NVIDIA co-founder Jensen Huang resigned Thursday morning (November 12) as president, CEO and board member of the world’s dominant AI chipmaker, a stunning leadership change that introduces new uncertainty into the global artificial intelligence infrastructure boom. In an official announcement, NVIDIA confirmed that Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board conducts a search for Huang’s permanent successor. The company also appointed longtime director Harvey C. Jones as its first board chairman. The departure ends Huang’s 33-year leadership of the company he co-founded in 1993 and comes amid a rapidly escalating controversy involving his reported personal relationships, potential Chinese intelligence activity and questions about corporate governance. According to Reuters, NVIDIA shares fell more than 10% in premarket trading Thursday as investors weighed the implications for the approximately $4 trillion company and the wider AI technology sector. The company’s announcement did not specify a reason for Huang’s resignation. National Security Investigation Precedes Leadership Change The leadership shakeup follows several days of increasing scrutiny over Huang’s reported relationship with a businesswoman whom U.S. authorities suspect of connections to Chinese intelligence, alongside separate reporting concerning a relationship with a senior NVIDIA executive. On November 8, NVIDIA’s board announced an independent investigation into whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. At the time, directors stated that they had no reason to believe company secrets or national security had been compromised. The controversy subsequently attracted congressional attention, including calls for Huang’s resignation and questions about semiconductor export controls and the security of advanced AI technology. The espionage allegations remain contested, and no compromise of NVIDIA technology has been publicly established. For the data center industry, however, the immediate question extends beyond the circumstances of Huang’s departure. It concerns the potential disruption of an infrastructure ecosystem increasingly organized

In Taiwan, the Work Begins With Access to Land Google’s first geothermal procurement agreements in Asia call for an initial 10 MW of new generation on Taiwan’s grid to support local data centers and offices. When Google and developer Baseload Capital announced the agreements in April 2025, a Google energy executive told Taiwan Public Television Service that the companies expected operations to begin in 2029. The original timetable allowed roughly four years between signing a customer and delivering electricity. Baseload’s development work in Hualien County illustrates one reason such projects take time. In November 2025, the company reported that members of the Hongye Tribe had voted to approve a public-land lease for geothermal exploration. Baseload opened a local office, reached an agreement with the community, and secured an exploration permit for a two-year program of drilling in stages. The company has described Hongye separately from Google’s contracted supply. What the Hualien project documents is an early milestone rarely visible in a power purchase announcement: the developer secured community consent before drilling could establish what the field might produce. Kenya Has the Generating Field. The Campus Remains Unresolved. In Kenya’s Rift Valley, the appeal of Olkaria was evident when Microsoft and G42 announced their digital investment initiative in 2024. Kenya already had a fleet of geothermal generating stations at Olkaria. G42 and local partners proposed building a campus there, powered by geothermal electricity and hosting Microsoft Azure services for a new East Africa cloud region. Two difficulties emerged. In May 2026, Semafor reported that President William Ruto had cited insufficient available power as an obstacle to the project. Separately, Reuters, citing Bloomberg, reported disagreements over payment guarantees. Microsoft and G42 had sought a commitment from the Kenyan government to buy a certain amount of computing capacity annually. Kenya’s principal secretary for

For Alberta’s emerging data center industry, the difference between a roadmap and an excavator has become increasingly consequential. A few years ago, Western Canada’s data center conversation revolved around the possibilities: abundant energy resources, available land, a favorable climate and the prospect of attracting hyperscale investment to a region better known for oil, gas and other industrial development. Today, earthmoving equipment is preparing the ground for what is expected to become Canada’s largest data center, and the questions facing the province have changed accordingly. The shift was on display at Data Centre West 2026, held in Calgary in September, where some 500 industry and government leaders gathered to examine the infrastructure and policy requirements of Alberta’s rapidly expanding digital economy. But for conference founder Vlad Oujegov, the most revealing development wasn’t simply the appearance of projects measured in gigawatts. It was the growing recognition that building those projects will require Alberta to develop an entire supporting industry, while confronting the environmental, political and community questions that increasingly accompany large-scale AI infrastructure. “The theme last year was the data center roadmap,” Oujegov told Data Center Frontier Editor in Chief Matt Vincent during a new episode of the Data Center Frontier Show podcast. “This year’s theme really to me was about execution and actually getting things done, actually seeing projects materialize and construction beginning.” Oujegov is president and founder of the Western Canada Data Centre Alliance, which organizes Data Centre West, and serves as National Data Center Power Systems Lead at Schneider Electric. His perspective draws on both Alberta’s emerging development pipeline and the wider industrial ecosystem now being assembled around it. In DCF’s earlier reporting from Data Centre West 2026, the central question was how quickly Alberta could convert growing hyperscale demand into deliverable capacity. The latest podcast conversation takes that

