strategic as Virginia tightens around very large load CleanArc is launching its flagship in the nation’s premier data center corridor at the same moment Virginia has moved to formalize a large-customer category that explicitly includes data centers. The implication is not that Virginia has become anti-data center. It is that the state is entering a phase where it

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Colossus: The Prototype For much of the past year, xAI’s infrastructure story did not unfold across a portfolio of sites. It unfolded inside a single building in Memphis, where the company first tested what an “AI factory” actually looks like in physical form. That building had a name that matched the ambition: Colossus. The Memphis-area facility, carved out of a vacant Electrolux factory, became shorthand for a new kind of AI build: fast, dense, liquid-cooled, and powered on a schedule that often ran ahead of the grid. It was an “AI factory” in the literal sense: not a cathedral of architecture, but a machine for turning electricity into tokens. Colossus began as an exercise in speed. xAI took over a dormant industrial building in Southwest Memphis and turned it into an AI training plant in months, not years. The company has said the first major system was built in about 122 days, and then doubled in roughly 92 more, reaching around 200,000 GPUs. Those numbers matter less for their bravado than for what they reveal about method. Colossus was never meant to be bespoke. It was meant to be repeatable. High-density GPU servers, liquid cooling at the rack, integrated CDUs, and large-scale Ethernet networking formed a standardized building block. The rack, not the room, became the unit of design. Liquid cooling was not treated as a novelty. It was treated as a prerequisite. By pushing heat removal down to the rack, xAI avoided having to reinvent the data hall every time density rose. The building became a container; the rack became the machine. That design logic, e.g. industrial shell plus standardized AI rack, has quietly become the template for everything that followed. Power: Where Speed Met Reality What slowed the story was not compute, cooling, or networking. It was power.

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle