Writes Second Order by TKN — a plain-English map of AI infrastructure and semiconductors for non-specialist investors. Focus: who gets paid, where money sticks, and which step is stuck. Not investment advice.
Wire
Oracle proposed a $10 million-a-year El Paso Electric agreement for Project Jupiter — construction, commissioning and backup — while Bloom Energy remains the primary 2.45 GW microgrid. Credits of up to $55 million a year are a separate offer, from 2027.
Wire
On 13 October AMD signed credit support for the 222 MW phase one lease at Fermi's Project Matador in Texas, the $6.5 billion, 15-year TensorWave lease. Fermi calls it a step toward project financing, which has not closed. Delivery starts in the second half of 2027.
AI Data Centers
Iron Mountain is best known for storing paper records, but its fastest-growing business is data centers: 528.5 MW leasable across 31 facilities at 30 June 2026, 97.1% leased, with 1,372.9 MW of total potential capacity. Q2 2026 data center revenue was $262.9m, up 38.8%.
Wire
Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan said on 12 October that capital, not chips, memory or power, may become the biggest constraint on the AI build-out. He put the wafer squeeze easing by 2028 and sized a gigawatt at about $10bn a year of cost against about $30bn of frontier-lab revenue.
Catalyst
Microsoft said on 12 October that Maia becomes its primary inference system from 2027 at multi-gigawatt scale. Serving moves off merchant GPUs, training stays with Nvidia and AMD, and the bind shifts to TSMC N2P wafers, HBM4 stacks and 167 kW racks.
Malaysia
Money is not what holds Malaysia's data centres back. Seven banks just doubled DayOne's Johor loans to RM30 billion, and the halls it is building are 99% booked. What sets the pace is the plug: the 275,000-volt stations that take about 11 months to build.
Analysis
NEXTDC has 740.1 MW contracted and 175.0 MW billing. At about A$7.12 billion, what does the price assume about the 565 MW still waiting to bill? Three scenarios, arithmetic shown.
Analysis
Cipher stretched Barber Lake to 20 years and >$9B of contracted lease payments, with halls due this winter. What does a ~$5.4B price assume about the hall clock? Three scenarios, arithmetic shown.
Wire
Nikkei reported on 13 October that NTT Data Group is in final-stage talks to build Anthropic's first dedicated Japan data center in Osaka. Construction could cost up to ¥1 trillion, about $6.3 billion, with partial opening as early as 2028. This is talks, not a signed lease.
Hyperscalers
Google books Cloud backlog, spends ads cash to stand up TPU and GPU halls, and gets paid as customers use live capacity or take delivery of TPU systems — demand still outruns what is installed, so watts are the stuck step.
Explained
A hyperscale data center is a huge hall for one cloud or AI giant; a colocation data center rents cages, racks and connections to many tenants. Per kilowatt, colocation pays far more. Per lease, hyperscale lasts twice as long, and power scarcity is now repricing the big leases.
Australia
Australia's AI data centres have the customers. What got dearer in two weeks is the money to build the halls: a 4.60% cash rate, a pulled US$5 billion float, and NEXTDC's A$1.1 billion of notes. Builders are paid first. The stuck step is funding the build.