In other locales, data centers lost badly. In Joliet Township, Illinois, a restriction on new data centers passed with 80% of the vote. In Hubbard, Ohio, more than three-quarters of voters gave data centers a thumbs down. Ohio emerged as the main battleground, accounting for 21 of the 50 measures tracked by Ballotpedia. The votes covered several different approaches to controlling development: outright bans, power-consumption thresholds, temporary permitting moratoriums, mandatory public votes and requirements for developers seeking tax incentives. California and Florida saw outright bans. California voters in the cities of Alhambra and Monterey Park, where voters approved a measure prohibiting data centers. In Florida, Edgewater voters approved a charter amendment opposing new data centers and expansions of existing facilities.

Hut 8 Advances a Gigawatt-Scale Campus Near Corpus Christi Another significant development came November 4, when Hut 8 reported continued progress on its Beacon Point AI data center campus in the Corpus Christi region. The company said that its previously announced second 352 MW IT-capacity lease had fully commercialized the campus, bringing the total contracted IT capacity associated with the two phases to 704 MW. The campus is designed around approximately 1 GW of utility capacity, a separate measure from the critical IT load under lease. Hut 8 estimates approximately $19.6 billion in base-term contract value across the two phases. In its third-quarter results, the company said construction of the campus substation had begun, alongside foundation and underground utility work for the first phase. Initial data hall delivery is targeted for the third quarter of 2027, with the second phase targeted for the second quarter of 2028. The company also disclosed agreements to acquire two energized sites in West Texas, with up to 230 MW of utility capacity at full energization, subject to outstanding approvals and infrastructure development. Those acquisitions point to another important trend: the increasing value of existing electrical infrastructure and sites that can potentially be adapted to serve advanced computing. As new greenfield projects face lengthy power studies and regulatory requirements, already energized locations may offer an alternative route to capacity. The distinction is especially important in markets such as Dallas-Fort Worth, where DCF’s analysis of CBRE’s first-half 2026 data found that approximately 95% of the region’s 765 MW under construction had already been preleased. PowerHouse and Big Watt Win Approval for Taylor Technology Campus Not every large new project is meeting resistance at the municipal level. On October 8, the City of Taylor approved a development agreement with PowerHouse Data Centers and Big Watt Digital for

“It’s like adding more lanes to the highway,” he observed. “We’re not necessarily making each car travel faster, we’re creating more capacity so more traffic can move through the system at the same time.” Handling bursts, idling However, an agentic workload doesn’t behave exactly like a traditional inference workload. “It is bursty, long running, but often idle,” Lohmeyer noted. While it might generate outputs and call tools, it still has to wait for a response, maybe from a human, “literally for days.” During that time, it doesn’t need to do anything; it just needs to preserve context. But if resources are tied up for that entire multi-day period, they’re being wasted “90% plus of the time,” he said. Google Cloud’s open source TPU Sync is designed to address these issues by unifying memory, storage, and networking in software. The model-state layer for TPUs turns chip high bandwidth memory (HBM), host DRAM, shared storage, and the data center network into a “single, co-designed memory hierarchy,” the company said. It automatically tiers KV caches off the chip in milliseconds, streams context across nodes, and synchronizes RL weights to cut transfer latency and Time to First Token (TTFT) by more than 90%.