2025 was pretty insane, with every day bringing billion-dollar announcements, wild price swings on the stock market, and a new cold war focused on the chip supply chain.

The year before was when generative AI began to gather steam, but 2025 was when we started to see gigawatt campuses actually begin their build-out, as scaling laws get pushed to their limits.

For DCD, it was a frankly exhausting 12 months: We published more than 5,700 news stories and 140 features, bringing in more than 22 million page views.

Keeping up with all the news is a full-time job, so we’ve collated all the biggest and most impactful data center stories of 2025. Across a whole supplement, we also looked at the biggest stories in M&A, compute, energy, cloud, networking, and cooling.

The biggest stories by traffic

Significant layoffs at Oracle, job cuts impact US and India OCI teams

While 2025 has primarily been about growth, giant investments, and the promise of AI, there has also been a constant stream of layoffs. Our scoop on Oracle’s cuts was our most-read article of 2025, with many of the readers coming from Oracle itself due to the lack of transparency within the company.

Job cuts are on the rise across big tech businesses, as they pare back from Covid-19 hiring highs, look to break worker power, trim expenses during a slowing economy, and seek ways to cut costs to fund dramatic capex. Some have blamed it on AI replacing workers, but most tools remain incapable of doing human jobs for now. Those layoffs are yet to come. Read more.

858TB of government data may be lost for good after South Korean data center fire

A September battery fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center in Daejeon caused havoc for government services in Korea.

Systems were brought offline, and crucial data looks to be lost for good. The incident was a disaster – with 70 fire vehicles deployed, one person injured, and a nation ground to a halt. This story is one both data centers and governments should study to avoid similar costly failures. Read more.

Amazon acquires 1,000 acres of land outside Atlanta, Georgia

In July, Amazon spent some $270 million on a huge swathe of land near Atlanta. The company has also bought other, smaller, plots nearby, amassing a vast portfolio. Exact plans are still forthcoming, but the company has pledged to spend around $11 billion on AI data centers in the state.

The company, the largest cloud provider in the world, has been slow to adapt to the AI boom – with Microsoft, Google, and the neoclouds eating into its lead. In Georgia and Indiana, we are starting to see Amazon’s fightback. Read more.

AWS claims half of Microsoft’s customers would jump ship if licensing costs were lower

Microsoft has always been one of the all-time greats at building software moats. Amazon, while fighting government intervention elsewhere, is hoping the UK government can help it with breaking some of that moat. “50 percent of those workloads currently running on Azure would move elsewhere if it was economically feasible,” the company claimed, arguing that Microsoft customers are more or less being held hostage if they want to run Microsoft software on the cloud. Read more.

Elon Musk denies reports that the US threatened to shut off Starlink access in Ukraine

It wouldn’t be a story about pageviews without Elon Musk, tragically the cheat code to traffic. This year, he dominated global headlines with DOGE cuts to child cancer research, his messy fallout with Trump, and his increasingly erratic tweets.

But for DCD, the biggest Musk story was a report from Reuters that the US government threatened Ukraine with cutting off access to SpaceX’s Starlink unless it agreed to hand over critical minerals for security. Musk said “Reuters is lying,” and posted an image of the word Reuters, itself made out of hundreds of the word ‘lies.’

Musk in 2024 accused Reuters of “lying” for reporting that Tesla had scrapped its plans for a $25,000 Model 2 affordable electric car. Months later, he said the car was scrapped. Read more.

The actual biggest stories

As much as we appreciate the clicks, traffic is never a good measure of the impact of a news story. The randomness of algorithmic chance means some stories are favored over others for no discernible reason, while disaster and celebrity pieces always see unfair weighting.

So, outside of the above stories, what are the ones we think mattered most?

OpenAI announces ‘The Stargate Project:’ $500bn over four years on AI infrastructure

Can you believe Stargate was only announced last January? The OpenAI megaproject was debuted by Trump on his second day in office, backed by SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and has dominated headlines ever since.

The joint venture (JV) has morphed and changed in aspirations. OpenAI has built out its data center team, and moved quickly in some areas – with the first phase of Crusoe’s Abilene campus already live. Elsewhere, the JV has struggled to find all the funds, and planning delays have held up some projects. At the same time, Stargate has gone global: With projects in the UAE, Norway, the UK, Argentina, and South Korea, alongside potential plans in India, Japan, Canada, and elsewhere.

Now, OpenAI’s partners need to actually build all of these data centers (while OpenAI needs to find the money). Read more.

OpenAI’s growing cloud contracts

Let’s do one more OpenAI story: In September, the company signed the largest cloud contract in history with Oracle at $300bn. This was followed by a $250bn Microsoft Azure contract, a $38bn multi-year cloud deal with AWS, and a large Google Cloud contract.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Stargate and OpenAI’s cloud commitments total some $1.4 trillion – although the company currently does not make a profit. Read more.

Aligned Data Centers sold to BlackRock and MGX in record-breaking $40bn deal

Set to close in 2026, this was the biggest ever acquisition in the data center market. Texas-based Aligned has campuses in Chicago, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; Phoenix, Arizona; and Northern Virginia. The company has further sites in development in Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, and Virginia, as well as across Latin America. Read more.

US coal power plants must stay online for as long as possible to meet AI demand – Southern Company CEO

As great as the data center boom has been for the sector, it’s important to note that it has meant the abandonment of climate commitments. Gigawatt deployments have turned to gas turbines right by their facilities, while, behind the scenes, coal is having a renaissance. Coal remains one of the dirtiest ways to make power, both for the planet and local communities. Read more.

The local pushback

From alleged swatting of local councillors, to arrests at council meetings and marches in the streets, local communities across the world are pushing back against large data center builds. Some of the turn against digital infrastructure is built on overhyped misinformation over power costs and water usage, but some of those cost concerns are accurate. The industry’s unwillingness to share information has not helped, nor has the speed at which it wants to move. Expect this to worsen next year, especially as communities see data centers as the physical manifestation of job-destroying AI. Read more.

Data centers head to space

In the coming years, DCD site visits might become a lot more complicated. Rocket companies SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Relativity Space are all planning to put data centers in space. Google’s Project Suncatcher is also experimenting with TPUs in space, while Axiom Space, NTT, Ramon.Space, and Sophia Space have plans to put data centers in orbit.

Already, there are a few prototypes circling above. Starcloud has launched a GPU into orbit, which managed to inference Gemini in space. Lonestar deployed a storage array on the Moon (carrying an article from DCD) to test cold storage on the lunar surface. Read more.

Bonus:

Other stories of note: Microsoft plans $17.5bn AI infrastructure investment in India, Nvidia CFO says $100bn OpenAI deal has yet to complete, Micron to exit the consumer memory and storage market in favor of AI data center customers, Trump threatens 100% China tariffs as Beijing tightens rare earth metal exports, and SoftBank to buy data center investor DigitalBridge for $4bn.

Thank you!

Running an editorial team in the age of AI bots, search engine vicissitudes, and clickbait coverage is a growing challenge. No one on the team is benchmarked, bonused, or paid based on traffic – they are told to write the best stuff they can to make this the best possible digital infrastructure publication we can – but we realistically could not operate without an audience.

We could not afford a team of 14 journalists across DCD and SDxCentral without your support. Every time you read an article, supplement, or magazine, you help make what we do possible.

So, from the whole team, thank you.