With the rapid growth of physical data center infrastructure, it’s no surprise that a niche market has emerged for companies specializing in land acquisition. Reports of massive property purchases by firms planning new facilities appear almost daily—and so do accounts of the challenges developers face before the first shovel hits the ground. As parcel sizes grow and power and water demands intensify, the complexities of acquiring and preparing these sites have only increased. Tract is a leader in this space. The Denver-based company develops master-planned data center parks, with more than 25,000 acres of potential sites under its control and plans to support over 25 GW of workload capacity. To put that into perspective, 25,000 acres is roughly 40 square miles—about two-thirds the land area of Washington, D.C., or, for European readers, two-thirds the size of Liechtenstein. Building Shovel-Ready Megasites Rather than waiting for developers to come knocking, Tract takes a proactive approach, built on the core belief that the future of data center growth lies in pre-entitled, zoned, and infrastructure-ready megasites. The company works years in advance to deliver shovel-ready campuses with reliable energy, fiber connectivity, and municipal cooperation already in place. Its model emphasizes strategic land aggregation in high-growth regions, the cultivation of long-term relationships with utilities and governments, and master planning for power, cooling, transportation, and sustainability. This integrated approach positions Tract to deliver both speed and certainty to hyperscale project developers—at scale. Tract’s leadership team brings deep industry experience. Founder and Executive Chairman Grant van Rooyen previously led acquisitions and expansions at Cologix and Teraco. President Matt Spencer brings more than 35 years of telecom and infrastructure leadership, while Chief Energy Officer Nat Sahlstrom, former head of Amazon’s global energy, water, and sustainability teams, helped make Amazon the world’s largest buyer of renewable energy. Backed by

2025 has been a landmark year for data center development. The rise of the AI Factory and AI-driven data center designs has made announcements of massive new complexes routine, with claims and certainties that these facilities will require hundreds of megawatts of power scarcely raising an industry eyebrow. At the same time, opposition is becoming more organized, often forming unexpected alliances. Even in an era of clear political alignment around certain causes, blocking data center projects has emerged as a bipartisan concern among voters. In the past several months, as data center projects in the gigawatt range have been announced, significant behind-the-scenes opposition has been building, from local grassroots organizations to state legislatures crafting new guidelines for data center development. Rising Community Opposition In 2025, multiple communities across the U.S., from Northern Virginia to Indiana, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama, have effectively organized to challenge proposed data center developments. Some campaigns have already succeeded in delaying or derailing projects, while others are still building momentum. A report from Data Center Watch, covering the period from May 2024 to March 2025, estimates that billions in data center investment have already been affected by local resistance: $18 billion in projects were blocked, and another $46 billion faced delays. Whether these trends will represent a lasting constraint on the AI-driven data center boom remains unclear, but one point is certain: organized community action has become a central front in the debate over digital infrastructure in America. The Data Center Watch report also identified 142 activist groups across 24 states actively opposing data center projects. While opposition is largely local in focus, the nature of the concerns has remained relatively consistent, with activism often coalescing quickly into organized groups (such as the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, No Desert Data Center, and Protect

Vacancy in the North American market has declined to a new record low of 2.3 percent, and JLL projects that figure will remain the same or go even further down from now through 2027. For comparison, the vacancy rate stood at 9.8 percent in 2020. As bad as the wait for data center capacity has become, the wait for power is even worse. The average wait time for a grid connection across North America is now four years, according to the report, with power delays representing a significant hurdle in efforts to alleviate the shortage of new colocation capacity. Most of the top markets have doubled or even tripled in size since 2020, with Columbus, Ohio leading the way with 1800% growth, followed by Austin/San Antonio at 500% growth. However, they started from a small base in 2020. In absolute terms, Northern Virginia (+3,975 MW), Dallas (+1,008 MW) and Atlanta (+828 MW) have seen the largest increase in capacity.

