0
Deep & Emerging Tech·July 28, 2026·1 min read

A 330 MW data center wanted to buy a farm, switch off the irrigation, and drink the difference — California's most powerful irrigation district said no, so it sued

Share

A 330 MW AI data center fighting an irrigation district over 287 million gallons of Colorado River water is the new face of resource competition. If your AI infra depends on water-cooled sites, water rights and local politics just became part of your technical due diligence.

Deep & Emerging Tech

GlobalFoundries says the US plans to award it $300M in CHIPS Act funding to bolster R&D of silicon photonics tech to power more efficient AI data centers

$300M of CHIPS Act money into GlobalFoundries silicon photonics—per [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-award-globalfoundries-300-million-develop-faster-ai-chip-links-2026-07-29/)—is a bet that interconnect, not just GPUs, is the next AI data center choke point. If you’re planning multi-year AI infra, start asking vendors about photonics roadmaps and how they’ll change bandwidth, power, and topology assumptions.