Google plans to invest $40 billion towards building data centers in Texas (www.engadget.com)

Google announced a $40 billion plan to expand its data center footprint in Texas, funding three new facilities (one in Armstrong County and two in Haskell County) dedicated to cloud and AI operations. The company says the investment — its largest in any U.S. state — will be spent through 2027 and builds on prior Texas projects (Midlothian and Red Oak) that brought its local total to roughly $2.7 billion since 2019. The move is part of a broader industry trend: NVIDIA is building AI supercomputer manufacturing space in Houston and Dallas, and Meta has signaled plans for massive nationwide data-center investment. For the AI/ML community this signals a major increase in regional compute capacity and cloud availability. Practically, the new sites will likely host large-scale GPU/TPU clusters and associated storage, networking and power/cooling infrastructure, enabling higher-throughput training and lower-latency inference for customers in the central and southern U.S. The scale of Google’s investment could accelerate enterprise migration to cloud AI services, intensify competition for AI compute and talent, and place new demands on local power grids and supply chains — all factors that will shape deployment strategies and resource planning for researchers and companies building large AI models.