The problem is that less than one-eighth of enterprises said that they believed HPE could justify the Juniper deal simply by having HPE salespeople sell Juniper gear. We can take JHPE off the table. But not the Mist influence. Nearly all the enterprises who offered comments on the deal want to see HPE expand Mist to include HPE management, becoming an element in a “full-stack observability” strategy, creating our “Mist4All” name. Three dozen told me that their sales team had suggested this would happen, but interestingly, none who also talked with HPE or Juniper executives said they repeated that promise. HPE’s problem is that only 11 of over 250 enterprises said a move to offer integrated AI observability would even make them consider switching from Cisco to the new company. The problem with vendor-specific observability like Mist4All is that you can’t introduce it incrementally; you need to fork-lift. Only one-fifth of enterprises thought HPE could justify the deal by integrating their own operations tools with Mist. Forget Mist4All, too. Which brings us to HPEJ. I don’t think there’s any question that the biggest driver in how the new venture positions itself is AI. AI is also the most likely near-term driver of incremental data center deployment, both among enterprises and among service providers, something Juniper’s AI-Native positioning aims to exploit and that competitors like Cisco and Extreme are countering. And, of course AI data centers obviously need servers, so HPE has its own interests here. That’s what creates the HPEJ/JHPE tension, but can shareholder value and customer interest be created by simply doubling down on what the companies were doing separately? Three enterprises who use both HPE and Juniper gear enough to get significant account attention from both say that Juniper’s people push AI hosting more than HPE does. Nobody

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved construction of the Oak Ridge facility in November 2024, marking the first non-water-cooled reactor permitted in the US in more than 50 years. Kairos Power planned to increase the Hermes 2 reactor’s output from an originally planned 28 megawatts to 50 megawatts, with operations scheduled to begin in 2030. Google’s agreement extended to up to 500 megawatts of Kairos reactors by 2035, the statement added. Enterprise power crunch drives nuclear innovation The technology breakthrough comes at a critical time for enterprises facing explosive electricity demands from artificial intelligence operations. Data center electricity use rose from 58 terawatt-hours in 2014 to 176 TWh in 2023, and could reach between 325 and 580 TWh by 2028, according to Department of Energy projections. For context, a single graphics processing unit used for AI can consume as much electricity as a four-person household uses daily. Unlike renewable energy sources, nuclear reactors provide constant baseload power regardless of weather conditions — critical for data centers that operate around the clock. Google said it needed the nuclear power to support data centers in Montgomery County, Tennessee, and Jackson County, Alabama. The 50-megawatt output equals the electricity consumption of about 36,000 homes. “To power the future, we need to grow the availability of smart, firm energy sources,” Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of data center energy, said in the statement.

Server CPU shipments were “uninteresting,” as he put it, on a sequential basis, with neither supplier seeing much growth on quarter after last quarter’s atypical increase. On-year, the server market was up significantly but that’s because a year ago, the segment was near its cyclical lows and dealing with inventory adjustments. “Intel was able to sustain volumes in total server unit shipments by moving shipments to non-data center products, such as Xeon D in networking/storage servers, which they noted in their earnings call. That comes at a price; those products have much lower ASPs, so lower revenues, which is why Intel’s DCAI revenues were lower when units were flat,” McCarron told Network World. “Nothing really moves that fast in servers, and in general a ‘freefall’ can’t really happen outside of some systemic demand collapse event like 2008 was, as the rest of the industry realistically can’t absorb market share at an unlimited rate due to supply chain considerations,” he added. AMD’s server revenues hit a record high, but most of the revenue gains was from selling a higher mix of its new Turin core CPUs, and unit shipment growth was very modest. However, even with a 0.1-point increase in share, that means a new record high in AMD server sales. It now has 37.2% market share. Excluding IoT/SoC embedded products from consideration, Intel’s shipments slightly outgrew AMDs in the quarter resulting in Intel having a modest sequential share increase thanks in part to mobile CPU shipments, where Intel has solid products. AMD made a slight gain in desktops, where it is particularly strong. As for Arm, it showed strength in the server market thanks to Nvidia’s GB200 processors ramping up volumes. On the client side, Apple had slightly higher shipments in the second but that was offset by weakness in