Copelouzos Sees Start of Power Link between Greece, Egypt in 2030

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Copelouzos Sees Start of Power Link between Greece, Egypt in 2030

Greece’s Copelouzos Group is speeding up development of its €4.2 billion ($4.3 billion) power link with Egypt, looking to reach a final investment decision next year and its startup in 2030, the executive in charge of the project said. Known as Gregy, the proposed undersea transmission line has attracted “strong interest” from European banks for […]

Known as Gregy, the proposed undersea transmission line has attracted “strong interest” from European banks for potential financing, Ioannis Karydas, chief executive officer for renewables, energy storage and interconnections, said in an interview in Athens.

Greece has seen increasing investments in energy infrastructure, from LNG terminals to pipeline links and power lines. That’s turning the Mediterranean nation into a gateway for imports into Europe as the continent seeks independence from Russian gas and plans to cut net carbon emissions to zero by 2050.

Gregy has entered the European Union’s list of energy projects of common and mutual interest, which makes it eligible for a grant for as much as 50 percent of the cost of construction. Greece’s power grid operator IPTO also said in November it would consider investing in it.

The link, which will consist of 4 cables stretching almost 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) across the eastern Mediterranean, aims to bring electricity from a 9.5 gigawatt portfolio of wind and solar projects that Copelouzos will develop in Egypt as a separate project, Karydas said.

One third of the electricity will be for Greek industry, one third for transfers to Bulgaria, Italy and onward to other European countries, and another third for Greek production of fuels such as hydrogen and green methanol for ships, according to Karydas. The project has the potential to replace 4.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually, he added.

The wind and solar parks in Egypt will require as much as €8 billion of investments, and Copelouzos aims for an international consortium of companies to develop them. A memorandum of understanding has already been signed with Infinity Power — a joint venture between Egypt’s Infinity and Abu Dhabi’s Masdar, Karydas said.

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AWS to invest $11 billion in Georgia to expand infra for gen AI

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Cisco in 2025: Lots of hard work ahead

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Point2 aims to cut data center power consumption through smart cabling

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How adding capacity to a network could reduce IT costs

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Scorecard: Looking Back at Data Center Frontier’s 2024 Industry Predictions

2. Rethinking Power on Every Level PREDICTION: Utilities are struggling to upgrade transmission networks to support the surging requirement for electricity to power data centers. CBRE recently said that data center construction completion timelines have been extended by 24 to 72 months due to power supply delays. Although the constraints in Northern Virginia have made headlines, power availability has quickly become a global challenge, impacting major markets in Europe and Asia as well as U.S. hubs like Ashburn, Santa Clara, and sections of Dallas and Suburban Chicago. Last year we predicted the rise of on-site power generation, but we’ve yet to truly see this at scale. But data center operators are working on a range of new approaches to power. Expect to see innovations in power continue as data centers seek better visibility into their power sourcing. MASSIVE HIT: This prediction was a huge “Hit,” as evidenced by 2024 data from leading commercial real estate firms CBRE, JLL, and Cushman & Wakefield, and other sources. Throughout the year, data center operators reported facing significant challenges in securing adequate power from utilities, leading to increased interest in adoption of on-site power generation solutions, as reflected by many industry discussions this year. The bottom line on this prediction might be the release of this year’s DOE-backed report indicating that U.S. data center power demand could nearly triple in the next three years, potentially consuming up to 12% of the country’s electricity, underscoring the urgency for alternative power solutions. In terms of the largest data center markets, VPM and others noted how Dominion Energy is projecting unprecedented energy demand from data centers in Virginia, posing significant challenges for accommodating this industry growth in the coming decades. In a noteable effort to shore up that gap, Dominion Energy, American Electric Power (AEP), and FirstEnergy

How 2024, the Year That Re-Energized Nuclear Power, Foretells Ongoing ‘New Nuclear’ Developments for Data Centers in 2025

In a world increasingly focused on advanced nuclear technologies and their integration with energy-intensive sectors like data centers, nuclear power could change the way that the world gets its electricity and finally take its place as a clean, renewable, source of power. Evidence of this shift toward nuclear energy and data centers’ role in it came in abundance last year, as the U.S. nuclear energy sector was observed undergoing a sea change with regard to the data center industry. We saw Microsoft, Constellation, AWS, Talen, and Meta with major data center nuclear energy announcements in the Second Half of 2024. With the surge in nuclear stakes has also come a wave of landmark PPAs representing the “new nuclear” industry’s ascendance. To wit, in the latter half of 2024, the data center industry witnessed significant developments concerning “new nuclear” energy integration, specifically in the area of plans for forthcoming nuclear small modular reactor (SMR) deployments by cloud hyperscalers. Some of the most notable announcements included: Amazon’s Investment in Nuclear Small Modular Reactors (SMRs): October 2024 saw Amazon reveal partnerships with Dominion Energy and X-energy to develop and deploy 5 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear energy, in a bid for future powering of its data centers with carbon-free energy. Google’s SMR Pact with Kairos Power: Also in October 2024, Google announced plans to collaborate with Kairos Power to build up to seven SMRs, providing up to 500 megawatts of power. The first unit is expected to come online by 2030, with the entire project slated for completion by 2035. Oracle’s Gigawatt-Scale SMR Plans: In September 2024, Oracle announced plans to construct a gigawatt-scale data center powered by three small modular reactors (SMRs). Company Founder and CTO Larry Ellison revealed that building permits for these reactors have been secured, and that the project was currently in its design phase. The company said

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

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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

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